State policy in tourism – business (MICE) tourism in Georgia
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Date
2018
Authors
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Publisher
Ivane Javakhishvili Tbilisi State University Press
Abstract
Due to high social and economic effectiveness of tourism, a great majority of the countries around
the world are interested in its development. Therefore, the issues of tourism theory and practice are
of great interest in scientific literature, however, the role, functions and methods of the state in the
management of the sector are not specified. The complexity of the issue is determined by different
tourism resources among the countries, different levels of economic and historical development and
the degree of maturity of the tourism industry itself that makes it impossible to use any uniform
approaches.
The paper also focuses on the situation that in the developing countries, where tourism flows have
greatly increased recently, the scheme to receive income from the industry still needs to be improved.
Seeking to receive quick economic benefits from tourism industry, these countries pay less attention
to the issues of sustainable development, which creates danger to long-term development of tourism,
as well as from ecological, social and cultural perspectives.
Georgia belongs to the countries, which have declared tourism as a priority economic direction and
for the last decade it has been trying to positively influence the development of the field through
applying the state instruments.
With the purpose to rapidly increase revenues from tourism sector, until recently the tourism policy
of the Government of Georgia was mainly based on increasing the number of tourists and encouraging
the inflow of foreign investments in the country. State intervention by implementation of changes in
legislation, such as liberalization of visa regime, tax preferences, encouraging attraction of
investments has provided direct positive effects. One of the most obvious consequences is the
increase in the number of tourists in the country reaching 7 million visitors by 2017 (the growth
compared to the previous year amounted to 20.2%), as well as the boom in the construction of hotels
and the entrance of the largest hotel brands. However, such development of tourism is limited both
from ecological and social perspectives.
Taking into consideration the above problems, the need for changes in tourism development policy
of Georgia is highlighted in the present paper. Currently, development of tourism in Georgia is on a
higher level of development; therefore, it is important to pay more attention to sustainable development
of tourism. The policy focusing on the increase of the number of tourists should be replaced with the
policy of tourism development focusing on encouraging development of new, more profitable tourism directions oriented on sustainable development. Business tourism is considered as a priority direction
among these areas of tourism.
Based on the consideration that this sector is new for our country and there is lack of related practical
experience and scientific research, the present paper studies the components of business tourism and
the trends and peculiarities of its development on the international market, analyses the possible
positive effects of the development of business tourism, identifies potential markets and the factors
that encourage development of business tourism, suggests the model of business tourism
development in Georgia, which includes its development in two stages.
The first one is based on the optimal utilization of the existing resources based on innovative
management, which implies:
• Development of small and medium meeting services and facilities at the current initial stage
with limited resources, instead of capital intensive large conventional centers;
• Preparation and promotion of various tour packages (business tourism + recreation…,
business tourism + wine tourism, etc.) in business tourism with the purpose to increase
competitiveness of Georgian business tourism, sell more tourist products, increase the
duration of tourist stays and tourism expenditures in the country;
• Mitigating the seasonality; organizing a significant part of small meetings in the regions in order
to increase their awareness and the occupancy rate of hotels in these regions.
The second stage of development implies creation of a convention center and attraction of large
customers of business tourism services by actively using state marketing mechanisms and
instruments.
Description
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Keywords
Citation
“Economics and Business”, vol. XI, #4, 2018, pp.127-145