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The starting‐point of this article is that it will be essential to give quality a crucial function in the tourism policy of the future. The philosophy of quality management is known. However its application in the tourism sector is hampered by a number of particularities of this sector. This article proposes a possible approach at the level of a tourist municipality or region. Based on an extensive quality audit among tourists it must be possible to draw up a quality plan which should result into a considerable quality improvement of the tourism product.

The travel industry in Belgium has gone through a number of notable changes in recent decades. One of the most important trends is the growth of the organised travel market in Belgium. Belgian holidaymakers are turning increasingly to travel intermediaries in general and to travel agents and tour operators in particular. The successive surveys of Belgian travel behaviour carried out by WES since the early eighties illustrate the increase in the number of long holidays booked through a tour operator. These rose from 900,000 in 1985 to 2,300,000 in 1996 and around 2,700,000 today.

Quality in tourism has many dimensions. Through quality management, efforts are being made to take account of the growing importance of individual aspects of quality. A Iprogramme with various instruments was designed for Swiss tourism with the aim of ystematically promoting and securing on‐going quality development. The programme consists of three levels: in level 1, the focus is on quality of service and in level 2 on management quality. It is not until level 3 that familiar TQM systems are adopted. This article provides a brief overview of the entire programme which covers all aspects of a tourism service package, ranging from tourism information through the hotel trade mountain cableways.