engleski

Stakeholder support for tourism development

Since early 1980s tourism planners have strongly advocated involvement of local stakeholders in tourism planning for, at least, three reasons: firstly, stakeholders are more likely to support public sector investment and private sectors projects if they support tourism development ; secondly, stakeholders supporting planned tourism development are more willing to tolerate some of the negative impacts of tourism and, thirdly, they are more hospitable toward tourists. The last aspect is important given that studies have showed that hospitable and friendly attitude of locals contribute significantly to overall tourist satisfaction. Thus, as tourism marketing experts have stressed the need to research market trends and adjust the range of destination products and services accordingly, so have the tourism planning experts highlighted the need to monitor attitudes of local stakeholders in order to identify possible problems early and devise strategies that will minimize possibly conflicting situations that would, if left undetected, undermine support for destination development and destination appeal for visitors. However, while market research has become a standard practice in destination planning process, monitoring perceptions of tourism stakeholders is still mostly in the realm of academic research and far from being integrated in the planning process. This assumption was tested in the Croatian context. Namely, being aware of the heterogeneity of tourism stakeholders and their attitudes as well as those ‘illusion’ perpetuated in the public discourse, a research agenda based on, both, qualitative and quantitative surveys was devised and implemented, with an aim to ascertain community attitudes towards tourism and its future development. The research included attitudes of public sector stakeholders – civil authority leaders (mayors of counties, cities and towns) and those of tourism sector leaders – head of all counties, cities and towns' tourism boards, advocacy groups and, finally, residents at large. The results of these surveys have dispelled some of the 'illusion' related to (un)desirable tourism development. Equally important, they advance the tourism planning research and methods as studies taking into account attitudes of variety of stakeholders based on representative samples of stakeholders' population are rare.

tourism planning; stakeholder management; advocacy groups; residents; government; tourism organization; attitudes to tourism

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