Destination Planning and the Sustainability of Wildlife Tourism Resources: Ongoing Challenges for Knowledge Integration

Despite the fact that the interface between wildlife and tourism has attracted increasing academic scrutiny, it has also been recognized that destination-level strategic marketing and planning constitute the least developed aspect of wildlife tourism management. The paper argues that this is partly due to ongoing challenges linked with integrating the needs of a tourism industry management perspective with those of wildlife resources planning, in particular when the diversity and distinctiveness of wildlife tourism destination types is acknowledged. The paper uses the findings emanating from the recent wildlife tourism literature (in particular on the nature of motivations of tourists participating in wildlife viewing experiences) to examine the basis for destination competitiveness in that area, and to investigate ensuing planning challenges. Subsequently, the paper examines a simple case study (wildlife-viewing in the Top End of the Northern Territory of Australia) where knowledge integration issues for wildlife tourism planning have been explicitly tackled with a Geographic Information System (GIS) approach.