ANALYZING AND RESOLVING THE CONSEQUENCES OF TOURIST INFLUXES ON ENVIRONMENTAL METRICS AT A TOURIST DESTINATION

he primary objective of this paper is to examine the impacts of tourist influxes on environmental metrics and to develop strategies for enhancing sustainability awareness among tourists, thereby minimizing the adverse effects of tourist influxes. The tourist data were collected from: 1) the portals of the Ministry of Tourism of India, to obtain arrival data for the past eight years; and 2) an environmental sustainability questionnaire designed to gather tourists' demographic profiles, resource consumption, waste generation, and behavioral or knowledge-related data in Agra; 3) The designed SWOT questionnaire to get the rankings of SWOT groups and factors. This data is used to analyze resource consumption and waste generation patterns using explanatory analysis, the correlation between the demographic and behavior and knowledge to understand their sustainability awareness level, and use TOWS analysis to design strategies for reducing the negative consequences of tourist influxes. The results show that age group is a strong predictor for water consumption, energy consumption, and waste generation. The large effect size, R2 values, and VIF analysis indicated excellent fit and strong predictive performance. The awareness questionnaire analysis showed a gap between the behavioral factors and the knowledge level. Fifteen strategies are designed to improve the sustainability awareness of tourists coming to Agra. This study will enable destination managers to better understand tourists’ waste reduction and resource consumption behaviors, and to make long-term oriented decisions to conserve the tourist destinations for future generations same as earlier generations.