Integrated approach for sustainable eco-tourism development in Egypt: lessons for Malaysia

Abstract

Egyptian tourism and hospitality industries face many environmental challenges to ensure their future sustainability. These challenges range from drawing suitable policies for sustainability using environmental indicators and environmental audit, to ensuring that there is commitment to the processes of sustainable tourism development. There are only a few examples of tourist's sites that are fully committed to a green strategic plan. So, sustainable strategies must be built and designed through understanding of sustainability and its consequences. The aims of this work is to give an overview of a general picture for eco-tourism resources management to understand how sustain- ability can be applied to different tourism sites and the factors leading to its success as well as its failure and explain how ecotourism resources can be managed and marketed effectively and efficiently. It also tries to evaluate the sustainable tourism development policies applied to the Red Sea Coast of Egypt and explain how these policies can be derived from tourism planning system that should be open-ended. The Egyptian experts defined 5 principles which is considered very important, from their view points, for managing eco-tourism resources effectively such as cooperation between eco-tourism stakeholders in the field of sustainable tourism planning programs, providing a suitable legislation framework for reservation of eco-tourism resources and cultural and social heritages, international cooperation in the field of eco-tourism resources and cultural and social heritages management process, sharing local community peoples in the process of sustainable tourism planning and the contribution of tourist to reserve eco-tourism resources and cultural and social heritages. The study also develops a new marketing strategy for eco-tourism in Egypt using suitable tourism marketing policies.