Tourist forms and social sustainability: an example of relational tourism in Sardinia

The diachronic and synchronic analysis of the dynamics and the tourist typologies puts in evidence problems and elements of crisis of the contemporary tourist phenomena. The actual situation returns a picture particularly faceted both as it regards the choices of the tourist, both for the one who creates the offer and it manages the question, and for the local societies that entertain the tourist flows. Tourism is increasingly seen as an industry that creates economies rather than a tool to regenerate urban and regional planning and indeed, often, the tourism policies are proving more oriented to the practices related to receptivity and so to the structures whether to consume the vacations, rather than to create occasions, real and not symbolic, of comparison between tourist and local society. Besides, often the tourist forms that celebrate itself sustainable put in strong emphasis either the economic sustainability or that environmental, but is it enough to exclusively consider the economic and environmental processes to be able to affirm that a tourist form is sustainable? Can a sustainable tourism socially exist? Sardinia offers an interesting field of research to study the evolution of the tourist politics, above all in comparison to the relationships between tourist and local society, because it has been, and it is still, one of the destinations of trip more aspired both in the set of the international tourism and for the one who seeks niche forms, however the tourist politics, that have driven the development of the different forms, have been driven in meaningful way, during the years, from what that can be defined the tourist ideology. Tourist ideology is the whole politics and actions that conduct to superficial fruitions of the territories, to gentrification processes, to address only the tourists on some territories, to set attention only to the receptive practice. There are however some small but significant changes in tourism context in recent years, also remaining in the set driven by the tourist ideology, with the search of new forms directed mostly to the relationship between local society and tourist, through a diffusion of the tourist flows not only along the coastal areas but also toward to the more interior territories. The tourist knows that an authentic tourist experience doesn't exist, but there are only a series of games and scripts that can be interpreted, time for time, from who organizes and manages the tourist forms and even from the local societies. There is a need to go beyond the ways traced by the tourist ideology with the purpose to track new forms down where find again the principles of the "relational tourism", new and unexpected forms which tourists and local society can enter in contact in a not programmed and not etero-organized way, in which the optimal conditions to the "mutual vulnerability" among guest and hosts are created. Sardinia’s tourist territory, in reason for its complexity and the contemporary necessity to identify new touristic forms that don't pursue the principles of the tourist ideology, as optimal place offers itself to reason on the possibility to identify appropriate fields and cases of study for new relational forms that can support a social dialogue and that, through this, can support the perception of a new sense of the place. The case study presented is an example in this direction of sustainable integration between services and tourist forms, among tourists and local society.