Thank you for your question. It is often difficult to know if developing touism will really help a community or a destination. Using indicators allows you to monitor the progress of social, economic and environmental benefits from tourism. As a community, you decide what is important to you and select the indicators that you want to measure over time. There are a broad range of possible indicators – much more that just tracking tourism income or the number of tourists. For example you can measure community satisfaction with tourism by a regular community survey, or perhaps by the number of complaints recieved from community members. Then you can decide what to change if people aren’t satisfied. Similarly you might want to know what the tourists think about their experience.

The UN World Tourism Organization has developed a long list of indicators and a guide which has helped many destinations implement a monitoring program that suits them. Most recently I was involved with a group of communities in Northern India. Respresentatives from communities, tourism operators, government forestry officals and others held a joint workshop to decide what was important to them, what they wanted to measure, and how the measuring would be done and by whom. By monitoring the indicators they selected over time, they can adapt and refine their tourism planning.

I hope this helps. For further questions, please feel free to e-mail me at wild@travel-net.com since I don’t check blogs very often.
Carolyn Wild