CONCLUSION
Regional tourism planning in Spain plays an essential role in establishing
the basis for a progressive spatial spread of the industry and
the diversification of the national model. Other factors that have
helped this process are the market’s evolution itself, which favors the
appearance of new products in geographical environments other than
coastal areas; the consolidation of regional and local policies in the
context of administrative decentralization, in which tourism has been
considered a prime industry in economic restructuring processes; the
growth of domestic demand; the rise in value of underused tourism
resources; the improvement of communications infrastructures; or the
contributions of the EU structural policies.
However, greater contributions from planning can be foreseen. To
achieve this aim, it is necessary to make more agile the processes of
preparation and passing of tourism and land-use plans; to design effective
coordination mechanisms among the different administrations so
that their actions or initiatives can follow with the integrated, multidimensional
and sustainable approach required by the industry; to
improve the plan scale articulation, above all at subregional and local
levels, with the aim of rationalizing the actions undertaken by municipalities
sharing the same tourism district; and above all, to consolidate,
once and for all, the importance of planning in tourism policy and
public management, going beyond the rhetorical institutional declarations
and the proliferation of legal instruments with few chances of
real implementation.