Chapter List

Why Do We Need Tourism Planning and Management?

The provocative title of this book has within it the underlying rationale for tourism planning and management as a largely private sector-led activity, the inherent search for business opportunities and profit, as the tourism sector has contributed to the development of tourism as a largely uncontrollable phenomenon. As Page (2003) highlighted, tourism has a tendency towards self-destruction, particularly in contexts where uncontrollable growth and development is allowed to progress in spite of attempts to plan and constrain its amoeba like tendencies, where it constantly reproduces (and reinvents) itself by breaking away and replicating itself elsewhere. Few researchers have questioned the need for tourism planning and management, though entrepreneurs and businesses frequently point to the negativity of red tape it creates through the costs imposed by the public sector in seeking to plan and manage tourism and tourism-related businesses. Indeed, if one accepts the general premise widely promoted by industry-led organisations such as the World Travel and Tourism Council (WTTC) that tourism is the world's largest industry and employer, then a degree of planning and...