Destination Audit on Boracay Island

Procedure

LO4. Undertake a strategic audit of a destination to develop strategy proposals and direction.

LO5. Assess the concept of a tourism master or comprehensive plan or strategy and its value for tourism business development.

You are required to complete a destination audit on the destination you’ve been given for your COIL project.

The destination audit should end with a set of recommendations which should focus on how your destination should plan to reduce the impacts of Overtourism.

Guidelines

“A destination audit is an investigation to make sure everything is in order, and where it is not, makes recommendations and seeks to provide advices.” (Adapted from Crouch and Richie 2004:09)

You will need to find the DMP (Destination Management Plan) for your assigned destination. These are freely available online. Please check with me once you’ve found this and I will confirm that it is the correct document.

REMEMBER THAT A DESTINATION AUDIT LOOKS AT THE DESTINATION NOW (I.E. A SNAPSHOT IN TIME).

When structuring your destination audit, you may wish to follow the structure proposed by Richie and Crouch (2003:254).

1. Determine – The destination’s vision, goals and objectives

• Find out what their current overall goal is and their objectives are. A good place to find this out would be in their latest destination management plan.

2. Establish – The principal competitors

• The principal competitors – Here you need to identify:
• Who your destination’s competitors are; consider both domestic and international.
• What are the competitor’s strategies, objectives, strengths and weaknesses?
• How do the competitors react to competition from their competitors?

2.1 Market structure – You need to examine the structure of the market. This is the main section where you will assess the current supply and demand of tourism in your destination.

To do this:

• Identify their market segments (e.g. families, empty-nesters, grey pound, etc.)
• Where are the visitors from? (This should have also been considered in your questionnaire) Domestic or international? If international, which country are they from? If domestic, what town/city are they from?
• How long are they in the destination for? (duration of stay).
• What’s their purpose of visit? (I.e. leisure, business, etc.)

You could also consider some wider research here about consumer trends and how they’re changing and the impact these changes are having on tourism in your destination.

3. Identify – Destination competitiveness and market structure

Once you know who their main competitors are, you can identify how competitive your destination is. To be able to do this, you must:

• Identify what the competing destinations you’ve identified have to offer visitors. This can be done by researching the strengths and weaknesses of the destinations. (This could be done by applying the 4As framework that we covered at the start of this module).
• Once you have identified what the competitor destinations have to offer in relation to the 4As, you should then identify what your destination can offer visitors by applying the 4As framework to your destination.
• Once you have done this, you can compare it against the other 4A frameworks of the competitor destinations and then determine whether your destination is more or less competitive than their competitors (i.e. do they have a competitive advantage? If so, what is it and why?)

4. Examine the Destination’s Environment

The previous stage looks at the internal factors of the destination and its competitors’ strengths and weaknesses. This stage assesses the current external environment that your destination is operating in.

Conduct a situation analysis i.e. a PESTLE or STEEP or if you really want to stretch yourself a SCEPTICAL analysis. It would also be beneficial to split each of the factors e.g. Political, etc. into opportunities and threats.

Environmental analyses often provides the basis for the specific actions of a tourism strategy. This should be the case for your recommendations too. Consider, how might the findings from applying these frameworks (SCEPTICAL/PESTEL & SWOT) inform your recommendations around limiting the impacts of Overtourism? (LO4)

These analyses should reveal important trends, changes and developments in the external environment that could have a significant impact upon how the destination manages and limits the impacts of Overtourism. What are they? How might they have an impact on the future strategy of the destination?

After this section is completed, you should have a clear idea about the challenges that the destination is facing as a result of Overtourism and the external and internal factors that are driving overtourism to your destination.

5. Evaluate the Dimensions of destination competitiveness

Here you should focus on finding out the following information about the destination.

Range of information and tourist services, Cultural events (concerts, art exhibitions, festivals, etc.), Quality and variety of shops, Accommodation, Price levels, Safety and security, the environment, Nature.

6. Appraise Destination Competitiveness and Performance

For this stage you must appraise (i.e. weigh up, consider, judge) your destination’s current competitiveness and performance in relation to their current vision, goals and objectives i.e. from your research, are they on track to achieve these? If not, what might they need to do to change this? If they are on track, what should they do to ensure they stay there?

7. Recommendations

Your recommendations should be strategic and sustainable (i.e. for the long-term health of the destination) and not be focused upon a quick fix. Remember that their focus should be upon reducing the impacts of Overtourism upon the destination.

Your recommendations must be based on your research and analyses – they should be easy to trace back to the main part of the audit. So please check this when you are proof-reading your work. Each recommendation should focus upon one thing only and be specific and detailed. I.e. clearly state what the recommendation is, why this is the case and how it should be implemented.