Many developing countries have recognized the potential of their natural resources for the development of tourism. However, the policies designed to provide a framework for socially inclusive and ecologically sound tourism turn out to be weak in fostering community-based tourism (CBT). There is a spectrum of conditions that lead to success or failure of CBT initiatives that should be accounted for by national policies to ensure meaningful community engagement. This paper proposes a framework for the evaluation of tourism policy documents based on factors that facilitate and constrain CBT in developing countries. The framework was applied to seven tourism policy documents in Colombia using a content analysis approach. The results showed that the policies are weak in providing a base for community engagement in CBT. International experiences indicate that the barriers to CBT are similar throughout the world; thus, the framework is useful in the evaluation of policy documents in other developing countries.

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A spectrum of operational, structural, and cultural conditions leads to the successorfailureofcommunity-basedtourism(CBT)initiatives.Knowledge of these factors is crucial in the design, evaluation, and monitoring of CBT. Therefore, the aim of this paper is to identify the factors that facilitate and inhibitCBTinthenaturalareasofdevelopingcountries.Adirectedcontent analysis of 68 case studies from literature identified 25 external and 32 internal factors. Based on the 77 factors obtained, a methodology to evaluate CBT initiatives is proposed that can serve as a framework to (1) evaluate initiatives in terms of their feasibility for CBT, current performance, and issues to be solved by management; (2) compare the performance of various initiatives; (3) prioritize factors for the success of CBT; and (4) statistically analyse the relationships among factors. The paper concludes that although several previous studies identified success factors and barriers for CBT, surprisingly little work has been published to create a universal framework to evaluate CBT initiatives. Further research is suggested to explore the statistical relationships among the factors and to define the relative importance of each factor in the success or failure of CBT initiatives.

Rural community tourism initiatives in developed nations share most positive and negative characteristics with community-based tourism (CBT) initiatives in developing nations. They also share many barriers and conditions for tourism development. What makes them different is the context in which they operate. This paper identifies the main conditions that explain these differences through a review of findings from 103 location-specific case studies and other available literature that provides empirical evidence. The paper also explores the usage of the concepts of CBT and rural tourism. The findings are discussed under seven categories: Definitions, socioeconomic and cultural factors, policy and governance, land ownership, community cohesiveness, assimilation of external stakeholders, and type of visitors. It is argued that it is the developing-/developed-nation context, and not objectively established criteria, which largely dictates authors’ narratives with corresponding takes on tourism development and subsequent recommendations. The paper engages in a discussion about case-study research, its weaknesses and tendencies, providing some recommendations on how to increase the contribution of case studies to knowledge, and calls for more research on externally assisted non-Indigenous community-tourism initiatives in developed nations.

This study aims to compare motivation-based and motivation-attitude-based segmentation of tourist markets, by identifying the heterogeneity of both solutions. A k-means cluster analysis was conducted to segment markets, using the data collected from 722 respondents, via an onsite survey of visitors to the Kuang Si Waterfall and Konglor Cave in Lao People’s Democratic Republic. Subsequently, socio-demographic and trip-related characteristics among the segments were compared using ANOVA and Chi-square tests. Both motivation-based and motivation-attitude-based segmentation each generated four distinctive segments. Although both solutions are viable for segmentation, the latter was found to be more useful in separating segments than the former, as its segments were significantly more distinguishable from each other in terms of socio-demographic and trip-related characteristics. This result contributes to the body of research on the comparison of market segmentation techniques, which is a rarely investigated topic.