From Strategy to Performance: Why Strategic Plans Fail During Implementation in Tourism Businesses

Tourism businesses must translate strategic priorities into coordinated decisions by managers and frontline employees; formulation alone does not ensure execution or performance. This working paper integrates tourism and hospitality research with broader strategy-implementation scholarship to explain why plans stall, how barriers reinforce one another and which managerial mechanisms may improve execution. The evidence points to interdependent constraints involving leadership, role clarity, resource deployment, employee participation, operational alignment, monitoring and learning, with variation across chains, independent properties, SMEs and destination actors. The paper proposes a literature-derived pathway linking context and barriers to managerial responses, execution quality, multidimensional performance and feedback. This is an integrative tourism-sensitive synthesis, not a claim of novelty or empirical validation.