Tourism Development and Planning

Tourism Development and Planning

Tourism Development and Planning

Introduction

Tourism industry is one of the largest worldwide, generating nearly 212 million jobs and represents an important contribution to gross domestic product of many countries (Wahab & Pigram, 2011). Tourism is an activity that affects society in many aspects and exercises profound impact on the social, cultural and economic life of citizens (Lascurain, 2005).

Factors Affecting Tourism

Being a complex socio-economic system, tourism is affected by numerous factors, whose role in every moment can be different both in strength and duration of exposure on the development of tourism (Ashworth, 2005).

Culture Factors

Culture now represents the ideas and practices, sites and symbols, of what has been called the “symbolic economy”, i.e. the process through which wealth is created from cultural activities, including art, music, and dance. Signs of change have emerged as more attention has been paid to experience production and creativity as an element of both tourism consumption and production (Berke, 2002).

Economic Factors

Among the economic factors also include inflation, interest rates, and fluctuations in real exchange rates. Thus, changes in exchange rates significantly affect the volume of tourist flows between countries with strong and weak currencies. It is noticed that the relative increase in the cost of overseas travel by 5% leads to a decrease in demand for outbound tourism by 6-10% (Wahab & Pigram, 2011).

Political Factors

A significant influence on the development of tourism have a political and legal factors: the political situation in the world and individual countries open borders policy, easing administrative controls in the tourism sector, the unification of fiscal and monetary policies (Manning & Dougherty,2000).

Planning and development of Tourism

World Tourism organization stated (2004) that if tourism are not properly planned and developed so it can badly effect at community and it can become negative. It is very important to developed properly planning of tourism which can help to growth of community, protects the valuable resources and it leads to community success in economic and societal context (Ashworth,2005).

Levels of Planning and Development of Tourism

There are different levels of Planning and development of tourism, some are given below:

International Level

In this level tourism planning are going to more than one country and include areas such as: services of international transportation, Tourism marketing beyond the boundaries of country, Policies and standards for regional tourism etc (Airey, 2006).

Regional Level

In regional level tourism planning is done by states, provinces involving ...