Ecological footprint study on tourism itinerary products in Shangri-La, Yunnan Province, China

The eco-footprint analysis of tourism is one of the most up-to-date and effective methods used to analyze the environmental effects of tourism. This study constructs a model to calculate the ecological footprint (EF) of tourism itinerary products by using a component approach, rudimentarily exploring the calculation methods for EF which target necklace-like tourism itinerary products and base tourist trips. By applying the model to calculate and analyze an “8-day tour of Shangri-La”, a typical tourism itinerary product, results of this study suggest that: (a) Tourism is a kind of life style with tremendous ecological consumption, that is, per capita EF that tourists produce in the course of travel is more than the one that local people produce in their daily life in tourist source areas, and it also exceeds the per capita EF that local people produce in their daily life in tourist destination; (b) According to the component approach, EF of tourism itinerary products is broken down into 7 components, among which “Transport”, “Food”, “Waste” and “Accommodation” play important roles; (c) There exist significant differences in ecological efficiency between different departments of tourism; the travel and entertainment sectors maintain a relatively high ecological efficiency, while the food and lodging departments have relatively low ecological efficiency