Implementation of the Tourism Area Life Cycle Model as An Advisory Decision Support System

The Tourism Area Life Cycle (TALC) is a theory of tourism region evolution designed to assist destination managers and others in dealing with and understanding problems that seem to almost inevitably arise with concentrated tourism development (e.g. environmental despoilment, low visitor yield and social issues). Various heuristics are associated with the transformation from one life cycle stage to the next and these, together with an increasing body of cases dealing with the application of rejuvenation strategies, form the basis of the decision support system (DSS) described in this paper. Technically, the paper focuses on specific data abstraction techniques used to facilitate DSS development and maintenance.