Measuring Community Impact Assessment for Internal Destination Performance Evaluation in an Exploring Tourist Destination

Abstract

Tourism development has become an increasingly important tool for social capital development in most of the developing economies of the world. Positive social capital development is the outcome of the costs and benefits of tourism development in the performance score card of the destination community. There are a number of performance items that needs to be identified and evaluated to assess the performance of tourism in the community settings. In the community impact performance scale, there are four different areas that determine the “gain and loss” of tourism development in a tourist destination such as (1) Conservation Effort, (2) Social Services, (3) Economic Condition, (4) and Social Issues. Destination community‟s receptivity of tourism development will be based on the performance of these indicators in a tourist destination. This study explicitly elucidates the performance of tourism in the destination community using a customized Community Impact Assessment model. The model is tested in the state of Kerala in South India to measure the performance of tourism in the destination community. Confirmatory factor analysis using Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) is employed to test the fitness of the proposed model.