Strategic visioning: integrating sustainable development principles into tourism destination planning

While sustainable development is asserted to underpin contemporary approaches to tourism destination planning and management, the extent to which this legitimately occurs in practice has been repeatedly questioned. Therefore, strategic visioning, a well accepted planning approach in corporate and community contexts, has been proposed as a means of incorporating multiple stakeholder perspectives into the tourism destination planning process. This paper reports on the findings of interviews undertaken with stakeholder participants of two strategic visioning exercises in Australia. Little empirical research on strategic visioning in a tourism destination context has been undertaken and this paper examines the potential of th is approach in addressing the principle of sustainable development in practice