Sustainable Tourism Planning Approaches: theory and practice

Similarly, Plog (1973) proposes that tourist destination areas go through cycles based on the types of tourists they tend to attract, suggesting that all destination areas eventually decline.  Plog states that those tourist destinations can carry with them the potential seeds of their own destruction if they allow themselves to become over-commercialised and lose their unique qualities that attracted tourists in the first place.  However, this has not always been the case.  With good planning and imagination, older tourist destinations have been maintained and in some cases revived, and the planning approaches now being applied are aimed at maintaining the continued vitality of newly developed destinations (Inskeep, 1991).  In other woeds, new areas can be planned to allow for future flexibility of development and older tourism areas can be planned for revitalisation.

The above is part of an article, Ahmad Puad Mat Som, Azizan Marzuki & Abdul Aziz Hussin (2007) Sustainable tourism planning approaches: theory and practice. Malaysian Townplan. 4(1):5-14.