Tourism Strategic Planning

Strategic planning is known in business as an approach to having a plan to manage a sustainable future. Having a strategic plan can increase chances for success in the future for a business. This also effects the way tourism is planned for the imperative future in responding to destinations’ financial, environmental, and community needs (Ruhanen 2010). Because of these outcomes of unpredictable external factors, tourism strategic planning follows a set of principles, policies, and different management methods to clear a path for new development within the tourism industry. Sustainability is what the tourism industry strives for in order to collect the revenue for the community, however, in order to sustain a growing industry, they must consider

The World Tourism Organization understands and states that “tourism is considered sustainable when it improves the quality of life of the host community; provides a high quality of experience for the visitor; and maintains the quality of the environment on which both the host community and the visitor depends” (Ruhanen 2010). Tourism sustainability does not happen easily and does not happen overnight. Focus on the decision making process is crucial and required in order to have an effective framework that is integrated into the tourism industry’s success. The World Tourism Organization has also stated that the lack there of in planning has been the downfall of the development. Now, strategic planning in an imperative role in defining the success and failures of destination tourism. Strategy helps the development of tourism and to achieve this, there are three basic strategic objectives; “conservation of tourism resource values; enhanced experiences of the visitors who interact with tourism resources; and the expansion of the economic, social and environmental returns to stakeholders in the host community” (Dutton & Hall, 1989; Hall, 2000). Practicing tourism related planning activities has been around and is not considered new, but the process of planning for geographical areas and new tourism destinations have not been studied to the depth that they

During this stage the researcher uses the factors in the first stage to come up with some broadly based goals that can make tourism sustainable, protect the local environment, and have the local population in mind (Simpson, 2001). Based on the information that is found through developing these broad goals a researcher can take that information and develop a contingency plan to meet these broadly based goals. This part of the planning will also allow the researcher to develop specific objectives targets that will equally distribute tourism’s economic benefits throughout a local