Abstract
Tourism is often considered as one of the main industries to promote development and modernization in small South Pacific islands countries. In Fiji, this was recognized in the 1960s, and resulted in large-scale resort based tourism development in coastal areas. While tourism has obvious advantages to the economy, a lot of problems such as exclusive foreign control of the main hotels and resorts, considerable overseas leakage of earnings, the limited participation by indigenous resource owners, and localized environmental damages to reefs and mangroves are emerging. For sustainable tourism development, it is needed to set growth objectives and targets for tourism in terms of benefits to Fiji, and to concentrate support on 'Rural Tourism' such as community-based tourism that have lower leakage and put more into local economies. Through case study in this paper, to develop rural tourism at the local level, several recommendations are as follows: 1) to introduce various rural tourism programs such as experiencing Fiji's traditional culture, participating in activities, picking fruits and harvesting agro-products, 2) to enhance aggressive promotion and marketing strategies, 3) to build the capacity of local communities for improving the quality of tourism services, and 4) to provide the infrastructure for tourism business such as road accessing, water supply and disaster prevention.