“Tourism is traditionally treated as an escape from everyday life and tourism theory is concerned with extraordinary places. Tourism and everyday life are conceptualized as belonging to different ontological worlds.” (Larsen, 2008, p. 27). According to Hall (2004), this approach to defining tourism as something outside the ordinary life of both tourists and destination residents has meant that tourism researchers have paid little attention to the “new mobilities paradigm” (NMP) described by Sheller and Urry (2006). Adopting the NMP in tourism research means rethinking a number of assumptions made about, and theories used to explain, different aspects of tourism. This paper will examine how new forms of mobility can be connected to new types of tourist, new relationships between tourism and residence, and, through these, to different ways in which tourism can be connected to sustainability. For this paper sustainability is being defined within a destination community well-being framework.

This examination is based on the qualitative analysis of a series of semi-structured interviews conducted with destination community stakeholders in three regional locations in the tropical regions of Australia. The paper will begin with a brief review of the NMP and how it changes the way tourism is defined and understood with a particular emphasis on models for explaining tourism impacts in host communities. It will then present the results of the stakeholder interviews highlighting the different ways in which new types of tourist, distinguished by different mobilities, contribute to and/or detract from destination community well-being (DCW). The paper will conclude by identifying some challenges for sustainable tourism planning and management created by these new tourist and resident mobilities.