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Tourism Planning: What To Consider In Tourism Plan Making |
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Michael E. Kelly
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Until the late 1970's tourism planning was seen almost exclusively as a problem of attracting visitors to a particular place. Lavish state, provincial, and national tourism marketing and promotion campaigns were particularly prominent in the competition for visitors. These campaigns are still prominent, and governments still tend to invest most of their tourism dollars in them.
To many local residents, tourism is a paradoxical, good and evil, uninvited monster that has descended into their communities bringing, in the best cases, economic benefit, but often it is at the cost of social disruption and stress on infrastructure and the environment. I cannot count the times I have heard comments like "The people who come here to watch our ceremonies can be so disrespectful...," or "If they would only just send their money and not come here at all, I'd be really happy!" made by people who live where I work as a land use planner on the Hopi Reservation in northeastern Arizona.
And little wonder these kinds of comments occur. The tourist flow to Hopi was estimated in 1990 at fifty to ninety thousand visitors per year. It has probably increased since then. In contrast, there are fewer than ten thousand people who live on the reservation. Furthermore, Hopi is ill prepared to receive this many visitors: there are only two motels totaling 55 rooms and two sit-down restaurants on the reservation; these two establishments are located 40 miles apart. Of the twelve Hopi villages, only one of them offers an organized guided walking tour of the village. The three guides are village employees and are paid out of village funds. There is no charge for the tour, although donations are encouraged. There are few public toilets anywhere on the reservation.
The Hopi tribal government does not have a program which promotes tourism to the reservation; instead, different tribal offices respond to the occasional mail-in or telephone inquiry. And yet, down at state capital offices in Phoenix, Arizona Tourism eagerly promotes the Hopi reservation as a place for tourists to come and experience Indians (along with a not so hidden agenda of spending money while they are in the rest of Arizona). They do this promotion worldwide. To my knowledge, the Hopi tribal government has never authorized the State of Arizona to do this. And people come. And Hopi people continue to cope and grumble, year after year.
It has not always been like this on Hopi. There was a time, not even so long ago, when visitors, who were not so many then, were welcome on the reservation and were welcome at the public portions of the sacred ceremonies. Now they are not. This is one of the most common paradoxes of tourism: growth in demand that eventually overwhelms supply which, in turn, ruins any positive attitude local residents might have toward tourists.
This situation provides planners with opportunity; this situation also provides the planning profession with a social imperative. Clare Gunn remarked: "Communities and regions generally lack expertise on the relationship between tourism and special places" (Gunn 1991). Planners, he goes on to say, can take on larger community education roles, incorporate tourism into city and community plans and can become proactive in the protection and conservation of the resources-social, cultural and natural-which are exposed to tourists.
To accomplish this, planners need a conceptual framework of tourism from which they can develop successful tourism strategies; those which balance tourist demand with local human, cultural and natural resources; those which respect the private lives of local residents. These strategies would meet the needs of tourists without compromising local residents, in other words, inject a quality of sustainability in the design. I shall describe what I think is such a general framework in preparation for a focused discussion on planning one particular type of tourism-Cultural Tourism. The social issues in developing cultural tourism strategies can be particularly impassioned and occur at several different levels, as you may have already concluded from some of my earlier remarks, which is why this session focuses on planning cultural tourism. The topics that I shall cover are:
From among a multitude of other definitions of tourism, there are two important views on what tourism is that have ramifications for successful tourism planning. First, there is the view that tourism is an individual human experience which some anthropologists theorize is really ritual human cultural experience. The second view is that tourism is an export economic activity.
There is one anthropological theory (Graburn 1983) which proposes that tourism is ritual experience akin to religious experience. Because a tourism experience is limited in time for most people, and it occurs for them in an out-of-the-ordinary place, there can be feelings of extraordinary reality associated with a destination. When one takes a trip, one leaves one's ordinary life through a transition, like an airplane flight; one has heightened liminal, some would say spiritual, experiences at this extraordinary, mystical place, and then one returns to ordinary life through another transition, a coming down. Grieving the loss of the mystical place and the intense relationships that were experienced there frequently accompany this last transition.
When people are in the time and space of their extraordinary, mystical place, the rules of their ordinary lives are usually suspended or may be totally reversed. They are susceptible to seeing fate in chance occurrences, they experience déja vu, they use only first names, they get drunk in public, and they have amorous, sometimes sexual, encounters with strangers whom they will never see again. In short, they have high intensity, deeply moving experiences.
Another is an ordinal classification that is based on tourist party volumes (Smith 1977). This measure ranges from mass tourism for large numbers of tourists to explorer for the single tourist traveling by herself. Images along this scale range from droves of people disgorging themselves from 47 passenger stinking diesel buses into crowed plazas before Notre Dame Cathedral (not the case anymore) to the solitary lean dirty backpacker hitch hiking her way across the Tibetan Plateau on the back side of Mount Everest.
The importance of these scales is that they begin to define segments in the whole of what constitutes the tourist population. These segments have differing tourism product experience expectations, travel service needs and demographics. This means they can be targeted for marketing purposes and specifically focused on in promotional campaigns and tourism product development.
Attractions, and Gunn's attractions component should be explicitly expanded to include events, function in two ways in successful tourism planning. One is they are the magnets that often entice a person to travel to a particular destination, that dreamed experience, and second they are part of the real tourism experience of a destination region. Service is the other significant experience generating component of tourism. The focus of this component is accommodation, and food and beverage establishments and their personnel. Here appropriate design, good taste and well-trained staff are often the key ingredients to successful experiences. Not always though, the Elbow Room in Vancouver, BC thrived on mild doses of tourist abuse. When regulars would show up behind tourists waiting in line to be seated, they were likely to be told, "You can wait, these boys have to go to work!" The tourists would step aside wondering what hit them and let the regulars be seated.
Gunn's last structural component is information and promotion. It is important to provide each tourist market segment with information and promotional materials that create the experience expectation and bring tourists to a destination. Unfortunately it is this component which has been so badly out of balance in traditional tourism planning to such an extent that resources that should go into training, destination design and physical development have often fallen short. This is less the case now than it was ten to twenty years ago. Another aspect of this component is providing good signage in the destination region to ease and direct movement of people.
About the visitor, Winterbottom remarks: "The truly successful visitor destination is one that is concerned more with visitor quality than quantity. The quality visitor is the one that is most likely to repeat the visit and to respect the visitor environment-both natural and man made." This statement stands as justification to actively target certain market segments in tourism planning in order to attract desirable visitors and thus conserve advertising dollars for other components of tourism development.
The visitor domain is simply an area where attractions and services are clustered so that the tourist experience is aggregated and enhanced.
Clustering and concentrating attractions and services is the technique of creating the visitor domain. Use of these principles leads ultimately to a critical mass of tourist products which establishes a place as a tourist destination in the tourist market. With a critical mass, tourists become aware of the place and will purposely begin to choose to go to that place.
The application of the market research technique of product/market match is the means to achieve a supply of the right tourism products, particularly attractions and services, for the targeted quality tourists of a tourism destination plan. Targeted tourists are statistically defined; the products suitable to their tastes are what should be developed at the destination. Statistically defined tourist segments usually come from defined geographic areas, fall into specified age and gender groups, have specified education and income levels and have specific preferences for what they like to do, see and eat.
Well signed transportation linkages are necessary to ease the movement of people in the tourist domain. Where large crowds of people are concentrated during the tourist season, such as now at the Grand Canyon with four to five million visitors per year, mass transit interventions are rapidly replacing automobile use.
Protecting the environment-natural, cultural and social-is now an accepted mainstay of successful tourism planning. This can be achieved by attracting quality tourists and by managing tourist flows and access while they are in the visitor domain. The Grand Canyon intervention of mass transit is a direct result of the Park Service's goal to protect the environment and preserve the visitor experience. This year Park Service introduced use of a quiet helicopter and will require commercial areal sightseeing operators to use noise-reduced equipment starting next year. There already are restricted air space regulations. Grand Canyon will be a quieter place soon.
The seasons-high, low and shoulder-can be the bane of a tourism planner's life and a test of her skills. In most cases, tourism flows are seasonal but with heavy investment in service and attraction facilities, there is generally a desire by the operators of these facilities to generate year round tourists and thus cash flow. The flip side of this principle is that the seasons with low tourist volumes give local residents periods of reduced stress and rest.
Partnership is another principle to incorporate into successful tourism planning. Because of the pluralistic nature of tourism, there needs to be destination partnerships created or formed which can more effectively take advantage of the product offerings of each member of the partnership. It is the idea of "synergy" where the total is more than the sum of the parts.
Another principle to consider in tourism planning is product life cycle. Tourism products, like many others, grow in popularity and after a while fall off in popularity. The key is to be prepared when popularity begins to wane and have plans prepared to breathe new life into the attraction or service.
A final principle for successful tourism planning is the planner should insure there is ample opportunity for economic benefits to be captured. Tourists are generally willing to spend money, but as in the Hopi situation noted earlier, there may be little planned opportunity for them to spend it. For example, most tourists to Hopi are day visitors; they spend money for accommodation in the border towns of Flagstaff, Winslow and Holbrook. There are only a few places to buy food and gas. There is one museum which charges $3.00. Most guided tours of the reservation originate off reservation; operators, if they are non Hopi, are required to pay a $1,000 fee to the tribal government once a year. The one place tourists can spend money on Hopi is at the dozen or so arts and craft shops and galleries which are spread out along state highway 264. These have sprung up at the initiative of Hopi artisans themselves and are operated as small businesses which do not pay taxes to the tribal government.
Monitoring and evaluation are important to measure the success of the plan and to modify it if it is not working out. Successful monitoring depends on establishing a baseline of data from which to measure change. It is unnecessary to measure everything about a plan; select several key indicators and work with those over time.
One last thought: Plan well and plan frequently!
Promotion is Tourism Planning & Development - No, it's not! This misconception has been mentioned several times before, but it is worth reiterating that promotion is only part of successful tourism structure and is only one of four vital components of tourism supply.
Tourism is an Industry - No, it's not! Tourism is made up of several different indus-tries-aviation, accommodation, food and beverage, attractions-and modes of business enterprise range from a few transnational companies to numerous local small businesses. Government, the public sector, is another major player in tourism development. Governments provide numerous "public good" attractions and conduct or subsidize promotional campaigns of their regions. The nonprofit, volunteer sector also operates attractions of various kinds; most common are county historical museums.
Tourism is a Smokeless Industry - No, it's not! Tourism can and unfortunately does bring pollution, overcrowding, congestion, destruction of natural and cultural resources, contamination of water supplies, decay of landscapes and vistas with oversized and insensitive physical development and cross cultural clashes in customs and values. Tourism planning must be sensitive to these issues and attempt to anticipate and mitigate the more dire impacts before they develop.
Tourism is the Salvation of Rural & Small Town Economies - Not necessarily! Rural and small towns must have reasonable access to tourist markets and be a special enough place to appeal in order to become successful tourist destinations. Clever rural and small towns see their large urban neighbors, a half hour to an hour driving time away, as their tourist market and they develop attractions and products which interest these people.
Tourism has Potential Anywhere - No, it doesn't! For some places, all the boosterism in the world will not overcome an intrinsic lack of natural and cultural resources on which to build a tourism attractions strategy. In other places, there is no distinct sense of place or the authentic and unique have been replaced by homogenized commercial development. In yet other places, local residents do not want tourism development; without local support successful development will be difficult at best.
Gunn, Clare A. 1991. "The Role of Tourism in the Planning and Management of Special Places." Plan Canada, 31(2):4-10.
Graburn, Nelson. 1983. The Anthropology of Tourism. Annals of Tourism Research, 10(1)9-33.
Inskeep, Edward. 1994. National and Regional Tourism Planning. Routledge, London & New York.
Murphy, Peter E. 1985. Tourism: A Community Approach. Routledge, London & New York.
Reid, Laurel and Stephen Smith. 1997. Keys to Successful Tourism Planning: Lessons from Niagra (a Video). Brock University, St. Catharines.
Smith, Valene. 1977. Hosts and Guests: The Anthropology of Tourism. Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia.
Winterbottom, Bert. 1993. Planning for Tourism. LDR International Professional Journal.
Michael E. Kelly, Principal Planner
The Hopi Tribe