Fifth International Conference on Tourism & Leisure Studies

Abstract

Few tourism studies are concerned with the distinction and proper application of the term potential, a key concept in the field of destination management and planning. Divergent applications have fed different interpretations of its real meaning. For competitiveness studies, the implications are more acute, as these studies and methodologies use a wide variety of indicators and complex calculation formulas for indexes composition that go beyond the essence of what represents potential and compromise the validity of its results as a management tool. The comparative analysis of the main methodologies found in the literature shown that the term tourism potential has been combined–and distorted–into three different categories: potential as a synonym for attraction, which incorporates equipment and structures already transformed and adapted for tourism use; potential as a synonym for supply, when in addition to equipment and structure, it also considers elements related to specialised products and services; potential as a synonym for the market, which in addition to the elements of attraction and supply, incorporates factors related to communication and promotion of destiny. In order to contribute to a more appropriate conceptual demarcation in the field of tourism, this paper advocates the use of the term potential as a synonym for potential, which means strictly considering the endogenous elements of the place, relative to its nature or culture, which has value for its own sake itself, before transformations or adaptations for tourist use. It concludes with the suggestion of a potential analysis structure applied to the destinations.