Article Hotel saturation and its impact upon destination marketing Stephen W Litvin and Sara L Romo College of Charleston, USA Abstract The following research addresses the growing concern that the historic tourism city of Charleston, South Carolina, may be reaching a tourism saturation point, with the city considering the implemen- tation of a moratorium on hotel development. This research, employing a qualitative approach, soli- cited and analyzed the viewpoints of a panel of hotel industry leaders from across the city to determine their views regarding the potential governmental intervention, seeking to answer the question ‘how will we know when “enough is enough?” ‘The hoteliers’ views are of significant importance to those managing, marketing, and governing Charleston, or any other destination concerned they may be reaching saturation. Keywords Destination maturation, free market, government intervention, hotel development, saturation Introduction Myriad tourism articles provide cautionary tales for destinations concerned with the impact of unbridled tourism growth upon their community. Perhaps the most impactful authors exploring the issue have been Richard Butler (1980), who adapted marketing’s product life cycle to create his ‘tourism area life cycle’ (TALC), and Stanley Plog (2001), who applied his psychographic tourist continuum to explore the issue ‘Why des- tinations rise and fall in popularity’. Somewhat less known, but also impactful, has been the work of George Doxey. Doxey (1976: 26) pre- sented his ‘Index for Tourism Irritation’ in the article ‘When enough’s enough: The natives are restless in Old Niagara’, which considered the issue of destination maturation in the Ontario resort community of Niagara-on-the-Lake (NOTL). Doxey’s ‘Irridex’ suggests that destina- tions, as they are discovered and grow, progress along a path that leads through sequential periods of euphoria, apathy, irritation, and ultimately antagonism—when residents ‘see the tourist as the harbinger of all that is bad ... destroying all that is fine’ and ‘mutual politeness’ gives way to an antagonistic view toward visitors and the local tourism industry. Doxey (1976) expressed con- cern that NOTL was rapidly approaching a stage of antagonism and hoped his paper would serve as warning that further tourism development should be checked. Significant early research that applied and extended these seminal models include work by Agarwal (1997) and Smith (1991), who respectively studied the maturation of resort and beach communities; Perdue et al.’s (1990) study of mountain community tourism development; Snepenger et al.’s (1998) model- ing of the maturation trajectory of a historic tour- ist city’s downtown; and Mitchell’s (1998) update of Doxey’s (1976) work, again studying developmental tourism issues faced by NOTL. What each of the original models, as well as these adaptions, have in common is an innate sense of pessimism—viewing tourism develop- ment as a ‘devil’s bargain’ (Rothman, 1998), with initial tourism success leading to growth, Corresponding author: Stephen W Litvin, Hospitality and Tourism Management, School of Business, College of Charleston, 66 George Street, Charleston, SC 29424, USA. Email: LitvinS@cofc.edu Journal of Vacation Marketing 1–13 ª The Author(s) 2018 Reprints and permission: sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/1356766718763703 journals.sagepub.com/home/jvm