After your committee has met and is sharing a common vision for tourism in your community, you are then ready to begin planning for its development.  Planning is necessary for tourism to develop in a way that is beneficial, sustainable, and not harmful to the environment, culture, and community.  Successful tourism development depends upon five factors:

• Attracting appropriate visitors to your destination area (i.e. community and surrounding region).

• Providing tourists with a satisfying experience that meets or exceeds their expectations.  This should result in repeat visits and positive word of mouth promotion.  Because word of mouth is considered one of the most effective forms of promotion, this point cannot be overstated.

• Keeping tourists in your destination area for as long as possible.

• Satisfying the needs and concerns of local residents by involving them in directing, controlling and providing the tourist services and experiences.  Local control over tourism development is critical if tourism growth is to be sustainable with respect to local resources.

• Ensuring for sustainable tourism development (via leadership and planning), with a perspective adopted from a community-based vision of how it wishes to evolve over the medium to long-term.

Attracting, satisfying, and keeping tourists  is the result of careful tourism planning - planning that builds on a community’s unique features with certain travel markets in mind.  It is also the result of committed leadership by the community.  This leadership helps to ensure that the conditions for effective tourism development are continually in place.  This section begins by focusing on ways tourism leadership can be encouraged at the community level.  Steps explaining the tourism planning process that will help to turn tourism ideas into action are presented.