The (moving) elephant in the room: A literature review on the impact of tourism on local residents’ mobility

Tourism is fundamentally a mobility phenomenon, yet its impacts on everyday mobility and transportation behaviors of residents remain neglected in both tourism and transportation research. This literature review examines how visitor impacts on residents’ everyday movement are conceptualized, measured, and analyzed in empirical research. Following PRISMA guidelines, it identifies 11 articles that capture perceptions of locals about tourism’s influence on their day-to-day mobility patterns. Findings indicate that while congestion, environmental effects, and transportation infrastructure and services are recognized as significant factors, few studies explicitly focus on investigating visitor-induced mobility impacts, with mobility-related variables more frequently incorporated within broader tourism impact assessments. The most critical identified gaps include concentration of studies on European urban destinations while ignoring diverse global contexts; predominant focus on public transport and exclusion of other modes; and lack of theoretical frameworks for understanding the complex and context-dependent nature of visitor-resident mobility dynamics. This review highlights the need for more dedicated research on how tourism alters resident mobility behaviors, particularly incorporating temporal and spatial dimensions, assessing responses across different settings and groups, and developing standardized mobility impact measures. These findings provide a foundation for advancing this critical field of study at the tourism-mobility nexus.