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“If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it”. This aphorism comes to our mind whenever we are concerned with the sustainable tourism planning and management of a destination. Indeed, without an efficient monitoring system engaging all stakeholders and covering all the tourism activities, it’s impossible to perform a rigorous assessment of tourism impacts. In order to achieve the twofold goals of tourism management is necessary to practice: competitiveness and sustainability. The goal of this paper is to present the Tourism Observatory of Central Portugal (TOCP) and the strategies used to surpass the most evident difficulties during the initial stage of data collecting process implementation. The relevant eight attributes to this Observatory can be described, namely by: the frequency of the barometers, the information availability, the reliability of the methods, the geographical and sectorial scopes, the usefulness of the produced information as a support to forecasting and innovation and the guarantee of a long-term perspective. Moreover, this paper describes the methods of data collecting, the functionalities of an online platform, the structure of stakeholders’ network and its coordination, and the relevant indicators that are assessed. Although the European Tourism Indicators System (ETIS) stands as the basic reference for the TOCP, some relevant adaptations were introduced, like for instance in cases when the official institutions do not have the statistical data required for the core indicators. In particular, the lack of statistical data seems more evident at local/municipal level. In consequence, the monitoring model described in this paper presents and discusses the approach adopted to deal with lack of statistical data. This approach consists of generating a rhizomatic and collaborative network of tourism stakeholders, each of them providing specific inputs to the monitoring system. info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersion |
