Now availabe online: Diversification as a Key Strategy for more Innovation and Competitiveness in Tourism

A practical guide for development cooperation

We are very pleased to have been commissioned by GIZ to write the fourth handbook on the use of tourism as an instrument of development policy.

This time, the focus is on diversification in tourism.

 

Why?

There are many indications that the global tourism system will undergo major changes. On the supply side, a market shakeout is currently taking place on an unimagined scale. On the demand side, there is a fundamental change in needs and travel behaviour. The industry is not only under the current influence of the global pandemic but is also being shaped by major social developments such as demographic change, the individualisation of society, advancing digitalisation and - last but not least - people's increasing awareness of the effects of tourism on climate change. Worldwide, tourism regions today find themselves in a market environment that is changing ever faster and is hardly predictable.

In such a time, the ability to constantly evolve or even reinvent oneself becomes a central competence - and diversification is a crucial strategy.

 

Diversification in this context means "a broader positioning" by developing a diverse range of products and by addressing new markets. What sounds pretty simple at first glance is demanding when diversification is approached strategically and systematically.

 

This handbook offers

  • provides a compact introduction to the topic and creates a conceptual framework for promoting diversification in tourism, 
  • outlines the multifunctional tourism destination as a target concept, derives different diversification strategies from it and explains them with practical examples,
  • gives practical advice on basic competencies that are crucial on the way to a multifunctional tourism destination, such as efficient governance or continuous knowledge management, and 
  • offers a guide that explains step by step the central process of diversification in the cooperative system of the tourism destination.

 

The handbook is now available for download in the GIZ media library: https://mia.giz.de/qlinkdb/cat/ID=249576000