The issues related to the development of Southeast Asia’s tourism industry are discussed in the following section. First, there is a need to prepare a framework demonstrating the relative performance, role, and that extent that private local and foreign tourism enterprises are organized in formulating developmental aspects of tourism management decisions in the region. Particularly, the decisions that are crucial for the benefit of tourism industry are in the decision of operation, investment, management and marketing of tourism products. The vital issue, here, is that all concerned stakeholders of tourism industry need to understand the undertaken development decisions which should bring greater economic consequences to Southeast Asia. Therefore, it carries significance to stress that tourism stakeholders need to infer the implications resulting from their actions by taking into consideration the overall interest of tourism sector that must grow with long-run economic sustainability.
Second, one of the main challenges for the Southeast Asian tourism industry, as mentioned before, is the lack of skilled human resources. Therefore, tourism industry should give more emphasis on developing human resources to ensure the quality products and services rendered to tourists. Specifically, local human resources as well as indigenous workforce should be given priority in upgrading the comprehensive skills necessary to better serve the tourism industry. At the same time, when emphasizing these objectives it is also important to ensure the proper utilization of local resources so that it will enhance productivity of local suppliers and broaden the inter-sectoral linkages among the enterprises of tourism industry. In this aspect, the repercussion effects of tourism receipts will obviously ensure that foreign exchanges will not leakage from the economy, rather; more income through multiplier effect would be generated.
The Southeast Asian tourism industry is characterized by the presence of large number of SMEs which is the third major issue. SMEs are at the forefront of tourism development in the Southeast Asian context. SMEs provide crucial positive functions to tourism industry in the form of integrating remote business, developing linkages with other sectors of the economy and integrating personal services. Albeit SMEs are at the heart of Southeast Asian tourism, most of them are facing the problem of every day struggle. In addition, many SMEs are continuing their operation at the marginal point of survival. The lack of operating tourism businesses through capitalization of modern management principles is the reason of why SMEs unable to maximize their profit. In turn, this is meaning that these SMEs are incompetent to take advantage of economies of scale arising from uncompetitive opportunities delivered by nature of tourism demand. Further, limited resource base of these SMEs makes it difficult to attain these objectives.