COMMUNITY-BASED TOURISM AND CREATIVE ECONOMY

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic heavily impacted many sectors and travel and tourism sector is one of the top industry been affected. Moving ahead to manage this impact, around the globe many natural and cultural tourism focus countries are currently in the thinking phase on how to reposition its tourism to destination focused tourism. In this repositing initiative to rebuild the tourism industry, Community-Based Tourism (CBT) is observed as one of the promising tourism prospects.  Sharma et al.’s resilience-based framework for reviving the tourism industry in post-COVID-19 established in 2021 is proposed to substantiate the understanding of the current CBT management during the pandemic to facilitate resilience and transformation of the tourism in the country. While shedding light on exploring the possibility of repositioning tourism towards CBT with a focus on sustainability, this study also highlighted the prospect of developing ‘creative economy’ as a contextual approach in CBT.  This repositioning strategy based on the development of contextual approach will facilitate destination recovery and add value to the local community’s resilience. The study concludes with recommendations to strategies on rebuilding CBT from sustainable tourism context as well as redesigning the CBT initiatives from creative economy perspective to tactically mitigate the recovery after the Covid-19 pandemic.