Other communities in your area besides yourself may be considering tourism as an economic development tool. If so, the competition for the tourist discretionary dollar and time is likely to increase. Your community will need to offer something that is different from, equal or superior to what neighboring communities offer to entice sufficient numbers of visitors to your town to make tourism an effective tourism strategy. For example, if every community within a hundred miles of yours has an amusement park, then developing an amusement park is not likely to be an overwhelming success unless it's superior in some way. To pursue a demand driven development strategy, five main questions need to be addressed.
Many residents have a proud parent syndrome about their community.
Initial tourism promotion activities often consist only of identifying the existing features that residents see as interesting and trying to market them. These features, however, may or may not have attraction to potential visitors. Visitors are more likely to engage in activities and experiences in your community if they perceive them as meeting their personal motives and reaping real benefits to them. A good way to think about this is to remember some of your own favorite tourism experiences. Probably in answering these types of questions you came up with some of the tourism motivations identified by marketers.