Avahan: A Journal on Hospitalty and Tourism

Abstract

One of the recent challenges that face developing nations today is the commitment to meet many of the socio-economic expectations of their communities. Sustainable developed has emerged to offer better opportunities to reduce the gap between the "North" and the "South" and to attain a set of economic, social and cultural benefits to local communities while conserving the environment. This paper argues that for tourism in developing nations to be sustainable, the tourism planning mechanism has to be approached from a community-based tourism development perspective which necessitates meeting economic, socio-cultural and environmental goals to enhance the living circumstances of their communities. Such goals should be fully considered while setting the tourism policies, strategies and plans. This also entails developing tourism programs and instrumenting techniques that enable the tourism agency putting the community-led tourism development into practice.

Arguably, a set of criteria has to be considered while incorporating the community-based development approach into the tourism planning process. The paper attempts to employ the value-chain model, which consists of key activities or guidelines that have to be taken into consideration while planning for tourism from a community-based perspective, to measure the tourism planning performance and orient its strategies and programs towards the community-led tourism development approach.

The paper has chosen Egypt, which is a developing nation, to showcase the crucial importance of employing an instrument such as the value-chain model to evaluate the compliance of the tourism planning process with the community-based sustainable development principles. In the past five years Egypt has gone through remarkable political changes as two revolutions broke out by its community demanding more equitable socio-economic benefits. Such change has influenced the country's political agenda and has urged its government to move towards more community-based development schemes. The value chain model has been used to measure the fulfilment of the Egyptian tourism planning process against the community-led approach indicators and values within the context of sustainable development. The research method has enabled the researcher to reach reliable findings regarding the Egyptian case and to draw a number of implementation models on how the community-based tourism development approach can be integrated into the tourism planning scheme at its different levels and stages.

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