Tourism is often regarded as a vehicle for the economic development of disadvantaged rural communities. Although the concept is good in principle, the successful implementation of community-based tourism projects has proved to be problematic. This article focuses on the preconditions required for the successful implementation of community based tourism development projects. A list of pre-conditions extracted from a literature study (the research design) is compiled and subsequently field-tested on existing CBT projects in the Eastern Cape Province of South Africa. A CBT pre-conditions model is subsequently proposed and an implementation strategy suggested.
