THE COTSWOLDS AREA OF OUTSTANDING NATURAL BEAUTY - Essay Example

ple and Hall (1992) opines that the heritage based tourism aims at letting the tourists experience the past traditional, social and religious aspects of a destination. In order to give tourists an unforgettable experience in heritage tourism, the management of a tourist destination selected must be perfect. One area that can be used to perfect the management of destinations is through an audit of the destination. An audit of the destination will involve an intensive examination of the destinations available tourism resources (Cooper, 2003).

These resources include the amenities, major attractions, activities and other internal aspects of the destination with respect to the targeted market. It also includes the external factors such as threats emerging from competition and economic environment (Woodside 2008). This paper uses the case of Cotswolds Area of Outstanding National Beauty to perform a tourist destination audit. First, an overview of the destination is given. It then proceeds to analyse the internal and internal factors that affect the performance of the destination with recommendations of appropriate actions in the end.

The Cotswold area is the largest heritage based destinations of tourism in England and Wales. The geographical area covers an expansive region with different tourist attractions. These include heritage cities, serene and attractive country side, cultural cuisines, and local limestone along with heritage events. Because of its expansive nature, the Cotswold area of outstanding natural beauty has a complex destination management organization. A destination management organization is the hierarchy of groups of persons and bodies that are in charge running tourism affairs in a given tourist destination (Wang & Pizam 2011).

Their main task is to constantly examine and improve tourism attraction features and strategically position the destination in the tourism market (Klimerk 2013, p. 1). This study also indicates that the destination