ABSTRACT
Each of the chapters carries a lesson for the practitioner and the academy. We offer situational analyses from a variety of destinations often very much from a socially constructed and personal perspective. Each story offers the community at its heart a future direction based upon research and product analysis. These are the narratives underpinning the often posed question that can turn a community into a destination “Why Should We Adopt Tourism”. The process of building a destination starts with values, beliefs and identity and evidence to support our beliefs in tourism as a force for good to benefit all stakeholders. Our contributors have asked for resources needed for destination building “What do we need here”. They have explored key markets and prospects, perhaps moving beyond Michael Porter’s five forces model and asking relevant questions such as “Who is going to come here next time?”. We have explored assigning responsibility for building and tracking progress (how to do it), we reflect on capacity and managing outcomes; we’ve reviewed and reflected on processes and considered how we share new capital – social capital. We see this as a precursor for many through the concept of networks and the value of what might be considered as transformative tourism. This text clarifies the need for managing expectations in sustainable tourism for community development, rejuvenation and regeneration with a special focus on accruing relevant decision-support material, ensuring coherence of material across many disciplines and socio-economic community development arenas, creating services, products and management approaches that will endure and adapt as change necessitates and enabling communities from all parts of the globe to share tacit and explicit knowledge to ensure resilience and future co-operation.
