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THE TOURISM PENETRATION INDEX IN LARGE ISLANDS:

The Case of the Dominican Republic

THE TOURISM PENETRATION INDEX IN LARGE ISLANDS:

The Case of the Dominican Republic

Art Padilla

Professor, Business Management

North Carolina State University

Raleigh NC 27695

TEL: 919-515-7967

FAX: 919-515-6943

Art_Padilla@ncsu.edu

and

Jerome L. McElroy

Professor, Economics

Saint Mary’s College

Notre Dame IN 46556

TEL: 574-284-4488

FAX: 574-284-4566

jmcelroy@saintmarys.edu

*An earlier version of this paper was presented to the 28^th Annual Caribbean Studies Conference, Belize City, Belize (May 26-31, 2003). The authors wish to thank the Fulbright Foundation for its financial support as well as two anonymous reviewers who provided helpful comments.

ABSTRACT

The Tourism Penetration Index (TPI) (McElroy & deAlbuquerque, 1998) provides an overall measure of economic, social and environmental impact in small islands. Thus far it has not been used to gauge tourism’s spatial concentration in different regions within a given destination. This study develops a TPI for four regions in the Dominican Republic (DR), and these regional scores are compared with a 42 small-island sample. Results place Punta Cana in the east among the most penetrated islands/regions, Puerto Plata/Samana in the north among the intermediate, and La Romana/San Pedro and Santo Domingo in the south among the least developed. Results are also compared with surveys on visitor satisfaction, perceptions of safety, and propensity to return. Planning and research implications are discussed.

Key Words: Tourism Penetration Index, Dominican Republic, islands.

INTRODUCTION

Without an early-warning system in place, island decision-makers are rushing to embrace the varied economic benefits of tourism. They fail to anticipate the destructive intrusions of mass tourism practice: in particular, how the interplay of inadequate facilities, infrastructure and amenity planning and management, with the high-volume propensity of capital-intensive travel interests, tends to cumulatively overrun the delicate insular carrying capacity. (McElroy, 2002)

The postwar development of mass tourism in the Caribbean has been fueled by a confluence of favorable demand and supply factors: rising North American and European affluence, the advent of economical jet travel, the influx of foreign hotel investment lured by tax concessions, and the large-scale expansion of aid-financed transport infrastructure. As a result, the Caribbean has become the most tourist-penetrated region in the world. According to Tourism Satellite Account estimates, tourism across the region accounts for roughly 20 percent of all exports and capital formation, and 16 and 17 percent of regional employment and GDP respectively (WTTC, 2002). Between 1970 and 2000, Caribbean stayover tourist arrivals increased nearly five times from 3.5 to 17.2 million, and the region’s share of the world’s arrivals rose slightly from 2.2 to 2.5 percent (CTO, 1991, 2002; U.S. Department of Commerce, 1993).

In recent years, nowhere has growth been more dramatic than in the Dominican Republic (DR), which shares with Haiti the relatively large island of Hispaniola. For example, between 1970 and 2000 stayover arrivals increased over 12 percent per year, more than double the annual rate of expansion (5.2%) for Caribbean islands as a whole. Consequently, at the turn of the millennium the DR has become a dominant force in the industry. In 2000, the DR accounted for roughly 17 percent of all Caribbean island stayover tourists and visitor expenditure. In addition, the DR maintained the largest facility structure in the region containing 25 percent of all rooms available.

Impressionistic evidence indicates that, as elsewhere in the region, much of this growth has been overly rapid, unplanned and intrusive, and harmful to the islands’ fragile ecosystems. Across the region, for example, condominium and hotel construction on steep hillsides has damaged forests and watersheds, causing erosion, silting over streams and wetlands and polluting lagoons (McElroy & de Albuquerque, 1998). Mangrove forests and salt ponds have been destroyed by the construction of resorts, marinas and infrastructure along delicate coasts depleting endemic species, archeological artifacts and reef systems already weakened by sand mining, yacht anchoring and urban and cruise ship sewage dumping (Wilkinson, 1989). As a result, nearly 30 percent of the reefs are at high risk (Bryant & others, 1998). In summary, just as centuries of sugar monoculture “resulted in the environmental devastation of [Caribbean] island interiors…mass tourism itself has had a particularly noticeable direct impact on highly vulnerable coastal environments…” (Weaver, 2001: 189). According to local experts, similar alterations are becoming visible in tourism zones in the DR and the increasingly critical importance of tourism to the Caribbean economies suggests that these challenges will only get worse. (Interview by the senior author with the Ministry of Environment and Natural Resources of the Dominican Republic, Dr. Frank Moya Pons, May 2002).

PROBLEM AND SCOPE
Although determining visitor capacity and saturation has become an increasing preoccupation in islands specializing in mass tourism because of their fragile ecologies, a particular set of circumstances has heightened this concern in the DR. The four most important are the following: the historical Caribbean proclivity for non-sustainable development; the DR’s preference for large-scale, all-inclusive resorts along delicate shorelines to cater predominantly to sun-lust visitation; the already highly developed tourist zones along the island’s north, east, and south coasts; and, perhaps most importantly, the implications of Butler’s (1980) lifecycle model suggesting that as successful destinations develop, they pass through predictable stages involving increasing facility scale, capital intensity, and socio-environmental encroachment (Butler, 1991).

However, establishing a convincing framework that would objectively assess the dangers that mass tourism imposes on fragile ecosystems and provide policy-makers with a guide for long-term planning has been difficult for two reasons. First, tourism’s impacts are pervasive and dynamic and inherently difficult to measure. Second, perhaps as a consequence of the first, there is no universally accepted measure of overall tourism impact (U.S. Congress, 1992). One exception is the Tourism Penetration Index (TPI), originally developed to cluster 20 small Caribbean islands into three levels of increasing tourism penetration loosely fitted to an abbreviated version of Butler’s lifecycle stages: low-density emerging destinations, growing intermediate islands, and mature high-density resort areas (McElroy & de Albuquerque, 1998). More recent applications have extended the TPI to other small islands (of less than one million population) across the world (McElroy & de Albuquerque, 1999; McElroy, 2002) and demonstrated its utility as a comprehensive measure of overall tourism impact, and as an early warning signal for those destinations at or near high-density development and potentially damaging levels of visitation.

Thus far, the TPI has been developed only for small destinations because of the ready availability of standard, “all-island” indicators. This study breaks new ground by employing within-country and provincial and regional data uniquely suited to develop regional TPI indicators for four coastal tourist zones in the DR. It is the first attempt using the TPI to measure the spatial concentration of tourism development in different regions within a larger country or island. The regional TPIs are compared within the DR to improve understanding of the complexity and varying intensity of tourism development within a given nation as well as to provide a general guide for balancing future development in different areas of the larger island. To impart an international perspective, these regional TPIs are further compared with TPI rankings of some 42 small islands from the Caribbean and the rest of the world. Finally, these TPI scores are related to results of visitor surveys from the DR to determine the relationship between levels of tourism penetration and visitor satisfaction, perceived safety, and the likelihood of a return visit. Implications of the DR analysis for other large Caribbean islands are also discussed.

THE SETTING

The DR, the second largest country in the Caribbean with 8.8 million residents (2002), occupies the eastern two thirds of the large island of Hispaniola, which is located between Cuba and Puerto Rico. In addition to its tropical beaches, it boasts one of the most bio-diverse environments on earth. The coastal zone provides critical habitats for several migratory and threatened species. The lowest and highest spots in the Caribbean basin are found in the DR: Lago Enriquillo is a salt-water lake 46 meters (150 feet) below sea level; and the Pico Duarte, its highest mountain, rises to 3,175 meters (10,400 feet) (CIA, 2003). One hour to the west of the capital, Santo Domingo, (see map), there is a climate and terrain evocative of the arid American Southwest, and two hours north and west is the Cordillera Central (central mountain range) with several peaks exceeding 2,700 meters (9,000 feet) and several spectacular waterfalls. To the northeast, the 208 km2 Haitises National Park contains limestone formations 300 meters high that date back to the Miocene Age. In the relatively undeveloped Samaná Bay to the northeast, several hundred massive humpback whales migrate from as far away as Greenland each spring, past ever more crowded islands and beaches, to breed (Nesmith, 2000).

The economy experienced dramatic growth during the 1990s fueled by the rapid expansion of tourism and light manufacturing exports. By 1992 tourism had become the largest export sector, supplanting traditional staples like sugar and tobacco (Pattullo, 1996). With a relatively low per capita GDP for the Caribbean ($5,870 2001 est., World Bank, 2003), the DR suffers from marked poverty and income inequality. Population pressure is increasing at nearly two percent per year, while the infant mortality rate (33 deaths per 1,000 live births), and the HIV/AIDS adult prevalence (2.8%) are both above average for the region (CIA, 2002). Because of its central location and proximity to Haiti, the DR has become an important transshipment point for illicit drugs (mainly cocaine, some heroin) destined for the U.S. and Europe (DEA, 2001). The spread of the narco-economy, the recent loss of manufacturing jobs to Mexico through NAFTA, and declining demand for traditional staples form the macroeconomic context for the DR’s increasing dependence upon mass, all-inclusive sun-lust tourism.

Much twentieth century political history was dominated by dictator Rafael L. Trujillo who established near total control over Dominican economy and society, as novelized in Julia Alvarez’s work, In the Time of the Butterflies (1994). His assassination in 1961 coincided with the disaffection with tourism and other “capitalistic vices” by Castro in Cuba, the leading tourist destination in the region at that time (Espino, 1993), and deflected the flow of visitors first to Puerto Rico, Jamaica, and Mexico and eventually down the Lesser Antilles. However, the DR failed to capitalize on the growth of tourism in the Caribbean during most of the 1960s and 1970s since a series of provisional governments, strikes, coups, and fraudulent elections were the norm for nearly two decades after Trujillo’s death.

RECENT DEVELOPMENTS

Following Trujillo’s assassination and through most of the 1970s, Dominican tourism, with fewer than 65,000 arrivals by air each year, was dwarfed by activity in the Greater Antilles (excluding Cuba) as well as in Aruba, Bahamas, Barbados, U.S. Virgin Islands, and the Netherlands Antilles. In the late 1970s, however, several significant developments ensued. The Casa de Campo resorts, built in La Romana east of Santo Domingo, began to attract golf enthusiasts and beachcombers. In 1980 the government began to implement a long-range plan to establish road networks and air transport infrastructure to develop the three most promising designated tourism regions outside the capital. The first was a new road and airport to encourage facility expansion along the Playa Dorada beach near Puerto Plata on the north coast. The 290-room Jack Tar Village became the centerpiece hotel in this region. The second was the 243-room Club Med resort in the eastern (Punta Cana) region followed by the 1987 construction of the privately-owned Punta Cana International Airport. The third was the opening in 2000 of the new airport in La Romana east of the capital. The establishment of these three outlying airports has provided North American and European visitors—who formerly had to endure a 3-4 hour bus ride from the Santo Domingo (Las Americas) airport — with direct access to the new tourism regions and substantially fueled their growth. Four major tourism regions have thus emerged.

Expansion in the oldest tourism region, Puerto Plata, suffering from beach pollution and aging infrastructure, has been sustained by deep hotel/package discounting and spillover development on La Samana including Playa Rincon. Second, in the southeast region, resorts have spread westward from the Casa de Campo complex in La Romana into Juan Dolio, Boca Chica, and Bayahibe beaches in the San Pedro de Macorís region. Third, Santo Domingo has become increasingly important both for tourism and business travel. The number of hotel rooms has doubled in the capital city during the 1990s, and the region accounts for a quarter of all DR stayover visitors. Finally, the more recently developed and expanding Punta Cana area, the current “in” spot for European and to a lesser extent, U.S. tourists (dr.1.com, 2003), includes the superlative beaches of Bávaro and important internationally-known investors and promoters like designer Oscar de la Renta and entertainer Julio Iglesias, who live there year-round.

These four regions, which contain virtually all the DR’s international (non-resident) tourism, are the designated tourism areas and statistical units (Banco Central, 2002). They are also areas where tourism is amazingly self-contained because most DR tourism is of the “all inclusive” variety, where tourists buy pre-paid “packages” that include most expenses and thus visitors tend to stay largely in one place. For these reasons, these four areas were selected as the basis for the study areas. They include specifically (see map):

1. Puerto Plata in the north and Samaná Bay in the northeast

2. La Romana (including the large Casa de Campo resorts) and San Pedro de Macorís regions in the southeast

3. Santo Domingo and small neighboring regions to the east like Boca Chica and the west like Barahona

4. Punta Cana including the Bávaro beaches in La Altagracia province at the secluded and relatively unpopulated eastern-most tip of the island.

It should be noted that the size and spatial configurations chosen for the tourism regions reported here have a material impact on the TPI results. Selecting established boundaries because of tradition and statistical fit can actually mask intense concentrations in tourism. The Punta Cana region, for example, is a discretely narrow and heavily concentrated coastal strip of all-inclusive resorts that literally sprang up “overnight” next to sparsely developed and relatively unpopulated hinterlands. But in fact this reflects the true nature of tourism development in the DR and in other parts of the Caribbean as well. Mass tourism is a fairly recent phenomenon in the DR and it is remarkably concentrated and isolated, due to the deliberate placement of airports next to tourism destinations and to the largely “all inclusive” nature of the tourism, which in turn is a result of the types of foreign investments typical of the region. Thus, put somewhat differently, these rather sudden tourism explosions in formerly pristine regions will make tourism penetration ratios seem somewhat distorted during early stages of development. However, this is not particularly different from actual situations and physical configurations found on many other small islands where the TPI has been applied (for example, Bahamas, Barbados, Trinidad, and Seychelles), which have similar characteristics in the sense of having dense and rather sudden development in coastal strips next to sparsely populated hinterlands. Yet these conditions and factors highlight a possible weakness in the TPI: in instances of explosive and dense tourism investment and development, the TPI might fail to account entirely for spatial visitor/facility concentration.

METHOD

Three separate analyses were performed in examining the regional penetration of tourism and its consequences. First, TPI indicators were developed for the four tourist regions and compared with the all-island average for the DR. Second, these indicators were then compared to a sample of 42 small islands to gauge their comparative level of tourism penetration in a worldwide context. Finally, to further explore the usefulness of the TPI, visitor survey responses (see below) from three of the four regions were compared to confront more directly the impact of varying levels of tourist development with visitor opinions about their satisfaction with their vacations.

The Dominican TPI

Following McElroy and de Albuquerque (1998), the TPIs were developed from the same representative indicators separately measuring economic, socio-cultural and environmental penetration: in-country visitor expenditures per resident, average daily visitor density per 1,000 population, and hotel rooms per km². The base year chosen for the TPI construction was 2000 for two reasons. First, it preceded the September 11, 2001, terrorist attack in the U.S. that resulted in a significant, if temporary, downturn in DR arrivals. Second, 2000 was devoid of natural disasters and sufficiently distant from Hurricane Georges of 1998, which left 200 dead in the DR alone.

Variable Estimation. In the first case, in-country visitor expenditure per resident, as a measure of overall economic impact because of its standard usage and correlation with other indicators of tourist development (Liu & Jenkins, 1996), was estimated in three steps. First, the number of stayover visitors for each region was estimated by allocating the number of foreign, non-resident visitor air arrivals at each regional airport to its respective region: Puerto Plata to Puerto Plata/Samaná, Punta Cana to Altagracia, La Romana to La Romana/S. Pedro de Macorís and Las Americas to Santo Domingo. This procedure was based on accurate government tracking of arrivals at the regional airports and their proximity to regional destinations. To take an example, arrivals of non-resident, temporary visitors to the Punta Cana airport, which make up 97 per cent of all arrivals there, tend virtually to remain for their entire stay within the Punta Cana resort destinations, nearly all of which are all-inclusive (Banco Central, 2002). Second, from this number the share of regional visitors in the Dominican total was estimated, and this ratio was used to derive each region’s proportion of total DR visitor expenditures. This figure divided by the regional population yielded visitor expenditures per resident recorded in Panel A of Table One.

One-day cruise passengers are few in number and insignificant in economic impact. In 2000 they accounted for less than seven percent of all visitors and 0.3 percent of total expenditure. However, to conform with McElroy and deAlbuquerque (1998), they were included. Typically they disembark from ships enroute to Puerto Rico at the only major port in Santo Domingo. Since they spend less than a day dining, shopping and touring the capital city environs, they were allocated to the Santo Domingo region and their spending ($50 per visitor in 2000) aggregated into that region’s per resident spending computation.

Second, the average daily visitor density was calculated as the number of stayover tourists times the average length of stay—plus the number of cruise passengers for Santo Domingo only--divided by the region population times 365. The resulting ratio was multiplied by 1,000 to yield the average daily visitor density per 1,000 population. In the absence of regional length of stay data, visitor density figures were roughly estimated for each region by employing the all-island DR average length of stay of 11.1 nights against the number of visitors allocated to each region divided by the respective region populations (multiplied by 365) (see Panel B in Table 1). This procedure introduces some distortion in the density results since, for example, average length of stay (ALOS) in the newer, full-service properties of Punta Cana tend to exceed ALOS, say, in Santo Domingo, which caters to a large segment of business travelers. With this caution, this indicator was interpreted, following McElroy and deAlbuquerque (1998), as an aggregative, indirect proxy measure of host-guest irritation and crowding or general socio-cultural pressure in the absence of survey information on host perception of visitor impact. Such an interpretation has a long history in the literature as far back as Lundberg (1974). Although the precise link between the presence of visitors (or tourism intensity) and the degree of resident stress has not been empirically established, Mathieson and Wall’s review (1982:137 ff.) suggests the relationship is variable over the cycle and nonlinear but positive, and therefore, although highly aggregative, average daily visitor density can be considered a “crude measure” and “a first step” (Mathieson and Wall, 1982: 143) toward monitoring socio-cultural impact.

Likewise, because of the absence of more direct measures, environmental penetration was estimated as the number of hotel rooms per square kilometer. Since progression through Butler’s stages of tourism development involves expansion of the hotel plant, increasing facility scale, and extension of the associated air, sea, and land infrastructure, this variable was used as a crude proxy for tourism’s impact on the insular ecology. Finally, the original TPI calculations applied to small islands did not include domestic tourism for two reasons: (1) its assumed negligible impact, and (2) the almost universal unavailability of readily accessible published data. To retain uniformity this same exclusion was employed in this regional DR analysis. Such an exclusion, however, could suggest that all previous TPI applications represent only partial estimates of overall tourism impact.

Index Construction. To construct the Dominican TPI, the same procedures in McElroy and deAlbuquerque (1998) were followed and are presented below. The index was constructed in two steps. First, the three indicators were normalized, and then these indices were averaged to generate the TPI scores and rankings. The normalization followed the simple formula:

TPI_ij = (X_ij – Min X_i) / (Max X_i – Min X_i)

Where TPI_ij = degree of tourism penetration for the j^th region or destination

(j is 1, 2, 3 or 4 for the four tourist regions) with respect to the i^th variable, where

i = 1, 2, or 3 for the three variables used in constructing the index;

X_ij = value of the i^th variable for the j^th tourist destination,

Max X_i = highest value of the i^th variable for all destinations, and

Min X_i = lowest value of the i^th variable for all destinations.

The destination within the DR with the highest, or maximum, value of X_ij takes on the value of one (1.000) for TPI_ij. Conversely, the destination with the lowest or minimum value of X_ij results in a TPI_ij value of zero. The standardized values of these sub-indices are presented in Table 2. This table also presents the unweighted formulations and rankings of the combined TPI_j as given by the formula:

TPI_j = Σ TPI_ij / 3

The Small Island TPI

To compare Dominican levels of tourism penetration with small islands across the world, the same three variables and normalization and aggregation procedures were used. In this case the model was operationalized on a sample of 42 islands with populations and area data taken from The World Factbook (CIA, 2001), and tourism indicators taken from the Compendium of Tourism Statistics (WTO, 2002). The selection of islands was based on two criteria: (1) size less than one million population, and (2) complete data availability for the year 2000. The resulting sample included 20 islands in the Caribbean, 13 in the Pacific, four in the Indian Ocean, two each in the Atlantic (Bermuda, Cape Verde) and Mediterranean (Malta, Cyprus), and Bahrain in the Persian Gulf. To develop comparable TPI scores, each of the four regions and the DR were treated as separate “island” destinations. As such their three respective impact indicators were normalized together with the 42 islands yielding a total sample of 47 destinations.

RESULTS[1]

Table 1 presents trends in the three tourism impact indicators for the DR and the four regions between 1996 and 2001. Several patterns are apparent. In almost all regions trends rise noticeably for every indicator between 1996 and 2000 and then decline the last year (2001), suggesting the effects of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. A slight slowdown or decline is also evident for most regions for visitor expenditure per resident and visitor densities during 1998, marking the impact of Hurricane Georges. But clearly these indicators tell a story of rapid growth and dense penetration of tourism into the fabric of the nation. Three of the most important regional trends are: (1) the rapid increase in tourism penetration among the three outlying regions, (2) the relative stability of tourism impact in Santo Domingo, and (3) the striking performance of Punta Cana (Altagracia province). In the latter region all of the impact indicators roughly doubled from already moderately high levels in the short space of four years between 1996 and 2000.

(Table 1 about here)

The significant penetration of the eastern or Punta Cana region is the direct result of the many large hotels, mainly European-owned and all-inclusive, that have been constructed in the last decade. Most striking is the average daily density of 204 visitors per 1,000 population recorded for Punta Cana in 2000, particularly since this area was essentially uninhabited a decade earlier. This is over three times higher than the level for Puerto Plata (59 per 1,000), the oldest and most heavily developed tourism region outside Santo Domingo. It represents roughly a 20 percent increase in the daily (residents plus visitors) population year-round, and stands in stark contrast to the very low-densities for La Romana, Santo Domingo and the DR area as a whole. In addition, the rapid increase in environmental impact in Punta Cana is suggested by the rise in hotel rooms per Km² (6.3 in Panel C of Table 1), which approaches the level of Puerto Plata (7.0) in 2001. Finally, the wide gap in in-country visitor spending per resident between Punta Cana ($7,941) and Puerto Plata ($2,291) in 2000 is primarily a function of disparate visitor densities since, in the absence of data, actual spending per visitor is assumed to be the same across the two sites. Were such regional spending estimates available, the gap would likely be wider. New hotels in the former region tend to be more upscale and full-service (more expensive) than many of the older properties in Puerto Plata where deep discounts for hotel packages to stave off the cancellation of budget flights especially from Europe have been the norm in recent years (El Caribe 2002).

The different regional levels of tourist development indicated by the three TPI indicators are aggregated in the overall TPI scores recorded in Table Two. Results show sharply discrete levels of development. Clearly Punta Cana is the most tourist-penetrated region with Puerto Plata a distant second. The least penetrated regions include La Romana and Santo Domingo respectively. Such rankings underline the importance of regional TPI analysis since these extreme differences would be entirely masked by the aggregate countrywide average for the DR as a whole, which ranks just below Santo Domingo, the least developed region. On the other hand, the results are somewhat counter-intuitive in the Butler resort cycle framework since the newest destination, the Punta Cana site, is the most developed while the older Puerto Plata and Santo Domingo regions are intermediate and least penetrated, respectively. However, there is precedent for alternative patterns of tourism evolution in the literature. Rapid large-scale infrastructure and hotel development can “transform terra incognita into a popular instant resort” (Papatheodorou, 2004: 232). The experiences of Cuba, Dominican Republic, and the “Mayan Riviera” around Cancun, Mexico, are examples. Butler (1993) himself points to the examples of the Cayman Islands and Turks and Caicos (Club Med in Providenciales) as destinations where local involvement and other early resort cycle stages were virtually skipped in their entirety. Moreover, the low ranking, especially for Santo Domingo, identifies another TPI weakness as a cross-sectional snapshot taken at only one point in time, since it fails to account quantitatively for a destination’s long-term experience with tourism.

(Table 2 about here)

In addition, the TPI analysis might overstate somewhat these regional development differences because some portion of these discrepancies is due to the varying population bases—the denominator in the calculation of expenditures per resident and visitor density—across the regions. For example, the major population centers in La Romana in the southeast (nearly half million residents) and in Santo Domingo and surrounding tourist areas (nearly three million) mask the sizeable tourist arrivals of over one million annually to these two regions. As a result of these population concentrations, these two regions are ranked low. This sensitivity to population variation is also why in traditional TPI analyses highly populated small islands (Fiji, Mauritius, Reunion, Trinidad) with relatively large established tourism sectors score low on the TPI scale (see McElroy, 2002). Of course, this sort of variation is precisely what the TPI is supposed to measure: 50,000 visitors walking around in a city of 2 or 3 million residents is certainly a different level of impact compared to the same number of tourists in an area with 25,000 residents. As a minor counterpoint, the TPI might also tend to understate somewhat the level of penetration in Punta Cana and Puerto Plata for another reason. In estimating the visitor density indicator, it was necessary to use the all-island ALOS in the absence of regional ALOS statistics. This might understate slightly the penetration in outlying regions that cater primarily to long-staying holiday-makers and overstate penetration in Santo Domingo and its environs that cater to business travelers who might stay for shorter periods.

Finally, the regional TPI figures may contain some bias because of the estimation procedures followed. For example, because of the absence of per visitor spending numbers for each region and the implicit substitution of the all-island average, one can argue that visitor spending per resident does not provide any new impact information over and above visitor density. It essentially doubles its weight in the overall TPI. In fact, according to Table 2, the normalized values of the two variables are identical. To correct for this “doubling” bias, two-variable TPIs were calculated using visitor density and rooms per square kilometer. The results (see Table 2) alter all the TPI scores but leave the basic regional development positions intact.

IMPLICATIONS

Although crude first approximations, these regional TPI rankings nevertheless highlight some preliminary directions for future tourism planning. First, since Punta Cana has become the most developed region, serious consideration must be given to monitoring environmental and socio-cultural impacts for evidence of potential damage and/or crowding/intrusion. As a corollary, despite current pressures to do so, caution should be exercised in encouraging expanded development along the east coast. Second, the intermediately-developed Puerto Plata region may warrant special policy attention to enhance its attractiveness. To maximize the advantages of its considerable infrastructure, appropriate incentives could be designed to encourage facility refurbishment. Third, in the long term, policy-makers should consider directing expected future growth to the less penetrated outlying regions like La Romana/San Pedro in the southeast, Barahona west of Santo Domingo, and into the island’s interior where many attractive ecotourism possibilities exist without encroaching into previously safeguarded national parks. (Interviews by senior author with the Honorable Hipólito Mejía, President of the Dominican Republic, 2001 and 2004).

Comparisons with the Small-Island TPI

One of the major advantages of employing the TPI to measure overall tourism impact is that it opens access to the experiences of many small island destinations at various stages of tourism development. To provide a comparative global context for the levels of tourism penetration observed in the DR, Table 3 presents the three TPI indicators, their normalized indices, and overall scores and rankings for the 42 small islands. The DR and four regions are included, with their TPI scores based on indices normalized within the overall 47 “island” sample. Using Butler’s lifecycle model as a useful backdrop framework for understanding the general evolution of tourism development (Hovinen, 2002), the results rank the destinations from the most (St. Maarten) to least (Solomon Islands) developed. With some assistance from the literature and long-term experience with small-island tourist economies (McElroy, 2002), they are roughly clustered into three distinct groups and levels of impact (least, intermediate, most) that correspond loosely to the three abbreviated stages of the resort cycle. Although the thresholds between development stages are drawn somewhat arbitrarily and cannot be empirically defended, they conform to TPI usage in past analyses and generally reflect the expected patterns. The more traditional, developed and accessible islands in the Caribbean, Mediterranean, and Northern Pacific populate the top of the rankings while the more remote emerging South Pacific and Indian Ocean destinations populate the bottom.

(Table 3 about here)

These amalgamated results also corroborate and generally strengthen conclusions from the Dominican TPI analysis. For example, the Punta Cana region would rank among the most tourism-penetrated destinations in the world. As a group, these heavily developed islands average over $10,000 in visitor spending per resident, over 170 visitors per 1,000 population and 25 rooms per square kilometer. Large hotels, high occupancy rates, and a high level of man-made attractions typically characterize mature destinations like Punta Cana. More importantly, many of these established resort areas are also among the most frequently cited in the literature for tourism-induced environmental damages, marine pollution, over-crowding, and declining vacation quality (Jenner & Smith, 1993; Briguglio and others, 1996; Apostolopoulos and Gayle, 2002). This group is dominated by the popular destinations in the Caribbean but also includes Malta in the Mediterranean and Guam and Northern Marianas in the Pacific.

Puerto Plata ranks among the intermediate impact destinations averaging per resident visitor spending above $2,200 and daily densities around 60 visitors per 1,000 residents. However, its “physical plant”—its roads, hotels, airport—is of an older age than that of Punta Cana, a significant qualitative difference not measured by the TPI approach. At the high end of this grouping are traditional mass-market Caribbean resort areas like Antigua, Bahamas, and Barbados plus Cyprus (Bonaire is a renowned dive destination) while the low end includes established Francophone destinations like Guadeloupe, Martinique, and Polynesia as well as the developing Windward Islands of St. Vincent and Dominica. Although they differ considerably in size, age of facilities, and tourism style, all the intermediate islands have extensive tourism experience, most display increasing tourism scale and ecosystem impact, and many face rapid growth pressures and resource-use conflicts. Like Puerto Plata, they may also face increasing competition from new entrants as well as from established rivals.

The less developed south (Santo Domingo) and southeast (La Romana) regions, along with the DR as a whole, would rank among the least penetrated (primarily Pacific) islands. Not surprisingly because of recent growth (and Santo Domingo’s long-standing tourism experience), these DR destinations cluster toward the top of the least penetrated group. In contrast to the affluent, high-density “pleasure periphery” defined by the most developed destinations (Turner & Ash, 1976), tourism is less visible in these emerging destinations. Average visitor spending per resident is just over $200, average daily density less than one percent of the population, and the landscape is barely marked by less than one room per square kilometer. Many exhibit traits common to Butler’s initial tourism stages: small-scale facilities and infrastructure, less disturbed ecosystems and cultures, and relatively long average visitor stays. Because of their early position in the resort cycle, many have significant planning room for designing alternative, more sustainable tourism styles than their high-density counterparts. This is similar to the advantage the DR shares because of its large size, abundant natural assets and relatively undeveloped western and interior regions.

In summary, this comparative analysis provides DR policy makers with a framework for broadly assessing tourism’s progress across the Dominican regions. It further opens the window to a wealth of experience of islands across the world at various similar levels along the economic-environmental continuum. It also confirms the earlier DR TPI analysis that the more developed regions of Punta Cana and Puerto Plata deserve special policy attention to ensure the long-term sustainability of DR tourism. This conclusion stands even when the TPI is corrected for the so-called “doubling” problem, referred to earlier, and estimated with only two impact indices (visitor density and rooms/km2). All regions by and large retain their original relative positions in the small-island sample and across the three development clusters (see last column, Table 3).

Visitor Satisfaction

Since the TPI is a measure of tourism’s destination impact, the question was raised whether different development levels would affect visitor satisfaction. According to a very generalized interpretation of the lifecycle model, it was broadly hypothesized that higher (lower) levels of visitor saturation and density in a region would be associated with lower (higher) levels of regional visitor satisfaction. This conclusion was based on the documented experience, particularly in the island literature, that more developed areas and/or destinations undergoing rapid transformational (large-scale, often unplanned) changes would, other things being equal, exhibit more crowded landscapes, greater environmental intrusion and a rising degree of mass commercialization concomitant with declines in service quality, cultural diversity and the unique measured pace and style of island life. Such changes were expected to produce generally lower levels of visitor satisfaction and preference to return.

To test this hypothesis, a visitor survey was conducted in March and April of 2001. The surveys were in English, self-administered, and conducted at some hotels and the airports in three of the four regions: Punta Cana, Puerto Plata, and La Romana. The Santo Domingo airport and area hotels were excluded since most of the airport arrivals at the capital’s terminal are not tourists and, in addition, the hotels in the area are spread around the region making them not easily or quickly accessible. Respondents took 10-15 minutes to complete the two-page questionnaire that asked about visitor origin, spending patterns, satisfaction with their hotels and their environments, perceptions of safety, and preference for a return visit. Because of its reliability and for purposes of comparability, the design and scale response structure of the questionnaire were taken from a longer survey routinely conducted by the government to monitor visitor trends.

A cautionary note should be made about the surveys since response rates were somewhat hampered by two factors: non-cooperation from a few hotels and the fact that a few tourists did not speak English well enough to understand some or all of the questions. Nonetheless, over 60 percent or 247 of the surveys distributed were completed and returned in usable form: 93 of 150 in Puerto Plata; 102 of 140 in Punta Cana; and 52 of 120 in La Romana. In addition, the distribution of respondents by native origin tended to mirror the distribution of all visitors in 2001 with minor exceptions. Since the timing of the survey coincided with the end of the high winter season (somewhat after the peak of North American visitation) and the beginning of the summer season when many Europeans visit, the proportion of North Americans in the survey was lower than the annual share (38% to 47%) while the European ratio was somewhat higher (39% to 34%). Because of the language problems, the British ratio was predictably higher (15% to 6%) and the “Other” ratio was lower (9% to 18%).

Despite these response rate limitations, the survey results corroborate general impressions derived from the TPI analysis and from other information such as newspaper accounts and interviews with government officials about development in the tourist regions. According to an analysis of variance of the survey responses by region shown in Table 4, visitors in Puerto Plata reported uniformly lower levels of satisfaction with their vacation experiences than did those in the other two regions by statistically significant margins. For example, on the question of hotel and service satisfaction, on a 1-5 Likert scale (“highly satisfied” to “very dissatisfied”), tourists’ responses in Puerto Plata averaged 2.8 in contrast to 3.3 in Punta Cana and 3.4 in La Romana. Similarly, on the question of satisfaction with beaches and other natural amenities, the average was significantly lower for the Puerto Plata region. In terms of visitor perceptions of safety, the gap was measurably larger: 2.7 at Puerto Plata compared to nearly 4.0 at Punta Cana and La Romana. Finally, on the question of likelihood of a return visit (1-3 scale), Puerto Plata responses averaged 2.0 versus 2.5 for the other two regions. It is noted, however, that overall satisfaction with the tourism experiences in the Dominican Republic and likelihood of return were uniformly high and also consistent with government surveys conducted of departing tourists at the various airports (Banco Central 2002).

(Table 4 about here)

The lower visitor satisfaction levels associated with Puerto Plata, one of the more developed DR tourist zones, ranking in the intermediate range of tourism penetration on the small-island scale, in part confirm the TPI results. However, results also demonstrate some limitations of the TPI analysis since Punta Cana—which routinely received high satisfaction ratings along with less penetrated La Romana—was the most tourist-developed region in the DR and also is classified with the most tourism penetrated in the international small-island analysis. This discrepancy suggests that the aggregative TPI, while useful for planners in assessing general levels of penetration in a given region or destination, can be a poor indicator of visitor satisfaction. To explore more directly the link between the TPI and visitor satisfaction, a series of logistic regression analyses were performed employing the four visitor responses (service, environment, safety, return) as the dependent variables and the aggregative TPI score and its three separate components (per resident spending, visitor density, rooms/km2) as the independent variables. The outcomes confirm visual inspection of the data in that the composite TPI as well as its (non-normalized) indicators are not significantly related to visitor satisfaction levels. On the other hand, the regressions indicate a close and statistically significant association between likelihood of return and high levels of hotel service, environmental quality, and, particularly, perceived safety.

The TPI remains a useful, though limited, first approximation of development conditions that for specific planning and implementation purposes must be supplemented with more concrete local or “on the ground” information. Clearly, such supplementary information should include the quality and age of the hotels, the socio-economic levels of their clienteles, and the tourist-related infrastructure available locally, such as police services, roads, and transportation. Perceptions of lower visitor satisfaction/safety in Puerto Plata are partly a reflection of an older and less expensive tourism plant, more crowded infrastructure, and higher levels of criminal activity in part because of the region’s proximity to drug traffic through nearby Haiti. By contrast, the more favorable ratings in Punta Cana may reflect the superior quality of the beaches and the absence of a significant local population, as well as the novelty of the destination and its newer and gated (protected) tourism facilities contributing to feelings of safety and relative isolation.

CONCLUSION

Capacity has become an increasing postwar concern for island economies specializing in mass tourism because of their fragile ecologies. This is especially the case for rapidly growing areas in general like the Caribbean—the world’s leading region in tourism intensity—and in particular for the Dominican Republic, which has developed in less than three decades to become the largest tourism plant in the island Caribbean. It also underscores the fundamental economic and social tension of nations that are poor in physical and human capital and rich in attractive and relatively unspoiled natural resources.

The Tourism Penetration Index was recently formulated to discern overall levels of tourism development in the context of Butler’s lifecycle model. It was designed to provide policy-makers with an empirically defined, if broad-based, quantitative assessment of the impact (low, medium, high) of tourism on delicate socio-economic and environmental configurations of island destinations. Up to now the TPI has been applied exclusively to small-island nations employing single or aggregate, all-island indicators. Because of data limitations, no previous effort has been able to discriminate regional levels of tourism penetration within a larger country with multiple, discrete destinations.

This analysis applies the TPI to four tourist regions in the DR and demonstrates its utility for highlighting heavy concentrations of tourism development and penetration levels within a single nation. In a comparative analysis with 42 small islands across the world, it grouped (1) the Punta Cana (Altagracia) destination within the DR on the east coast with the most developed destinations worldwide, (2) the Puerto Plata/Samaná region in the north with intermediate islands, and (3) the La Romana/San Pedro/Bayahibe and Santo Domingo destinations in the south with the least penetrated destinations. The study further linked these varying regional development levels with responses from a visitor satisfaction survey. Results here were mixed. They confirmed that lower levels of satisfaction, perceived safety, and return preference were associated with higher levels of tourist penetration with the exception of Punta Cana, a highly developed region with high visitor ratings because of its spectacular beaches and new, upscale and secluded properties. Finally, the analysis highlighted a weakness of the regional TPI as a first approximation in that supplemental local information is essential for assessing tourism quality. This is particularly true for regions that have experienced explosive growth and leapfrogged over Butler’s early stages. Overall the results suggest the TPI is not a useful stand-alone predictor of perceived visitor satisfaction and should be used with caution until further evaluations are completed.

Despite these limitations, this analysis of tourism in the Dominican Republic identified general directions for a long-run planning framework. The evidence of high impact in Punta Cana suggests that for this destination to retain its attractiveness and international reputation, the scope and pace of future development should be monitored to safeguard the region’s special natural assets. In addition, the analysis confirms that refurbishing the infrastructure of Puerto Plata should be continued and expanded, and preference for future development should be given to the less penetrated southwestern and interior regions, while carefully protecting environmental preserves such as the pristine and delicate Bahía de las Aguilas (“Eagle Bay”) in the extreme southwest region of the country. Indeed, there is evidence that the DR government is considering these issues; there are some renovation projects underway in the north and discussions to develop areas to the south and west (Betances 2002; Interviews during 2001 and 2002 with the Honorable Hipólito Mejia, President, and with Frank Moya Pons, Minister of the Environment and Natural Resources).

Future research should proceed in two directions. First, several weaknesses in the construction of the TPI that have been highlighted in this study should be addressed. These include developing a more refined indicator of spatial concentration, designing a time-dimension measure that captures a destination’s long-term experience (exposure) with tourism, and factoring in domestic tourism to establish a truly comprehensive measure of overall impact. Further work on incorporating qualitative measures would also be a real step forward. A second major avenue for further research would be to extend the regional TPI analysis to other larger Caribbean islands like Jamaica, Puerto Rico, and Cuba, to the extent this is made possible by the availability of appropriate data. Along with the DR, these islands accounted for roughly 50 percent of all stayover visitors in 2000 to the island Caribbean, as well as 50 percent of total visitor spending and nearly 60 percent of all rooms available (WTO, 2002). If one looked at these leading tourism countries as single entities or destinations, intensely penetrated areas like Varadero and Cayo Coco within Cuba, Montego Bay and Ocho Rios within Jamaica, and the Condado and Isla Verde areas within San Juan, Puerto Rico, would be missed entirely. A regional TPI would bring these within-island differences into objective relief for further scrutiny and policy discussion. Similarly, regional TPI analysis could also be used to discriminate objectively the spatial concentration of tourism activity in some of the smaller archipelagic states in the region, such as between St. Vincent and the outlying Grenadines, St. Thomas and St. John in the U.S. Virgin Islands, and New Providence/Grand Bahama and the Family Islands in the Bahamas.

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Table 1
		Tourism Indicators in Four Destinations Within the Dominican Republic
Panel A.			Expenditures per Resident
	1996	1997	1998	1999	2000	2001
Punta Cana	$3,625	$4,304	$4,716	$5,962	$7,941	$6,769
La Romana/S. Pedro	316	364	361	406	458	379
Puerto Plata/Samaná	1677	2040	2042	2177	2291	1675
Santo Domingo	236	261	247	263	273	250