Destination Management Systems and Community Participation: Indonesia Case

Abstract

Destination Management Systems (DMS) are Information Communication Technology (ICT) based tools that were first created with a marketing and booking focus. DMS functions mainly focus on relaying destination images and providing relevant booking information through destination websites as their front end. More recently, policymakers and researchers have seen the potential for DMS to foster sustainable tourism outcomes through effective destination management. This research argues that DMS can help to empower local communities to engage in tourism development and create stakeholder networks that can facilitate more sustainable forms of tourism development. This research will investigate how DMS worldwide, specifically in Indonesia, can empower community participation in tourism development. A major contribution of this work will be the development and provision of a set of criteria for a community-focused DMS. This research is divided into two stages. The first stage focuses on investigating community dimensions in DMS practice globally and in Indonesia. The Motivation – Opportunity – Ability (MOA) model will be used to identify the DMS functions that can empower the community to participate in tourism development. The second stage of the research has two objectives: investigating the strategic reasons behind DMS design and formulating evaluation criteria of the study cases that emerge from the prior stage. Semi-structured interviews and the Delphi Method will be utilised to address the objectives, respectively. This research contributes to the academic discourse on the interrelation between Tourism, ICT and sustainable community-focused development. From a practical perspective, the outcomes of this research will enhance destination management practice by providing a new avenue to foster community participation in tourism development processes. In the upcoming presentation, I will present the research methods and early research findings, which mainly come from the web evaluation process in the first stage of this research. The presentation will also share the following process of the research.