Case Study Sample: Rebuilding Visitor Numbers at a Coastal Resort Town

Model Answer

Introduction and Context

Harcombe Bay is a fictional English seaside resort town, used here to illustrate a destination management case study of the kind widely discussed in the UK tourism literature. Located on the south coast and built around a Victorian pier, promenade and sandy beach, Harcombe Bay grew rapidly as a domestic holiday destination through the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and reached its peak popularity in the 1960s, when it regularly attracted several hundred thousand overnight visitors each summer season. Since the growth of affordable overseas package holidays from the 1970s onwards, however, Harcombe Bay’s overnight visitor numbers have declined steadily, and the town now receives roughly a third of the visitors it did at its peak, with much of its remaining trade concentrated in day trips rather than longer, higher-spending overnight stays.

The Harcombe Bay Tourism Partnership, a fictional body representing local hoteliers, attraction operators and the district council, has commissioned this case study to understand why visitor numbers have continued to fall even as neighbouring coastal towns have stabilised or partially recovered their visitor economies, and to recommend a practical strategy for rebuilding overnight visitor numbers over the next five years. The town’s economy remains heavily dependent on tourism and hospitality employment, and the council has identified reversing the visitor decline as a priority for the local economic strategy.

The analysis applies Butler’s (1980) Tourism Area Life Cycle model to explain Harcombe Bay’s trajectory from growth to decline, before applying Buhalis’s (2000) framework of destination competitiveness, summarised as the “six As”, to identify specific, practical areas the town can address to rebuild its appeal. As with the other cases in this series, Harcombe Bay is a fictional construct created for academic illustration; it draws on patterns widely documented across the UK seaside tourism sector but does not describe any real town.

Case Background

Table 1 summarises Harcombe Bay’s estimated overnight visitor numbers at three points over the past six decades, illustrating the scale of the long-term decline.

Much of Harcombe Bay’s visitor accommodation dates from the town’s Victorian and mid-twentieth-century growth periods, and a significant proportion of the seafront hotels and guesthouses have not been substantially modernised in several decades; a number have closed permanently or converted to residential use as demand fell. The town’s main attractions, the pier, promenade, beach and a small funfair, have likewise seen limited reinvestment, and several once-popular attractions, including an amusement arcade and a seafront theatre, have closed over the past twenty years. Public transport links to the town remain reasonable by rail from regional cities, but the town has no significant new visitor infrastructure, digital marketing presence or coordinated event programme comparable to competitor coastal towns that have seen visitor numbers stabilise or grow over the same period.

Neighbouring resort towns of a broadly similar size and history have, in several cases, seen visitor numbers stabilise through targeted investment in boutique accommodation, food and drink offerings, and cultural or arts-led attractions aimed at a broader range of visitor segments than traditional family beach holidays alone. The Harcombe Bay Tourism Partnership’s own visitor survey, conducted last summer, found that current visitors were disproportionately older and more likely to be day trippers than overnight guests, while younger visitors and families surveyed at a nearby competitor town cited a wider range of contemporary food, drink and activity options as a reason for choosing that destination over Harcombe Bay.

The council’s economic assessment accompanying the case study brief notes that tourism and hospitality still account for close to a quarter of local employment, disproportionately concentrated in seasonal and part-time roles, meaning the visitor decline has direct implications for local livelihoods and not only for the visual condition of the seafront. The assessment also highlights a pronounced seasonality problem layered on top of the long-term decline: even the reduced visitor numbers Harcombe Bay now receives are heavily concentrated in the six to eight weeks of the school summer holiday, with many attractions and food outlets operating at a loss, or closing altogether, during the autumn, winter and early spring months. This seasonal concentration limits the viability of exactly the kind of accommodation and attraction investment the town needs to break out of decline, since operators reinvesting in their properties can currently expect a meaningful return only across a short trading window each year.

Analysis

Two frameworks are applied: Butler’s (1980) Tourism Area Life Cycle, to explain Harcombe Bay’s trajectory from growth to decline, and Buhalis’s (2000) six As framework, to identify the specific competitiveness factors the town can address.

Butler’s Tourism Area Life Cycle

Butler’s (1980) Tourism Area Life Cycle (TALC) model describes destinations as typically passing through a sequence of stages: exploration, involvement, development, consolidation, stagnation, and finally either decline or rejuvenation, depending on the choices made by destination stakeholders once stagnation is reached. Harcombe Bay’s history maps closely onto this model: its rapid growth from the late nineteenth century through to the 1960s corresponds to Butler’s development and consolidation stages, during which visitor numbers grew steadily and infrastructure investment kept pace with demand. The decline from the 1970s onwards, coinciding with the rise of affordable overseas package holidays, corresponds to Butler’s stagnation and decline stages, in which the destination’s product had not been sufficiently renewed to compete with newer alternatives becoming available to the same visitor market.

Critically, Butler’s model does not treat decline as inevitable once stagnation is reached; it identifies rejuvenation, achieved through significant reinvestment, repositioning or the addition of new attractions, as an alternative path available to destinations that respond deliberately rather than allowing decline to continue unmanaged (Cooper, 2012). Several of Harcombe Bay’s neighbouring towns, which have stabilised or grown their visitor numbers over the same period through targeted reinvestment, appear to illustrate this rejuvenation path, while Harcombe Bay’s own limited reinvestment in accommodation and attractions is consistent with continued decline rather than rejuvenation. This suggests that Harcombe Bay’s core problem is not that seaside tourism itself is in structural decline, since comparable towns have shown recovery is achievable, but that the town has not yet undertaken the scale of reinvestment Butler’s model associates with successful rejuvenation.

Butler (1980) also notes that a destination’s response to stagnation is shaped heavily by local stakeholder capacity and coordination, since rejuvenation typically requires investment beyond what any single business can undertake alone, whether through public sector-led regeneration, coordinated private investment, or a combination of both. Cooper (2012) adds that towns which delay a coordinated response tend to see the cost and difficulty of rejuvenation increase over time, as accommodation stock and attractions fall further behind visitor expectations and require more extensive, rather than incremental, investment to become competitive again. Applied to Harcombe Bay, this suggests that the town’s continued decline over several decades, rather than an earlier, more limited intervention, may mean the scale of reinvestment now required is larger than it would have been had a coordinated response begun earlier, a consideration that is directly relevant to how the recommendations below are prioritised and sequenced.

Buhalis’s Six As Framework

Buhalis’s (2000) six As framework, attractions, accessibility, amenities, available packages, activities and ancillary services, provides a practical structure for assessing a destination’s competitiveness and identifying specific weaknesses. Applied to Harcombe Bay, attractions have declined in both number and condition, with several closures over the past two decades and limited reinvestment in those that remain. Accessibility by rail is reasonable, suggesting this is not a primary constraint on visitor numbers. Amenities, particularly accommodation, are dated relative to competitor towns, directly limiting the town’s ability to attract overnight, higher-spending visitors rather than day trippers. Available packages and activities are limited, with little coordinated effort to bundle accommodation, attractions and events into the kind of short-break offer that has helped competitor towns attract younger visitors and families. Ancillary services, including contemporary food and drink options identified in the partnership’s own visitor survey, are also comparatively underdeveloped.

Read alongside Butler’s model, the six As analysis suggests that Harcombe Bay’s stagnation is not primarily a demand-side problem, evidence from neighbouring towns indicates visitor demand for UK seaside breaks remains real, but a supply-side problem: the town’s product, across most of the six As, has not kept pace with the expectations of contemporary visitors, particularly younger visitors and families, in the way competitor towns’ has.

The partnership’s visitor survey also points to a further, related weakness not always captured explicitly within the original six As framework but widely discussed in more recent destination marketing literature: online visibility and digital presence (Buhalis and Law, 2008). Harcombe Bay currently has only a basic informational website maintained by the district council and no coordinated social media presence promoting the town’s attractions, accommodation or events, in contrast to competitor towns that maintain active destination marketing accounts and are correspondingly more visible to visitors researching short breaks online. Since the six As framework treats accessibility primarily in physical, transport-related terms, this digital visibility gap is best understood as compounding the ancillary services and available packages weaknesses already identified, since even a strengthened offer across accommodation, activities and packages would have limited impact on visitor numbers if potential visitors are not able to discover it during the online research stage that increasingly precedes UK short-break booking decisions.

Key Issues

Synthesising the two frameworks, four key issues emerge.

First, ageing and under-invested accommodation and attractions, consistent with Butler’s stagnation stage, mean Harcombe Bay’s product no longer matches the standard visitors can find at competitor coastal towns, directly limiting the town’s ability to compete for overnight, higher-spending visitors.

Second, a narrow and ageing visitor base, with the partnership’s own survey suggesting the town is not currently reaching younger visitors and families in the way it once did or in the way competitor towns currently do, leaving Harcombe Bay reliant on a shrinking segment of its historic visitor market.

Third, an absence of a coordinated rejuvenation strategy, meaning individual businesses face the decline largely in isolation rather than as part of a town-wide plan of the kind Butler’s model suggests is necessary to move from stagnation towards rejuvenation rather than continued decline, a gap made more consequential by the pronounced seasonality of the town’s remaining trade.

Fourth, weak digital visibility, meaning that even where Harcombe Bay’s existing offer might appeal to visitors researching short breaks online, the town is significantly less likely to appear in that research process than competitor towns with an active, coordinated digital presence.

Recommendations

Five recommendations follow, sequenced to build a coordinated foundation before individual investment.

1. Develop a town-wide destination rejuvenation plan. Coordinated by the Tourism Partnership and district council, this should set out a shared vision and prioritised investment programme across accommodation, attractions and the public realm, addressing the coordination gap identified above and giving Harcombe Bay a deliberate rejuvenation path in Butler’s (1980) terms rather than continued unmanaged decline.

2. Support targeted reinvestment in accommodation. For example, through grant or loan schemes encouraging owners of dated seafront hotels and guesthouses to modernise or reposition their properties, directly addressing the amenities weakness identified through the six As analysis.

3. Develop a stronger food, drink and activity offer aimed at families and younger visitors. This could include a seasonal events programme extending beyond the peak summer weeks, addressing both the activities and ancillary services gaps and the seasonality problem identified in the case background above.

4. Develop bundled short-break packages combining accommodation, attractions and events. This addresses the available packages weakness and gives visitors a clearer reason to stay overnight rather than visit only for the day, directly targeting the overnight-versus-day-trip imbalance identified in the visitor survey.

5. Build a coordinated digital marketing presence for the destination. Establish an active, professionally maintained website and social media presence promoting Harcombe Bay’s attractions, accommodation and events collectively, rather than leaving individual businesses to market themselves in isolation, addressing the online visibility gap identified through the extended six As analysis and ensuring the improvements proposed in recommendations 2 to 4 are actually visible to potential visitors during their research and booking process.

Implementation should begin with the coordinated rejuvenation plan, recommendation 1, since the accommodation, activity, packaging and digital marketing recommendations that follow depend on a shared, agreed direction across the town’s tourism businesses rather than isolated individual investment; digital marketing, recommendation 5, should nonetheless be progressed in parallel rather than left until last, since it is comparatively low-cost relative to physical reinvestment and can begin building visibility for the destination while longer-term accommodation and attraction investment is still underway.

Conclusion

This case study has examined the long-term decline in overnight visitor numbers at Harcombe Bay, a fictional English seaside resort town. Applying Butler’s Tourism Area Life Cycle model suggests the town’s trajectory, from rapid growth through consolidation to stagnation and decline, is a recognisable pattern in UK seaside tourism, and that decline is not inevitable provided the town undertakes deliberate rejuvenation. Applying Buhalis’s six As framework indicates the town’s central weaknesses lie on the supply side, particularly dated accommodation and attractions and a limited activity and packaging offer, rather than in any fundamental lack of visitor demand for UK coastal breaks.

The recommendations proposed therefore centre on a coordinated, town-wide rejuvenation plan supporting reinvestment in accommodation and attractions, a stronger and less narrowly seasonal activity and packaging offer, and a coordinated digital marketing presence, aimed at rebuilding overnight visitor numbers among both existing and new visitor segments. The broader implication for Harcombe Bay, and for comparable UK seaside towns facing similar long-term decline, is that recovery depends less on any single investment than on a coordinated response across accommodation, attractions, packaging and visibility together, since improvement in any one area alone is unlikely to be sufficient to shift visitor perceptions or booking behaviour on its own. As with the other cases in this series, Harcombe Bay and the figures presented are fictional constructs created for academic illustration and do not describe any real town.

References

• Buhalis, D. (2000) ‘Marketing the competitive destination of the future’, Tourism Management, 21(1), pp. 97–116.
• Buhalis, D. and Law, R. (2008) ‘Progress in information technology and tourism management: 20 years on and 10 years after the Internet’, Tourism Management, 29(4), pp. 609–623.
• Butler, R.W. (1980) ‘The concept of a tourist area cycle of evolution: implications for management of resources’, The Canadian Geographer, 24(1), pp. 5–12.
• Cooper, C. (2012) Essentials of Tourism. Harlow: Pearson.
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