Key Issues on Tourism Strategies

Abstract

After an institutional request, strategic planning is usually promoted by teams coordinated by one expert in the field, by a firm or by a University. The day it is delivered there is a general feeling of frustration with the outcome. This feeling is most likely due to an incomplete diffusion process or/and to some difficulties to measure long term and intangible outcomes. In this paper we intend to overcome some of these misinterpretations, reflecting on the mostly theoretical questions popping up from recent study cases; it is essentially centred upon the lived experiences and the methodological issues that only future will assess. This paper is also an academic exercise to share with the regional science peers the life experiment we had during PETUR (Strategic Plan for Tourism in Serra Estrela - Portugal), the acronym of the work team I coordinated, which rose a number of practical questions that one should reflect upon under recent theoretical developments in social sciences involving decision and collective action. The paper is structured as follows: (1) a context introduction; (2) an international and national literature review considering then in more detail (3) some recent developments on innovation diffusion theories. The (4) section illustrates some of the initiatives we took in the case study for a the specific region in Serra da Estrela, an internal small region located in between the Portuguese Atlantic coast and the Spanish border; the (5) section is devoted to the main focus of the paper - key issues in tourism Strategies. The paper will close with the concluding remarks where private-public partnership is mostly considered a complex learning process in order to excel in innovative diffusion processes. JEL Classification: R58; L83; O22; L26; C61; H77Keywords: tourism economics; planning methodology; organizational complexity; cluster strategy; Portugal