Abstract
Tourism researchers as well as policy makers are interested in knowing the impact of tourism on residents’ life. Countless studies in tourism research considered positive and negative impacts of tourism on economic, social, environmental and cultural life of residents (Wal and Mathieson, 2006). These studies, however, provide an instant picture of the situation through a cross section analysis. Meanwhile, tourism destination takes years to develop and residents’ wellbeing is affected differently depending on the development stage of the destination (Kim et al., 2013). The focus of analysis in the existing literature is limited to a single destination making it difficult to generalize obtained results. In the present study we investigate the impact of tourism flows directly on the overall utility of residents in tourism areas through the analysis of residents’ satisfaction with life. For this we unite data from socio-economic panel of German residents (SOEP) and data on tourists’ flows collected by German statistical bureau. The analysis conducted in the present paper involves the whole country distinguishing tourism destinations at regional political regions (ROR) level. The present study is conducted over time period between 2006 and 2011. Longitudinal feature of SOEP permits to investigate how the growth in tourism during the analysed period affected residents’ wellbeing over time. The paper discusses implications of results obtained in the present study for the tourism development policy.