Integrating Marketing and Management Planning for Outstanding Visitor Experiences in a Turbulent Era: The Case of Plitvice Lakes National Park

Building a viable tourism management plan requires integrative, holistic approaches that provide a foundation for outstanding visitor experience opportunities: diversity of products (the park setting in terms of managerial, biophysical, and social attributes) and programs that connect potential visitors with nature-based products (e.g. marketing). Integrative and adaptive approaches are useful in developing effective responses (such as provide diverse opportunities) to situations where rapidly changing variables (such as visitation) stretch the capacity of managers to respond. These challenges require management to think more holistically than in the past. Plitvice Lakes National Park in Croatia illustrates an example of how management in an era of rapidly growing use can respond in a holistic way to produce higher quality experiences with opportunities to enjoy other nearby offers and continue to contribute to the regional economy. The Park recently experienced significant visitation growth (from about 850,000 annual visitors in 2007 to about 1.75 million in 2018), with peak hourly and daily visitation during the two months of the summer season surpassing the physical capability of the existing visitation system to provide outstanding visitor experiences, resulting in congestion within the Park and consequently degradation of some visitors’ experience, increased safety risks as well as some negative impacts on this World Heritage Site outstanding universal value. The former General Management Plan (adopted in 2007) provided only relatively vague statements about managing sustainable tourism leaving managers with little formalized direction for promotion and management. The Park revised its General Management Plan from 2016 to 2019 while partially under the scrutiny of the World Heritage Committee due to its designation as a World Heritage Site. The chapter describes how Park managers responded to this situation by engaging its many constituencies to develop an integrated program of promotional changes, capacity building, visitor use modeling, trail construction, development of new opportunities, and contemporary technology to manage visitor use, all occurring within dynamically changing visitor use patterns.