An Approach to the Development and the Promotion of Secondary Tourism Destinations: A Case Study of BuengKan – A Potential Tourism Destination in Northeastern Thailand

Abstract

The Government of Thailand has announced a policy to develop and promote 55 provinces of Thailand to become secondary tourism destinations, BuengKan is a new-born province in the Northern part of Thailand, which is not a popular tourism region compared to the Northern and the Southern regions of the country. Nonetheless, BuengKan has a high potential to become a popular secondary tourism destination because it has a lot of tourism resources to develop various types of tourism with many modes of accessibility. In order to formulate a strategy to develop and promote BuengKan to become a popular secondary tourism destination, guidelines and recommendations from all stakeholders, including the public sector, the private sector, the community sector, and the academic sector need to be gathered.  A   qualitative   research was conducted by employing in-depth interviews with public officers, local politicians, chamber of commerce members, private entrepreneurs in tourism industry, prominent figures of community members, and scholars in the fields of tourism, marketing, and marketing communications. Their answers from the in-depth interviews have been analyzed and organized to formulate development and promotion strategies to make BuengKan a popular secondary tourism destination of Thailand