Propuesta de Opciones de Turismo Alternativo Integradas al Cantón Cuenca

Ecuador is a country that has a wide variety of tourist attractions; However, it is noted that, despite national policies regarding the development of this activity, the potential for the development of alternative forms of tourism is not widely assessed. For this reason, this research aims to identify alternative tourism opti-ons, as a contribution to strengthening the positioning of the destination Cuenca, Ecuador; since the emphasis of management is currently on cultural and religious attractions, managed as city tourism. The study is based on the lifting of primary information, through the application of the methodology of tourist inventories issued by the Ministry of Tourism of Ecuador, 2017; instrument that enabled the attractions in the selected areas to be hierarchical, in order to establish the sour-ces that would subsequently facilitate the development of tourist products inte-grated into the current offer; promoting a target management approach. This analysis was complemented by the application of interview questionnaires, sur-veys and focus groups, linking the actors that are part of the tourism manage-ment decision-making process in the territory, which allowed to evaluate their perception of the causes that hinder the development of alternative tourism of-fers; descriptive and inferential statistical measurement methods were used for the processing of information, which showed that in the 20 parishes selected as the subject of study, there are 12 resources /attractives evaluated with hierarchy II and 8 with hierarchy I, currently wasted, that can be valued from the structu-ring of tourist offers, provided that the weaknesses identified around manage-ment and concrete, tourism development policies in the territory are eliminated and/or attenuated in order to generate development opportunities for the localit.