The Evaluation of Tourism Marketing Model within Moroccan Public Policy Management

Morocco is situated in the north western Africa facing Europe on the Mediterranean and on the other side open to the Atlantic Ocean benefiting from a favourable geographical location as Africa’s gate to Europe. The country has four inscribed biosphere reserves, and nine UNESCO inscribed world heritage sites. The performance of tourism in the country kept a steady growth rate in the last decade despite being slightly affected by the 2008 world economic crisis; just to recover later by taking advantage of the unstable political situation in competing neighbour countries, after the so-called ‘Arab Spring’. This improvement in the performance of the Moroccan tourism sector is also among the planned objectives of the two major tourism management plans in modern Morocco (Vision 2010 and Vision 2020). Evidently, the second strategic plan (2020) came as a continuation of the first one but with wider plans and bigger ambition. However, these management plans were not all ‘la vie en rose’. The objectives of both programs were not completely achieved (2020 vision is still two years away from completing its execution but various gaps can be found in the realised points). A descriptive study was conducted to evaluate the performance of the tourism marketing practices within Moroccan public policy management. The tourism marketing strategy of both management programs was critically reviewed to identify both their strengths and weaknesses. The findings of this study show that public policy concerning tourism sector drove the country in the right development path but still, the chosen marketing strategies were not highly efficient, given the considerable various Moroccan tourism potential. Nevertheless, analysis also showed that public tourism management policy was initially designed with some inadequate approaches concerning the development of the sector. It has been suggested that the government should concentrate more on a wider marketing approach that takes into consideration the valorisation of the sustainable tourist product of the country and more importantly empowering the human potential to be centric in parallel with the touristic product.