Tourism Monitoring as a Strategic Tool for Tourism Management: The Perceptions of Entrepreneurs from Centro de Portugal

Abstract

Gathering information on the impact of tourism in territories is fundamental for the responsible management of tourism businesses and destinations. Therefore, it is important to monitor tourism performance using indicators that can assess its impacts. Monitoring tourism is a management technique that should adopt a stakeholder network perspective, i.e., all stakeholders should be involved and collaborate with each other by sharing information to increase the competitiveness of the destination. However, it is unclear whether stakeholders are aware of the importance of monitoring and whether monitoring considers their interests, which often leads to a lack of involvement. In this study, we adopt the stakeholder network perspective with tourism entrepreneurs from Centro de Portugal, where we aimed to evaluate the importance assigned to the monitoring of tourism and to the understanding of entrepreneurs’ information needs. To do so, the same survey was conducted twice, for the first time in 2018 and later repeated in 2022. The second survey sought to analyze whether tourism entrepreneurs’ perceptions changed after the COVID-19 pandemic. We found that tourism entrepreneurs valued the economic area more than the social and environmental ones in both periods. Nevertheless, from 2018 to 2022, entrepreneurs became more committed to monitoring tourism in Centro de Portugal.

Keywords

• tourism management
• tourism monitoring
• indicators
• sustainable tourism development
• stakeholder networks
• stakeholder theory