Planning for tourism through landscape. The innovative SPOT-IT tool

This paper presents the potential and prospects of incorporating the destination landscape and its features/ parameters into the ‘SPOT-IT’ tool, developed to support tourism development, planning and management, in the context of the EU H2020 SPOT Project (www.SPOTprojectH2020.eu). This GIS-based web tool identifies and evaluates existing and/or potential tourism sites/ attractions, variable infrastructures and actors in destination development; provides their interlinkages as well as their (natural, cultural, social, economic, etc.) attributes; offers  the ability to estimate the area’s further/ feasible tourism development and capacity, as well as required investment and expected tourism returns/ revenues, etc. The overall purpose of this tool is to provide decision support mechanisms for tourism development among all interested and involved parties (local authorities, tourism entrepreneurs, residents etc.), with the capacity to estimate, forecast and regulate tourism flows in space, time, and desirable/ sustainable types of tourism.