Stakeholder Colaboration in Tourism Destination Planning – The Case of Montenegro

The importance of involving diverse stakeholders in tourism planning is receiving growing recognition. Effective tourism destination planning is a complex process, due to the existence of a wide variety of stakeholders with a wide range of opinions, multiple problem visions and different interests. Despite the complexity of the planning process one feature acknowledged for successful destination management planning is a high level of stakeholder engagement and cooperation. The implementation and success of a tourism plan often relies on the support of destination stakeholders. The paper deals with the issue of effective tourism destination planning from the perspective of harmonizing stakeholders’ interests. It explores tourism destination planning in the Montenegrin tourist destinations, the level of stakeholder cooperation and correlation between destination plans implementation and stakeholder cooperation. An empirical research was carried on the population of 19 local tourist organizations in Montenegro. Findings and implications of the research are given in the paper. The results revealed the problem of insufficient implementation of tourism development plans and low level of stakeholder cooperation. Also, there are implications based on recently conducted research reported in this paper, that there is a strong positive correlation between the level of stakeholder cooperation and implementation of a tourism destination plans.