Does strategic planning pay? Lessons for destinations from corporate planning experience

Although tourism planning is well established, with strategic destination planning gaining some acceptance, little attention has been paid to the evaluation of planning effectiveness. This paper discusses the strategic planning of tourism destinations, with specific emphasis on the management of the planning process and the development of appropriate performance indicators to measure planning effectiveness. Since most thought on strategic planning has arisen in the business management field, it is reasonable to search this literature for lessons on planning effectiveness and performance evaluation. The paper therefore sets out the dimensions of the strategic planning problem for destinations (including the key issue of what planning performance means), documents the results of research and debate within the corporate strategic planning field, and draws practical implications for tourism planning, as well as theoretical implications for the study of destination planning and management. Both the macro-destination level and the micro-organization level are addressed, with the local community-based destination used as the primary unit of analysis.