The concept of sustainability in tourism development in Northern Sumatra

Tourism development has been part of national strategy to accelerate economic growth, enhance the landscape development based on sound economic system, improve the welfare of the people and improve the quality of life.In order to protect the interests of all stakeholders, each development must be planned, monitored, and controlled so it will be more tolerable and balanced between economic, social and ecological culture.It is appropriate that if every tourist destination adhered to the concept of sustainability which has always wanted to increase quality of life in the long run, based on the principles of continuity.With this, North Sumatra province has been selected to conduct a more detailed view of the potential for growth and volatility based on what is happening at the moment.In general, this study is designed to examine, evaluate, and identify the elements in the concept of sustainable tourism development in the study area.It will discuss how various elements within the dimension of economic, social and ecological are associated or deem to have relationship to the development of sustainable tourism.The study took into account the views of some 300 respondents which were randomly selected, and data were analysed using SPSS software for regression, ANOVA, correlation coefficients / determination and significance.The results show that essentially all of the elements / dimension are having some kind of relationships to sustainable development. However there are no significant relationship on the elements of religious, cultural and human resources in the social dimension to support sustainable development