Analyzing senior tourism. The role of ecosystem services to improve sustainable tourism destinations

his study focuses on two emerging and growing phenomena that occur in today’s cities and will have impacts on the future organization of urban systems, affecting all their components (physical, functional and social). On the one side, population aging, as the principal effect of the “baby boom” generation, but not the only one; on the other side, the tourism phenomenon, as one of the economic sectors relentlessly growing worldwide also according to the United Nations World Tourism Organization forecasts. Senior tourism, thus, has been considered as an urban phenomenon to be investigated as one of the occurrences giving rise to new demands of use of the cities. As these new demands request for good quality and variety of services and facilities, this paper considers the issue of Ecosystem Services (ES), meant as one of the peculiarities able to increase the attractiveness of a tourism destination and enhance its physical quality. ESs contribute to augmenting the well-being of city populations (residents and tourists), improving the efficiency of its services and, overall, assuring the outliving of the whole complex urban and/or territorial system. In other words, the study considers the ecosystem services as a background condition for a territorial context, trying to identify which of them act as polarizing factors for senior travelers. Starting from the characteristics of senior tourism, the study works out a first characterization of a senior-friendly destination in which ecosystem services play a strategic role in improving the general quality of the supply systems’ facilities and amenities, in order to assure a high-quality level of life both for residential and temporary urban populations.