Characterizing Tourism Destination and Policies Forward: The Case in Bantayan Island, Philippines

This work reports a holistic tourism destination assessment of Bantayan Island (Philippines) using an expanded tourism area life cycle (TALC) model. The expanded TALC contains five evaluation areas: destination characteristics, marketing response, economic impact, social impact, and environmental impact. Using various sources of evidence, findings suggest that Bantayan Island is positioned in the involvement stage of the TALC model. However, specific areas yield different results as the island is in the development–consolidation stage for destination characteristics, involvement–development for marketing response, involvement for economic impacts, development for social impacts, and involvement for environmental impacts. With these findings, various policy insights for destination management are offered, such as establishing carrying capacity, embracing a proactive marketing content and marketing analytics, managing resiliency of the locals and the tourism industry, integrating local culture in tourism packages, and reducing material and energy use and waste generation. These insights can be extended to other tourism destinations with similar conditions, particularly in developing countries.