Can the tourist-area life cycle be made operational?

Abstract

The tourist-area life-cycle concept has become accepted in the minds of tourism planners and managers. If the lifecycle concept is to be useful it must be made operational. This paper reviews six major conceptual and measurement decisions necessary to accomplish this task. The applicability of the life cycle to tourism forecasting and marketing strategy is then considered. The article concludes with some thoughts on how tourism planning might be better served if the concept of evolution of a tourist area were based more on a framework of structured analysis and the Darwinian natural selection theory than the life-cycle concept.