Abstract:
Tourism is one of the fastest-growing industries in the world today. The
attractiveness, climate, topography, soil, infrastructure and other amenities of
a given geographical unit make the place an attractive destination. Due to these
factors, the tourism industry which is established in a particular area will affect
many sectors including economic, environmental, social, and political. It can
be seen that the variation of tourist immigration in the destination area has also
affected its livelihood. The problem of this research is to identify the
community livelihood changes in tourism destination areas due to the reason
of immigrant fluctuation. The approach of this research is an economic
geography approach based on the human geographic view. Both primary and
secondary data were used in the study. Questionnaires and interview
techniques used under the survey method and also observation methods have
been used to collect primary data. Accordingly, 10 sample producers, 10
marketers and 10 tourism service providers in the Gangawatakorale Divisional
Secretariat and Kalapuraya Grama Niladhari Division in the Kandy District
were selected as the sample. Descriptive analysis methods were used for
getting the result. The finding of this research was the decline period of tourist
immigration has highly contributed to the deterioration of the economic and
social status of the people in the destination area. The main affecting factor
was the high loan pressure of the community in the destination area.
