Peripheral Tourism Development: Challenges, Issues and Success Factors

Abstract

While tourism has been widely used as a tool for economic development in peripheral regions for many decades, it has been suggested that the actual practice of tourism development is not usually informed by the planning approaches proposed by academics. One of the reasons put forward for this gap between proposed planning systems and actual planning practice is that there has been a lack of inductive research into actual practice. The broad aim of the research reported in this paper was to use inductive approaches to better understand actual tourism development practices in peripheral regions. The research involved reviewing a sample of case studies of tourism development in peripheral regions and using the results of this review to build a conceptual scheme of the major factors and processes that occur in tourism development practice. The analysis of the 40 case studies revealed ten major themes. These themes were used to develop a preliminary conceptual scheme of peripheral region tourism development. This conceptual scheme was then used to offer suggested future directions for research into, and management of, peripheral region tourism development.