Tourist Resort Development

On Thursday, the 27th of August, we first visited the Baptism Site of Jesus Christ and after that we went to the Dead Sea Spa Resort, where we spent the rest of the day. The Dead Sea area is the lowest land on earth, getting as low as 429 meters below sea level. It was very hot and we were happy to arrive at the Dead Sea Spa Hotel, where we underwent a security check before entering the four star hotel. The Dead Sea Spa Hotel is one of the nine Hotels on the Jordan shore; among them are well-known western hotel companies such as Mövenpick and HolidayInn. These resorts are a different world than the life in other regions in Jordan, they were build solely for leisure and traditional and cultural rules that hold in most of the other areas do not necessarily hold there. Our tour guide said the day before that we could wear anything we want – “it’s a resort, no one cares there”. I now will look at the stages of development. Butler’s (1980) cycle of evolution of tourist areas proposes a cycle that starts at the exploratory stage, in which just very few tourists discover a new destination, and ends at the stagnation or post-stagnation state, in which demand is not increasing anymore. It is difficult to evaluate the stage of development of the Jordan shore of the Dead Sea, due to the conflicts that were going on in that area. The hotel we relaxed at opened just roughly 25 years ago and demand may have continued to increase if it wasn’t for the crisis in Syria and Iraq. Resorts worldwide commonly experience some difficulties. Agarwal and Brunt (2006) identified some of these common difficulties, such as a large amount of low quality accommodation and the bad state of the environment. These difficulties mostly don’t apply in the Dead Sea area, as all Hotels are awarded 4 or 5 stars. Though the shrinking of the Dead Sea could be considered a deterioration of the environment.

LLM
Butler, R.W. (ed.) (2006) The Tourism Area Life Cycle (2 volumes), Clevedon: Channel View Publications.
Agarwal, S. and Brunt, P. (2006) ‘Social exclusion and English seaside resorts’, Tourism Management, Vol. 27 (4): 654–70.

Dead Sea Spa Hotel

Access to the Dead Sea from the resort