Developing a Tourism Opportunity Spectrum Scale

Abstract

The Recreation Opportunity Spectrum (ROS) has been used in a multitude of recreation planning and management applications, and has led the way for the development of the Water Recreation Opportunity Spectrum (WROS) – its water based counterpart. More recently the Tourism Opportunity Spectrum (TOS) has been identified as a valuable tool for assessing nature-based tourism viability and host community-visitor relationships (Butler and Waldbrook, 2003). This tool relies on important tourism conditions of site access, compatibility of other uses, regimentation, tourism impacts, onsite management, and social perceptions of visitors and hosts.