Mountain Bike Tourism and Community Development In British Columbia: Critical Success Factors for the Future

Abstract

Mountain bike tourism may provide significant benefit to communities, as shown by economic impacts of $38 (CDN) million realized in the Sea-to-Sky Corridor region of British Columbia, Canada in 2006. This achievement was realized due to regional stakeholder collaboration and community mountain bike trail planning dating back to the early 1990s. Despite the value and recent growth in mountain bike tourism, formal research into community mountain bike tourism development is still in its infancy. To explore the critical success factors necessary to build sustainable tourism capacity for the development of mountain bike tourism, a modified Delphi method was utilized to query industry experts in this empirical study. A literature review, followed by online surveys of selected experts, led to the creation of a framework for community-based mountain bike tourism development to support sustainable community mountain bike tourism strategies. This framework may be beneficial to clusters of tourism stakeholders for mapping-out long-term objectives and to achieve planning and operational efficacy. Utilization of the framework may also assist stakeholders to more effectively execute a successful community-based mountain bike tourism development strategy while assisting future researchers to delve further into an analysis of the role of critical success factors.