engleski

Strategic management in cultural tourism with emphasis on event management: the case study of Croatia

Sustainable tourism should be one of the key goals of every developing tourism destination. One of the biggest challenges is the question of how to manage a complex tourism destination system in a way that meets the needs and interests of three key stakeholders – temporary visitors, business entities in tourism, and local community. Solutions are sought in the application of the so-called stakeholder theories, based on network partnership and the collaboration of stakeholders in a tourism destination at all levels – micro, mezzo, and macro level. In this paper, the authors advocate the application of this approach, examining the applicability and effectiveness of their own strategic management model in tourism destination, called SMCT – Strategic Management in Cultural Tourism. This was tested on the example of the tourism cluster of Northwestern Istria, Croatia. The authors believe that implementing the presented and similar management models makes it possible to optimise the effectiveness of managing cultural tourism, where, in the opinion of the authors, events are one of the key segments of the integrated tourism product of the destination and are ''organically'' related to the core values of the tourist site itself. The authors, therefore, advocate a further elaboration of the SMCT model and also call for its wider application in the practice of managing tourism destinations because it may lead toward saving financial, time, and human resources, reducing redundancies, such as the organisation of similar events at the same time, but most importantly, it may lead to achieving a common consensus of stakeholders about the key events of a tourism destination that need to be continually and strategically developed. In addition to these functions, the authors emphasise quality tourism valorisation as the most important function of event management, as well as the presentation of autochthonous values of the destination – precisely through events.

event management ; destination management ; stakeholder theory ; sustainable tourism ; cultural tourism in Croatia ; tourism clusters in Croatia

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