Anna TORRES-DELGADO, University of Surrey, United Kingdom
Xavier FONT, University of Surrey, United Kingdom
Cities have become increasingly popular destinations, to a point where the income generated from tourism contributes significantly to their development, but conversely, massive tourism is threatening its long-term viability (Martins, 2018). Although the COVID-19 break, the tourism recovery is expected to follow the same pattern, therefore sustainability is ‘a must’ to guarantee a better and more resilient model of tourism in cities.
Tourist boards need new terms of reference that go beyond destination promotion to increase tourism, to now focus on the planning and management of tourism as a vehicle to improve the quality of life and the environment of their cities. To meet these new requirements, tourist boards need more complete data systems about tourism impacts, and new management skills to take a broader range of policy decisions.
This research (framed in an EU-funded project called SusTPol -Sustainable Tourism evidence-informed Policy-) analyses how tourist boards learn about sustainability indicators and how they adapt them to their needs. In addition to collecting baseline data, the research conducts workshops and interviews to a realistic evaluation of the contextual factors that allow for the use of indicators to support the selection and implementation of policy mechanisms that promote sustainable development.
Preliminary results show that, although tourism is an information-intensive sector, it also lacks an adequate transferral of knowledge through its stakeholders (WTO, 2012). The stakeholder knowledge exchange affects the management of strategic change and sustainable development of tourist destinations. Besides, to date, few cities have experimented in the development and use of sustainability indicators to inform policy, and the effects of the actions implemented have not been robustly assessed and shared to promote scalability (Malito, Umbach & Bhuta, 2018).
Mots clés : Indicator|Sustainable Tourism|City|Tourism Policy
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