TITLE:
Local Concern for Sustainable Tourism Development: San Juan de Los Remedios, Cuba
AUTHORS:
Manuel R. González Herrera, Mercedes A. Rodríguez Rodríguez, Silvia Giralt Escobar, Elizabeth A. Mackay
KEYWORDS:
Tourism, Sustainability, Planning, Local, Strategic, Urban, Cuba, City
JOURNAL NAME:
Current Urban Studies,
Vol.7 No.3,
July
31,
2019
ABSTRACT: The
growing global concern for sustainable and alternative tourism development has
strengthened the scientific research and management of tourist destinations. In
this context, the objective of this study is to characterize the tourism system
of the city of San Juan de Los Remedios in order to understand the current
problems and design sustainable solutions. It corresponds to a
quali-quantitative, applied, deductive and multidisciplinary propositional
research, in which the basic principles of strategic tourism planning were implemented.
It presents, in a sequential and integrated way, an inventory of the local
tourism system, a diagnostic study based on SWOT analysis, and a projective
study for the consolidation of sustainable tourism. It concludes that there is
favorable potential for urban tourism use, though this is not currently being
pursued in a sustainable way; further, there is a lack of regional-territorial
cohesion. This situation demands higher levels of strategic planning, as well
as the creation of a destination management organization and a tourism
observatory at a local-regional level. These approaches would strengthen the
holistic management of the territory and lead to the creation of a competitive,
multi-purpose, multi-product destination.