Tourism Relationship Model and Intermediary for Sustainable Tourism Management: Case Study of the Kiritappu Wetland Trust in Hamanaka,Hokkaido

Abstract

This article proposes a simple model that depicts the relationship between community and extra-community stakeholders that will enable the effective development of sustainable tourism. ‘Sustainable tourism’ in this article is defined as tourism that utilizes community resources for tourism development and re-invests the returns from tourism to the destination resources based on the previous studies. The tourism relationship model, with a community-based intermediary as its sub-system, is introduced and applied to a case in Hokkaido, Japan. The application demonstrates that the model is a valid tool to identify two important factors for successful development of sustainable tourism, which are a ‘circulation mechanism’ that connects community resources and extra-community stakeholders through community-based intermediaries, and a ‘balancing mechanism’ that considers the existence value and economic value, supplemented by the community-based intermediary's functions to transfer financial capital from non-tourist sources.

Keywords

relationship model;community-based intermediary;sustainable tourism;existence value;economic value

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