Success Factors For Public Private Partnership: Cases In Alpine Tourism Development | Klaus Weiermair, Mike Peters & Joerg Frehse

Sustainable competitiveness in tourism calls for meaningful and appropriate management approaches in order to prevent the exploitation of non-renewable resources. Generally where mass tourism is practiced, resources tend to be overconsumed and hence nature can be harmed. Thus, a major goal of sustainable tourism is to find a balance between resource use and consumer preferences or needs. A tourism nation won?t achieve international competitive advantages through strict prohibitions of resource use but rather through conservation-conscious consumption. Tourism is on the one hand strongly influenced by governmental regulation and on the other hand driven by private, often also short term, interests. The following paper attempts to analyse core benefits and problems of private public partnerships (PPPs) in the tourism industry. The purpose is to derive principles and management imperatives for the formation of private-public partnerships in tourism. In order to evaluate the above mentioned principles we have selected two PPP examples of Austria?s Alpine tourism development. The first case involves the development of the ?Mountain Beach Water and Nature Park? in the Western Austrian Alps, the second case study evaluates the cable way development project ?Muttersberg? of the Silvretta Nova Group in Vorarlberg (Austria). After a presentation and critical discussion of the case studies, the last part of the paper will conclude with recommendations for PPP practices in tourism and leisure and highlight implications for future research in the field of tourism – development, -financing and -cooperation.