BOOK REVIEW
Children in Tourism Communities: Sustainability and Social Justice, by Marko Koščak, Mladen Knežević, Tony O’Rourke, Tina Šegota, Routledge, 2024, 228, GBP £145.00 (Hardback), ISBN 9781032448763
The book opens with a quiet scene that stays with the reader long after the page is turned. In a small alpine village shaped by seasonal tourism, a local child watches visitors arrive with cameras, skis, and expectations. The child knows the rhythm of these arrivals better than the calendar. School schedules bend during peak season, family routines adjust, and certain village spaces feel less like home and more like a stage. Koščak and colleagues use such moments to set the tone of Children in Tourism Communities. Rather than beginning with abstract theory, the book starts with lived experience. Children appear not as symbols or statistics but as people who sense tourism’s presence in their daily lives. This opening anecdote signals the authors’ intent. Tourism is not only an economic activity or a planning problem. It is a social force that reaches into childhood, shaping how young people grow up in places visited by others.
At its core, the book asks a simple but neglected question. What does tourism mean for children who live in destinations shaped by visitors? To answer this, the authors bring together case studies from different countries and development contexts, combining qualitative interviews, observations, and community level analysis. The central theme is that children are both affected by tourism and active participants in tourism communities, even though policy and research often ignore them. The book is structured to move from broad framing to grounded detail. Early chapters explain why children matter in tourism research and how tourism changes family life, schooling, labor, and play. Later chapters focus on specific settings, ranging from rural villages to mature destinations in developed economies. Arguments are laid out carefully, with each chapter building on the last. The authors avoid sweeping claims. Instead, they show how tourism reshapes everyday life in uneven ways, producing benefits, pressures, and moral tensions that children feel first and explain with surprising clarity.
One of the book’s strongest contributions is its insistence that children are social actors, not passive victims or future adults in waiting. Koščak et al. draw from sociology of childhood and community studies to argue that children interpret tourism in their own terms. Some enjoy the exposure to different languages and cultures. Others resent the loss of privacy or the seasonal absence of parents working long hours in tourism jobs. By foregrounding children’s voices, the book fills a gap in tourism studies that has long focused on tourists, workers, or planners. It also contributes methodologically by showing how to ethically engage with children in research, respecting their agency without romanticizing their perspectives. This approach broadens the field by reminding researchers that sustainability and community wellbeing cannot be measured only through income, infrastructure, or visitor satisfaction.
At the same time, the book takes positions that may sit uneasily with parts of existing tourism practice. One such stance is its critique of the assumption that tourism development is automatically good for local communities if it raises income. The authors show cases where household earnings increase while children’s quality of life declines. Long working hours for parents reduce supervision and shared time. Housing pressure pushes families into smaller or peripheral spaces. School attendance becomes irregular during high season. These findings challenge growth-oriented models of tourism planning that treat social impacts as secondary. Some practitioners may argue that such problems are transitional or manageable through better management. Koščak and colleagues are more cautious. They suggest that without explicit attention to children, these issues persist and become normalized.
The book also invites healthy debate, particularly around the balance between protection and participation. In several chapters, the authors describe children contributing to family tourism businesses, helping in guesthouses, shops, or farms. Rather than framing this only as child labor, the book presents a more nuanced view. For some children, participation builds skills, pride, and belonging. For others, it interferes with education and play. The debate here is not resolved neatly, and the authors resist simple moral judgments. This openness strengthens the book. It encourages readers to question rigid categories and to consider context, culture, and children’s own views. In doing so, the book aligns with broader debates in development studies about work, care, and childhood.
Children in Tourism Communities stands out among peer books for its focus and tone. Many tourism paper address community impacts but treat children as part of households or future labor markets (Leventhal & Brooks-Gunn, 2000). Compared to works on sustainable tourism (Weaver, 2007) or community-based tourism (Walia, 2021), this book is narrower but deeper. It does not offer toolkits or policy checklists. Instead, it offers insight. In this sense, it resembles ethnographic studies more than planning manuals. For readers familiar with tourism impact literature, the book feels corrective rather than repetitive. Its value lies not in proposing a new grand theory but in shifting attention to a group that has been consistently overlooked.
The relevance of the book to sustainable tourism research is clear. Sustainability is often framed around environmental protection and economic viability, with social dimensions added as an afterthought. By focusing on children, the book redefines what social sustainability means. A destination cannot be considered sustainable if it undermines children’s education, safety, or sense of belonging. Koščak et al. show that children’s experiences are early indicators of deeper social change (Elder, 1994). When children feel excluded from public spaces or pressured by adult work patterns, these signals point to long term community strain. For sustainability scholars, the book offers both a moral argument and an analytical lens.
The internal structure of the book supports this argument well. The first section sets the conceptual ground, explaining why children matter in tourism communities and reviewing existing research gaps. It begins with community level observations and gradually narrows to family and child level experiences. The second section presents empirical chapters, each grounded in a specific destination. Here the focus shifts from framing to evidence. Readers move through different contexts, seeing how tourism interacts with schooling, leisure, gender roles, and migration. The final section reflects on implications, drawing connections between cases and pointing toward policy and research agendas. This progression from context to case to consequence makes the book accessible even to readers outside tourism studies.
Beyond academia, the book speaks directly to tourism researchers, trip planning platforms, and policy makers working in sustainability. For researchers, it opens a new unit of analysis. For aggregators and platforms that shape demand and seasonality, the book is a reminder that algorithm driven peaks have social costs (Ghaderi et al., 2025). For policy makers, the message is practical. Planning decisions about zoning, season length, and labor regulation affect children’s lives. By showing these links through concrete stories, the book translates abstract policy debates into human terms. This is one reason the book remains relevant years after its publication.
One of the most striking aspects of the book is its refusal to draw a simple line between developed and developing countries. In a chapter set in a well-known European destination, children describe feelings of displacement like those reported in less affluent regions. Public spaces are crowded with visitors. Local traditions are performed for outsiders. Housing prices rise beyond what local families can afford. These anecdotes challenge the idea that such problems belong only to the Global South. Koščak et al. show that tourism creates comparable pressures across contexts, even if they appear in different forms. By including these cases, the book avoids pity and instead fosters recognition. Children in tourism communities, whether in alpine villages or coastal resorts, share vulnerabilities that deserve attention. This insight may be the book’s quiet but lasting contribution, reminding readers that tourism’s human impact does not stop at national income levels or development labels.
Disclosure of interest
The author(s) confirm that there are no financial or non-financial competing interests.
Statement of funding
No funding was received.
References
Elder Jr, G. H. (1994). Time, human agency, and social change: Perspectives on the life course. Social psychology quarterly, 4-15.
Ghaderi, Z., Beal, L., Hall, C. M., Zaman, M., Ahmad Rather, R., & Mat Som, A. P. (2025). Cybersecurity and smart tourist destinations resilience. Tourism Recreation Research, 50(7), 1622-1638.
Leventhal, T., & Brooks-Gunn, J. (2000). The neighborhoods they live in: the effects of neighborhood residence on child and adolescent outcomes. Psychological bulletin, 126(2), 309.
Walia, S. K. (2021). The routledge handbook of community-based tourism management. Routledge.
Weaver, D. (2007). Sustainable tourism. Routledge.
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Reviewed by:
Mayukh Mukhopadhyay
Executive Doctoral Scholar
Indian Institute of Management Indore
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