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In recent times the Business Council of the World Tourism Organisation has been concerned at the escalation in the number of tourism taxes and the rates at which tourism is taxed. There is a justifiable suspicion that governments are looking at the burgeoning tourist industry not from the rational principles of taxation, but simply as a new revenue source, particularly as foreign tourists are not voters in the destination. The tourism industry has to cope with specific taxes, such as a departure tax, and general taxation, such as value added tax (VAT). This article reviews the principles by which tourism should be taxed and focuses on the different rates of VAT in a European context. Using Denmark as a case example, a simulation exercise is carried out to examine the hotel sector's claim that a more efficient and equitable economic solution would result from cutting VAT.

Commencing in the late 1980s in Europe, regional development policy has seen a switch of emphasis from large automatic grants to attract inward investment projects, towards small and medium enterprises (SMEs) and indigenous growth. From a tourism perspective, this blends well with models of community tourism development, particularly in peripheral areas. The task of co‐ordinating local actions usually falls on public agencies, but development is often made doubly difficult because there is a dichotomy between the market stance of tourist bureaux and the supply‐oriented approach of small traders. Such is the case of the restaurant industry on Bornholm, which fails to match the expectations of the visitors in their menu structures. This article analyses the extent of the gap between demand and supply in terms of the visitors’ experiences.

There is considerable interest both across Europe and America concerning how to reprocess old mines and quarries workings. This article looks at the experiences of the tourism authorities in South Wales in setting up mines and industrial remains as tourist attractions and the key issues involved. The focus is on the Big Pit Mining Museum in Blaenafon, South Wales, which was conceived in 1979 and established in 1983. As a commercial tourist attraction, the museum was fated to struggle for its existence, but as time has passed and the memories of coal have diminished, so the mine has acquired a growing heritage value of its own, just like any antique item. Thus, in May 1999, it was agreed that the state-run National Museums and Galleries of Wales should absorb the museum to conserve it for posterity.

The growing interest in community tourism development is paralleled within the European Union by a switch of emphasis away from large automatic grants to attract inward investment projects, towards small firms, and indigenous development. The promotion of small and medium enterprises by the union is on the basis that these firms provide the community underpinnings for entrepreneurship and job creation. Taking the experience of Wales as an example, the full-time equivalent employment out-turns from 216 projects are analyzed to assess job creation performance against targets. On the whole, the small and medium tourism enterprises in question were either in line with or better than their employment targets.

The Wales Tourist Board is a non-departmental tourism public body that has product development powers. Within a global sum set by its sponsoring body, the Welsh Office, it influences the tourist product through a variety of initiatives. By far the most ambitious has been the Local Enterprise and Development scheme (LEAD). From start to finish, the Board has used Lead to combine the skills of consultants, academic researchers, public authorities, the public sector and the local community to improve the destination product in different parts of Wales. This paper looks at the development of the LEAD scheme, including the Board's approach to project evaluation, and examines the lessons learnt from it.

In April 1995, the VAT Working Group of the British Tourist Authority (BTA) presented its report on the economic effects of changing the rate of VAT on the UK tourism and leisure industry. The report was prepared by Touche Ross. This article reviews and summarizes the issues raised by the BTA Report as a matter of general interest for the readers of this journal. The author is grateful to the BTA for giving permission to reproduce parts of the Report and to Michael Nevin of Touche Rosse who undertook the task of preparing the report.

Around the world, expansion in tourism has resulted in the industry being recognized as a development option that few countries are prepared to ignore. Governments of all persuasions offer a range of investment incentives that, ideally, should be targeted at produc ing a balanced development of tourism to meet the many needs of visitors and be consistent with policy objectives. This article examines the nature of investment incentives, their impact, and some methods to evaluate their worth.

The reform of the European Structural Funds over the period 1986–1988 saw a move away from the Community funding individual projects towards a multi-annual programming approach. The European Regional Development Fund is still the main instrument for regional intervention. The economics of this form of grant-in-aid is considered together with the methodology of appraising projects for submission.

It is possible to classify attractions along a number of different dimensions: ownership, capacity, market or catchment area, permanency and type. Classification by type is the common way in which countries collect attraction statistics, but here some form of permanency is required so that public access can be controlled and measured, which implies that even some iconic attractions (those featuring in destination marketing strategies) are never listed in official statistics, for example, the monument to Sibelius in Helsinki, although the music festivals, concert hall and museum in his honour are recorded. The simplest classification by type is to group attractions into those that are gifts of nature and those which are human-made. The former include the landscape, climate, vegetation, forests and wildlife, embodied in, say, country parks in Britain, lakes in Canada, mountains in Switzerland, the coast in Spain or game reserves in Africa. The latter are principally the products of the historical development of countries and civilizations, but also include artificially created entertainment complexes, that is, attractions designed almost exclusively for amusement and enjoyment, such as theme parks. Among the most well known of these are the Walt Disney parks, the imagescape originating in California (1955) but since reproduced in Florida, Tokyo, Paris and Hong Kong, with one further park due to open soon in Shanghai (see Chapter 6).

In planning or project appraisal, the methodology and concepts employed by the major international agencies in their project manuals are not always consistent with those employed in the tourism industry itself. This paper shows how we might integrate the concepts used by the project manuals into the analysis of tourism as a development sector.

Employment creation is an important consideration in grant-aiding tourism projects. Drawing on the results of 140 tourism projects that were given English Tourist Board support, this article evaluates their performance by comparing promised employment to jobs actually created and analyses the forecasting errors.

In many cases the competition is such that when catering contractors bid for outside events, they are simply price-takers. But opportunities do exist in the area of hospitality catering and organized functions to build up to a price. Three different pricing strategies were considered with respect to particular company objectives to arrive at an optimal solution.