Bipin Chandra Pant has stated,Although, at an advanced stage, the decline of a tourist destination normally results in economic losses or failure, even those destinations which are still profitable might already be declining or may be under acute threat of decline. It would, therefore, be insufficient to define “decline” merely by actual decrease in guest numbers and turnover. This is why in this study we propose a set of indicators in order to monitor the evolution of the destination according to the TALC (Tourist Area Life Cycle) phases, and re-define a declining destination as a “destination with a certain tradition in providing tourism, but characterized by one or more negative trends”.
From a set of selected indicators representing the strategic variables for the destination, a dynamic and user-friendly decision-making tool which summarizes the following three functions can be built:
1)giving destination managers strategic information about current situation and risk of decline that can be easily interpreted.
2)showing in a really effective way (by means of a series of snapshots)the evolution of the destination over time.
3)simulating by means of images (created with a simple interface) the effect of changes in variables
This exercise is described in the paper and a first warning system prototype is presented by means of IDES (Interactive Destination Evaluation System), a holistic diagnostic system which can be used to simulate different scenarios. IDES is therefore a Virtual Warning Machine which, once strategic variables have been selected (in this example, a seven-variable model is proposed) and appropriate decline thresholds have been adopted, helps to anticipate decline and gives an input for the implementation of practical measures to face it.
1. Introduction
This paper summarizes the results of the DETOUR study carried out for the European Commission aimed at analyzing the decline of tourist destinations with regard to the definition of an early warning system based on appropriate indicators which allow to identify tendencies of decline.
The study has been developed around these themes:
The conceptual framework:
This part has been devoted to the discussion of the main issues linked to the concept of tourist destination and relevant for the identification & management of decline: from the life cycle model to tourism sustainability to the destination management approach.
Early warning in practice:
a survey among practitioners (public administration bodies, private operators and associations, universities and research institutes) of 10 selected European tourist destinations has been conducted in order to investigate the consciousness toward decline, the state of the art of monitoring systems implementation, as well as the strategies and actions adopted to prevent or to recover from decline.
Warning system prototype:
IDES (Interactive Destination Evaluation System): a tool for visualizing threats of decline, starting from a set of selected strategic variables has been proposed.
The following paragraphs describe in detail the concept of “declining destination” the background and the indicators grid finalized to the implementation of a warning system approach.
2. How to define “declining destinations”
The concept of “declining destination” brings to mind Butler’s model of the tourist area life cycle (TALC), according to which the decline phase, subsequent to the stagnation phase where maximum capacity is likely to be reached, implies a decrease in the number of tourist arrivals to a certain destination.
According to the objective of DETOUR, it is necessary to re-define a declining destination as a “destination with a certain tradition in providing tourism, but characterized by one or more negative trends”. The negative trend does not necessarily refer to a decrease in demand, as in the original life-cycle model, but can be associated to a number of different effects.
For instance, signals of decline can be represented by:
a decrease in the elements defining former quality of the destination
a decrease in the competitive success of the destination (market share)
a difficulty in assuring sustainable tourism
a decrease in the average tourist expenditure
According to this approach, destinations which are still profitable might be declining or under acute threat of decline. Therefore, the decline of tourist destinations will be considered from a structural viewpoint.
Reasons for decline can vary depending on the different situations. Decline can be caused both by external factors, basically linked to changes in the global tourism market or exogenous variables, and internal factors, peculiar of the specific destination.
External factors:
.causes beyond one’s control (wars, epidemics, earthquakes, climate or political changes, etc.)
.upcoming of new competitors for one or more of the tourist products supplied by the destination.
.negative publicity
.failure to communicate the destination’s image
Internal factors:
.product obsolescence with respect to requirements of demand
.physical deterioration of the environment / heritage
Congestion
.reaching/exceeding of carrying capacity threshold
Effective planning and management of a destination imply the use of any available tool in order to detect early signals of decline and take preventive measures with the purpose of leading the destination itself to a rejuvenation phase. Of course, policies to be undertaken may differ a lot depending on the nature of the factors which lie at the basis of the decline. Some of them, especially external factors, are not predictable, therefore not controllable in advance. In such cases, an effective communication process can be very useful in order to refocus the image of the destination among actual and potential visitors.
In other cases, it is actually possible to identify trends likely to lead to a decline. The early warning system developed in this study have the purpose of allowing the actors involved to measure such trends in a wide range of situations and enabling them to undertake suitable actions.
3. Towards an early warning system
“Evaluation is nothing special, we do it all the time in the things we do. our daily occupations are full of it. When the alarm clock wakes us in the morning we choose to jump out of bed or to rest a little bit longer, according to the situation. Evaluation has to do with the judgments of values and the estimation of situations.”
When evaluation has to do with applied and practical research the most important purpose of evaluation is to generate knowledge that enables actors to influence and adapt a situation. “The most important purpose of evaluation is not to prove, but to improve”.
The term ‘evaluation’ can be used in different stages of policy making. Evaluations can be afterwards, during or before an intervention or process and can be used to get insight of the consequences, to manage the process of introduction of an intervention or to design of an intervention. In the context of the development of an early warning system evaluation has mainly to do with the generation of information in time and the possibilities to adjust( process evaluation).
Monitoring has to do with evaluation in time. The object of the study is followed in time and this measurement gives insight whether the development is to the liking of the decision-makers.
It can be argued that monitoring is an applied evaluation research in time and as an early warning system is bases on Five important principals:
These five principles can be explained as follows.
a)Situation
Good monitoring starts with a good description of the current situation. It should contain the precise description of the actors, the organizations, the location, and other circumstances, as well as of the problem. It also contains the goals that should be monitored. This is the desired situation: the situation that the different actors aim for. In relation with the existing situation, the desired situation can mean a discrepancy.
b)Indicators
The use of good indicators is fundamental to measure the difference between the existing and desired situation ,the effects and impact of interventions to clear this discrepancy. Therefore evaluation begins also with the formulation of the objectives and the definition of a framework.
The central questions are:
.Which indicators give good insight in the current situation?
.Can these indicators be used in relation with the goals and the desired situation?
.Which indicators give insight whether a certain situation is near the desired situation of just far away of it?
.Can the indicators be used in formulating policy interventions?
Indicators can be on an qualitative and on a quantitative level. On the one hand indicators can be put together by qualitative surveying techniques (like telephone calls or face-to-face interviews, questionnaires etc.) On the other hand quantitative indicators make the comparability easier. Sometimes the precise impact cannot be indicated for several situations, because of lack of quantitative information. In that case it is also possible to give scores as ‘+’ of ‘-‘ levels. By giving these values different situations can be ranked by comparing their scores on each separate indicator. The lack of hard quantitative data and the uncertainty makes the qualitative measurement useful.
c)Performance (values)
Another important question in the case of an early warning system is ‘how decline is to be measured?’ For the indicators this means that they should not only measure the current situation, but also to indicate the value of it. On the level of indicators there are several possibilities to indicate ‘decline’:
d)Evolution in time:
‘Decline’ can be measured as an evolution in time. On a year-to-year bases and indicator growths or shrinks. When the value of an indicator shrinks below a defined level this can be called ‘decline’. Therefore periodically data collection is necessary. Moreover the level that indicates whether a development can be called ‘decline’ is very important. Therefore a study has to be done to what are acceptable performance levels. This can only be done after the agreement about the indicators.
e)Expected values
‘Decline’ can also be measured for a given situation. Agreed is that a certain level of an indicator is feasible in potential, given the dimension of the region. The potential level can be measured in relation to reference areas. For example: given the number of hotel beds in a city it is to be expected that a certain level of expenses in the tourist sector is done.
Following actions
After the measurement of the performance it has to be judged whether further actions are necessary. The used indicators in the monitoring system should be sufficient to formulate those actions. After taking them monitoring follows the performance on a period basis.
4. Indicators for early warning to decline: the DETOUR system
The number of variables/indicators which can be collected/evaluated to monitor the performance of a destination is potentially very large. For selecting a framework of manageable size, it is useful to assess potential indicators against several evaluation criteria.
Criteria for the selection of the indicators should be:
The data to build the indicator are obtainable. In case the data are available but difficult to retrieve, the usefulness of the indicator must be assessed with reference to the resources (in terms of both time and money) needed to build it.
They are credible and easy to understand. Their goal must be to provide credible information to tourism managers who have varying perspectives, priorities and knowledge. It is therefore preferable to insure that chosen indicators are easy to understand by the audience.
Their significance in order to express the decline process of a mature tourist destination together with the conditions which allow the decline.
The effectiveness in achieving awareness of decline risks and, therefore, the possibility of defining an early warning system.
The temporality, i.e. the ability to detect destination trends over time.
The comparability of the indicators in order to spread experiences throughout a big number of destinations.
The possibility of summarizing different indicators with few integrated, easy understandable, composed indicators and of communicating results by means of graphical tools (e.g. spider plots).
Each indicator has been identified, within the DETOUR project, by means of a unique id code in order to provide an easy storing and retrieving system of the information with the purpose of obtaining an efficient data base.
The code ISSN is composed by: a prefix I meaning Indicator and three numbers: S corresponding to the set of indicators considered (1 = first set of indicators: the state of the art; 2 = second set of indicators: towards a dynamic analysis), S corresponding to the subset, N corresponding to a progressive order number providing unique identification to the examined indicator.
Among the above mentioned characteristics of the indicator, two of them must be underlined: relevance and difficulty degree since it could happen that a strategic indicator cannot be measured because of not availability of data or other reasons.
In the short term, the remedy to such a situation can be found in the alternative definition even if a middle-long tem solution implies the implementation of the first choice indicator.
Quantitative indicators should be largely preferred to qualitative ones, even if the choice between quantitative and qualitative indicators is frequently determined by lack of data or by the need to implement too expensive surveys; qualitative estimates are sometimes the only available solution.
5. A first warning system prototype: the Interactive Destination Evaluation System (IDES)
From a set of selected indicators among those named in the previous paragraph, a dynamic and user-friendly decision-making tool which summarizes the following three functions can be built:
giving destination managers strategic information about current situation and risk of decline that can easily be interpreted showing in a really effective way (by means of a series of snapshots) the evolution of the destination over time simulating by means of images (created with a simple interface) the effect of changes in variables
A monitoring system prototype elaborated within the DETOUR project (see footnote 1) is here discussed. IDES (Interactive Destination Evaluation System) is a holistic diagnostic system which can be used to simulate different scenarios: once strategic variables have been selected (in this example, a seven-variable model is proposed) and appropriate decline thresholds have been adopted, helps to anticipate risks and gives an input for the implementation of practical measures to face them.
A threshold value, in fact, is a theoretical maximum value that must not be exceeded. The identification of a threshold is necessary in order to provide a benchmark against which the overall trend for a given variable can be assessed.
IDES is an internal and external benchmarking tool as it allows monitoring specific destination dynamics over time as well as a horizontal comparison between different destinations.
This paragraph presents an example of the application of the IDES warning system to a hypothetical tourist destination (india) monitored in the last periods of its life cycle: maturity, decline and rejuvenation.
The following life cycle is assumed for India: introduction (P1), development (P2), maturity (P3), decline (P4) and rejuvenation (P5).
Five variables have been identified as adequate in order to achieve a successful implementation of IDES:
.Tourists/Residents
.Excursionist share
.Economic role of tourism
.seasonality index
.demand structure index
Two other variables have been added to this list in order to acquire more comprehensive insight into the destination:
a)Lack of co-operation:This variables can be expressed by the formula “1 - Degree of co-operation”, where “Degree of co-operation” is measured by the percentage of operators and organizations involved in partnerships on total.
b)Environmental impact: This variable represents the physical pressure which affects the destination as a consequence of tourism, and can be expressed most easily by means of use intensity indicators (i.e. number of visitors / surface). Other indicators which could prove useful to express environmental impact, but with less a availability of data, are represented by waste levels, water consumption and air pollution.
Due to its dynamic nature, IDES needs systematic data as an input in order to represent an effective warning system. The seven variables chosen for its implementation have been selected on the basis of their effectiveness (i.e. the amount of information they provide with reference to the destination) and the likelihood of finding systematic data necessary to build them.
In order to build the IDES graph, a threshold for each of the variables considered can be established or the risky direction of its dynamics monitored; if reached, exceeded or followed, such values/trends provide a warning of a potential risk. In our example, hypothetical thresholds values for each of the seven variables have been identified.
The three pictures that follow show the dynamics of India over time from maturity (P3) to decline (P4) and rejuvenation (P5).
Particularly, the IDES graph referred to period P3 shows a situation of maturity in which main issues are represented by seasonality and tourist/residents ratio, while the other variables are still within an acceptable range.
P4 identifies a situation of decline, since the majority of the variables register a value which goes beyond the fixed thresholds. Nevertheless, the variables which claim for immediate action are linked to environmental and seasonality issues, as well as to strong excursionist pressure.
The graph referred to period P5, on the other hand, shows that most variables have returned within an acceptable range (implying that strategies and measures have been implemented in the destination), even if it is evident that the tourist/resident ratio must be carefully monitored, and that the destination is still too dependent on tourism (the economic role of tourism is now the only variable whose value exceeds the fixed threshold).
Even if, only theoretically, this example clearly shows that a monitoring system prototype can be built on the basis of simple data, although data must be collected on a regular basis.
6. IDES applied to the case of Canary Islands
The implementation of IDES to the case of Canary Islands required the adaptation of the set of variables chosen to the characteristics of the destination, as well as to the availability of data:
Tourists/Residents = number of tourist arrivals on residents, i.e. average number of interactions of each member of the local community with different people coming from outside.
Tourist pressure on environment = average daily number of tourists per square km of suitable land (= total surface - geomorphologic soil – protected soil), i.e. additional human pressure on the environment caused by tourists.
Cement sold per person = yearly tonnes of cement sold on average population (= inhabitants plus daily number of tourists)
Consumption of electricity per person = daily kwh on average population (= inhabitants plus daily number of tourists)
Seasonal concentration = seasonal index measuring the concentration of tourist flows during the year
Hotel Beds/Total Beds = percentage of Hotel Beds on Total Beds expressing the weight of hotel supply on accommodation market
Hotels and restaurants G.V.A./Agriculture & Fishing G.V.A.= ratio of tourist industry G.V.A. on primary sector G.V.A. expressing the dependence of the economy from external supply and demand
Import /Export = ratio of imports on exports index numbers expressing the dependence of the economy from external resources
The comparison between the situation of two islands shows how different can be the evolution of a destination.
A part from the common value Import/Export (referred to the Canary Islands), La Palma is characterised by a more equilibrated system (concentration around the origin of the impact indicators) while Fuerteventura presents very high values (high risk) with significant increases for some of them (Tourist/residents, Cement sold per person) and has a Agriculture and Fishing sector very weak if compared with its Tourist Sector.
6. Conclusions
From the analysis carried out within the DETOUR project emerges that decline is still a “fuzzy” concept which is perceived more like a theoretical concept than a real threat: even where perceived, no real warning system is implemented. Normally, decline is basically perceived through manifested and/or easy to measure phenomena. The decrease in the number of tourist flows remains the most evident signal, followed by the negative environmental impacts.
Many other variables regarding the tourism consciousness from the demand and supply side (e.g. excursionist flows, role of tourist activities, etc.) and the social and economic impacts of tourism (e.g. residents’ quality of life, site stress, crowding out effects, etc.) as well as the quality of supply development (resource-based approach) are not monitored at all.
This paper intends to stress the importance of such indicators, which are essential to the full understanding of the trend of a destination, and therefore recommends that they are collected on a regular basis. Finally, the lack of a systematic monitoring system makes it difficult to conduct a feed-back analysis which can provide the measure of the effectiveness of the strategies implemented.
Monitoring decline or tendency towards decline in a tourist destination, on the contrary, is a complex exercise which requires a strong interaction between theoretical and quantitative approaches, leading to user-friendly decision making tools. This study stresses the importance of the Tourist area life cycle(TALC) approach as the basis to develop a warning system prototype of decline, which can be built from a set of selected indicators representing the strategic variables for the destination. The proposed prototype in its application to the case of Canary Islands becomes a tool able to show in a really effective way the evolution of the destination over time and then to visualize threats of decline. Furthermore, it can help destination managers to anticipate decline and give an input for the implementation of practical measures to face it.
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Paper Prepared by:
Bipin Chandra Pant (Faculty)
Amity University,Noida
Uttar Pradesh,India
91-9999464750
bcpant@amity.edu
bipinpant114@gmail.com
