Community Based Tourism
Finding the Euilibrium in the COMCEC Context
44
market intelligence for enterprise and business sustainability as well as for ensuring full
participation from locals by providing information on:
 Product and service quality,
 Market trends in consumer expectations, preferences, satisfaction, and intentions,
 Internal community issues such as negative attitudes toward tourism,
dissatisfaction about roles and responsibilities, inequity, jealousy, perceived lack of
transparency,
 Critical sustainability factors
o economic (jobs, income),
o social and cultural (values),
o environmental and ecological (flora, fauna, waste management, biodiversity,
carrying capacity ).
The socio-cultural, ecological, environmental and financial resilience of the CBT site
/project has to be monitored. A critical success factor in financial resilience of the CBT is
that once the ventures start making profits, a portion of profits should always be
reinvested in the community by sharing among the community, hiring more locals, buying
local products, and, more importantly, improving the CBT product. These factors, as
success criteria, need to be measured and evaluated as well. However, the point of break-
even and turning profits may take a long time and a lot of hard work. Therefore, locals’
perseverance, persistence, commitment and resilience in times of trials and errors are
extremely critical.