Perth Convention and Exhibition Centre (PCEC)
1500 words
Task: Tourism businesses have been challenged in recent times to address various community concerns about sustainability, including (but not limited to) climate change, crisis management, public health and safety and ethics. Chose a tourism attraction or operator of your choice and develop a relevant set of sustainable tourism (ST) indicators to measure progress towards the concept of sustainable tourism.
For the purpose of this assignment, you are required to complete the following tasks:
1.From the literature, define and develop a set of ST indicators that may be used to evaluate the selected tourism attraction or operator in terms of adoption of the concept of sustainable tourism (Note: you should not simply copy indicators from the UNWTO Indicators or another single source)
2.Undertake a field trip to the site to collect primary data required for your report. Make sure your field trip is conducted in a safe and ethical manner (See Appendix B to learn about some ethical considerations in relation to field research). This requirement may be waived in an event COVID19 restrictions are reinstated, making this activity infeasible;
3.Evaluate the site using the ST indicators that you have developed; and
4.Write a research report outlining and discussing outcomes from the assessment at your chosen tourism operator/site to determine its current level of sustainability; and the usefulness of your derived indicators to measure Sustainable Tourism activities
Content
•Description of the tourism operator on which the research report is based. • Examination of the recent and relevant theoretical literature on the topic under investigation.
• Critical analysis of the current news and media coverage of the evolving situation (you should ensure these are obtained from reliable and official government and mainstream media sources)
• Application of research methods.
• Interpretation of results.
• Discussion of findings.
• Evaluation of the criteria (based on the ST Indicators).
• Conclusion and recommendations.
Method
1.Provide a site description of your chosen tourism operator/site and the set of ST indicators you have developed. You need to make the origin of your indicator clear to your reader (i.e. where did the original source of the indicator come from – which academic article or organisation did you develop the indicator from?). In line with the triple bottom line (TBL) approach, the ST indicators derived should be balanced and you must have at least three (3) indicators per triple bottom line dimension (a total of minimumsix (6) ST indicators). You may include a table (a template available on LMS) of your derived indicators.
Derived ST Indicators
Indicator
Issue being evaluated
Academic source
Other source
Economic
–
–
–
Environmental
–
–
–
Discusshow you evaluated the tourism product against your ST indicators. This should provide enough information for the reader to replicate your research. At this level of your development as a researchers, you are expected to refer to a social science research text (such as Babbie, 2011; Jennings, 2010) and other academic sources (such as peer reviewed scholarly articles) to describe and justify your research methods.
Results
Link your findings with the ST indicators that you have established in the method section. You may find that the use of some tables to summarise your results is an effective way of presenting information.
Discussion
Critically discuss your findings through the paradigm of ‘sustainable tourism’. The discussion should link to the literature reviewed in the introduction section, reflect the results of all the indicators utilised. Conclusions and Recommendations
You need to conclude your discussion with:
1.A brief summary of the key findings of your research;
2. Suggest some limitations of your approach and suggest ways in which your method could be improved for future investigations.
3. Based on the findings, provide a set of recommendations towards its sustainable future. Your recommendations should incorporate the following strategies: a) Visitor and site management strategies b) Short to long term strategies c) Marketing strategies Reference List (NOT a Bibliography) List only the sources that you have cited in the report (i.e., in-text citations). Please note thata minimum of15 peer-reviewed academic references (2018 onwards). It is assumed that students at this level of study are aware of citation conventions. You must use the appropriate APA style of reference. Marks will be lost for those who do not use such an approach.
