Tourism is complex and has social, cultural, economic, environmental and political implications for both the tourism destination as well as for the country.

There are 3 basic features of tourism: tourism is subject to commoditization, private capital alone is not sufficient and state intervention is needed to fulfil the vision for tourism (in the case of capitalist economies, this could be in the form of a mix of the public and private sector) and tourism necessarily sees privatisation. Further it has been established that tourism is a product which is subject to issues of consumption i.e. demand and supply.

Tourism like all other sectors in the services industry is not immune to social and cultural hierarchies. Given the broad spectrum of stakeholders, very often their benefits are also in competition and at logger heads with each other