A Toolkit for Monitoring and Managing Community-Based Tourism

Tourism is a highly competitive industry. Community-based tourism (CBT) projects, like any other small businesses, need to keep careful tabs on their performance in all aspects of a business – understanding and reacting to meet customer needs and management of their finances, their internal operations, their human resources and their relations with various external suppliers and stakeholders.  Where poverty alleviation and environmental sustainability are key concerns, monitoring can help project managers to find out if the project is living up to expectations, and help them make adjustments to improve performance where necessary. Monitoring involves carefully selecting and piloting indicators, collecting and evaluating data, and presenting and acting on the results.  Developing a monitoring framework can take some time, but is likely to result in a more responsive and successful CBT project. This Toolkit is designed to provide readers with the know-how to set up and run a monitoring programme for a community-based tourism project. It gives step-by-step guidelines, supported by a wide range of case studies, in order to enable readers to embark on their own monitoring project.This Toolkit is recommended for anyone involved in the funding, planning or managing of a community-based tourism project: local officials, tourism planners, development consultants, donor agencies, and community groups. It provides an introduction to monitoring and a solid foundation for further practice-based learning. It aims to break down the knowledge barriers to active public participation in tourism monitoring to enable communities to design and run their own tourism monitoring programmes.

Case Studies / Examples
Tools / Guidelines / Training
Sustainable Tourism Network [SNV]
University of Hawaii
85 pages
English
Community-based Tourism [CBT]
Tourism Development
Stakeholder Engagement