Critical factors, good practices and lessons learned in community-based tourism

Abstract

Community-based tourism is a form of management of this activity that boomed after the first decade of the 20th century in Ecuador. For this reason, the purpose of the work presented here was to identify critical factors, good practices and lessons learned in community-based tourism in the Ecuadorian Amazon region, starting from the Amazon as a world region. It was developed through a diagnosis using the case study method from a mixed approach, between intrinsic and collective, from which a summary and systematization was made at the international level (on the theoretical) and at the level of the Ecuadorian region (in practice) of community-based tourism, with an Online Discussion Group, from whose evaluations quantitative and qualitative inferences were made. The research showed that community-based tourism in the Amazon region presents a great diversity of experiences and results, according to the level of information available in each country, where Ecuador stands out with the largest number of documented cases, as well as for its legal and political framework favorable to community-based tourism. The provinces of the Ecuadorian Amazon region with the most information related to community-based tourism were Orellana, Napo and Pastaza, where the greatest number of documented cases of community-based tourism in their territories are located. There were 23 critical factors and 16 good practices and lessons learned, respectively), and a prevalence of strong connections and influences among them was corroborated, as well as empirical coincidence with the weightings made by specialists on the outputs.