International Sustainable Tourism Management Essay

International Sustainable Tourism Management - Essay Example In the vast tourism literature, community based tourism is defined in two broad ways. The first description focuses on community involvement with the affected community in the mapping of tourism industry as a land use, and the resultant enlargement of the tourism venture, in an effort to create a lasting relationship between clients and service providers. The second description focuses on development of a community through tourism. The world is ever changing and so are the tourism destinations and markets. The important of tourism monitoring cannot therefore be overemphasized right from the project level to the country level for effective evaluation and managing these changes in tourism. According to Hall (2008), monitoring in community bases tourism helps to alleviate the understanding of the contribution the tourism industry makes in regard to the sustainability objectives of the community as well as the general impacts of tourism on the community. In additions, community monitorin g is vital in an effort of identifying areas in which changes are taking place and where improvements may be needed in the tourism sector. This makes management and monitoring as both interdependent and interrelated under community-based tourism. Due to the fact that tourism is an industry that is highly completive, the projects of community-based tourism ought to keep careful tabs like any other small business on their performance in every aspect. This means that the community should and in fact must have a swift reaction and understanding, that can enable them meet the needs of the customers, manage their internal operations, financial aspects, interpersonal relations as well as their ability to forge better and long term relations with various stakeholders and other external suppliers. Generally, monitoring is a term used to define the process of taking consistent measurements, using indicators to give a better understanding of the trends in performance and the current situation. It is worth mentioning that an indicator on the other hand is a tool used in evaluating and monitoring. The purpose of indicators is to help in simplifying the complex information by measuring and selecting a given element in the study as an indication or a lead to the position of a give issue at hand. Tourism indicators such as expenditure, arrival numbers, and length of stay have for a long time been used in an effort to monitor and evaluate performance of tourist destinations (Mowforth and Munt 2009). Conversely, indicators of sustainable tourism differ from those indicators of conventional tourism in terms of the linkage they create between issues of sustainability and tourism in the community. Community monitoring, therefore, entails a thoughtful piloting and selecting viable indicators, followed by collecting information and proper evaluation of that information for purposes of presenting and working on the outcomes. Although it is quite true that it could take some time to f ormulate a monitoring strategy, successful formulation of such strategy could result to a more effective and responsive to projects of community based tourism for sustainable tourism. There are a number of benefits that are associated with monitoring community-based tourism in relation to sustainable touris