Scenario simulation of destination planning initiatives for small island tourism using fuzzy cognitive mapping

This work heeds the call to promote a systems approach to tourism planning, especially for small island destinations, with stakeholders influencing the welfare of local communities. It demonstrates the use of fuzzy cognitive mapping as a systems approach for analysing how policy initiatives associated with tourism planning evolve dynamically with other initiatives, given the strength and direction of their relationships. With an actual case of 22 destination planning initiatives (DPIs) previously identified for Bantayan Island (Philippines), four policy directions, each containing a subset of DPIs, were simulated in a scenario analysis: (1) least-cost, (2) green, (3) marketing informatics, and (4) socio-cultural strategies. Simulations of the four scenarios allow planners to track the transitions of the initial values assigned to the initialised DPIs until convergence, where both partially and fully activated DPIs emerge. Findings indicate that the four scenarios resulted in the full activation of three DPIs, including promoting environmentally and socially responsible marketing, promoting tourism product and service development, and exploring conservation programmes and projecting ecological and cultural values to the tourists. This condition arises from the relatively higher in-degree centrality of these DPIs, making them function as effects that other DPIs largely influence.