In a famous hot spring resort struggling with from decline in visitors, several residents stood up to form a community in which they can live with pride. After many trials and errors, they have succeeded in involving other groups and individuals in launching a community development project that maximizes local resources. As a result, the satisfaction rate has increased both for visitors and residents, and deterioration of resources has been kept to a minimum.
In this sense, Tourism-Based Community Development is defined as "activities of the local community to promote exchange and to create a community filled with energy by fully harnessing, culture, history, industry, talented people and other local resources."
How is it diffierent from other tourism development?
The key factor for Tourism-Based Community Development is maintaining the balance and harmony among living environment, resources and visitor satisfaction by local initiatives. On the other hand we can find many conflicts, living environment vs. visitor satisfaction, resources vs. living environment and resources vs. visitor satisfaction, in traditional unbalanced tourism developments.
Traditional tourism development has often placed priority on increasing the number of visitors and promoting the industry, with less consideration for local color or impact on the living environment for local residents. As tourism grew, conflict arose between the tourism industry focusing on market expansion and the local residents focusing on maintaining community resources and living environment.
Even when there are good resources, they do not appeal to visitors if they are not presented effectively or if residents do not fully appreciate their value. To make full use of the resources in community revitalization, development must consider visitor satisfaction.
Besides in some village where an ancient capital was located, too much emphasis was placed on resource conservation. For residents, this meant limited access to conveniences and amenities; for people interested in seeing the ancient capital, this meant limited opportunities.
We think one of the reasons for those conflicts is the lack of community to manage and coordinate regional problems. Sustainable development of the entire community maintaining the balance of resources, living environment and visitor satisfaction can be attained through integrated community development, in which the community can serves as the key player in tourism promotion.
