Building Community Tourism
A Step-by-Step Guide.
A practical, community-first roadmap for building tourism that protects culture, strengthens livelihoods and keeps control in local hands.
Across the world, villages, cooperatives, women’s groups and youth groups are exploring community tourism as a way to create income while protecting their cultures and lands. But many projects fail—not because communities lack potential, but because they lack clear steps, fair partnerships and simple systems.
Building Community Tourism: A Step-by-Step Guide gives you everything you need to develop meaningful tourism experiences without losing identity, dignity or control. Written for communities, NGOs, social entrepreneurs and development partners, this handbook is practical, honest and easy to use.
Inside, you’ll learn how to:
- Identify authentic community assets
- Design low-cost pilot experiences before investing
- Train community guides, hosts and storytellers
- Build strong safety, operations and financial systems
- Create fair partnerships with tour operators and platforms
- Protect cultural boundaries and sacred knowledge
- Price your experience sustainably
- Measure impact with simple KPIs
- Tell your story without losing it
- Attract the right visitors—not the wrong ones
You’ll also get:
- Checklists, templates and worksheets
- Revenue-sharing models
- Cultural protection guidelines
- Community Benefit Agreement templates
- Social media and branding tools
- Realistic examples from successful villages
Whether you’re starting from scratch or improving an existing project, this guide helps you build tourism that feels safe, manageable and genuinely community-led.
Tourism should strengthen your community—not reshape it.
This book shows you how to grow on your terms, at your pace, with your story at the center.