Managing and Marketing Tourist Destinations

Description

Destinations are places that attract visitors for a temporary stay and range from continents to countries to states and provinces to cities to villages to purpose built resort areas. At the foundation level destinations are essentially communities based on local government boundaries. The WTO offered the following working definition of a “local tourism destination” as a ‘physical space in which a visitor spends at least one overnight. It includes tourism products such as support services and attractions, and tourism resources within one day’s return travel time. It has physical and administrative boundaries defining its management, and images and perceptions defining its market competitiveness. Local destinations incorporate various stakeholders often including a host community and can nest and network to form larger destinations.
Tourism is one of many activities in a community or region that requires planning and coordination. This bulletin provides a simple structure and basic guidelines for comprehensive tourism planning at a community or regional level. Planning is the process of identifying objectives and defining and evaluating methods of achieving them. By comprehensive planning we mean planning which considers all of the tourism resources, organisations, markets, and Programme within a region. Comprehensive planning also considers economic, environmental, social, and institutional aspects of tourism development.
This book offers practical information directly related to the tourism industry, using the examples of real-world cases to bridge marketing theory with practice.