Pick your research topic. You can get inspiration from tourism conferences, classes you've taken, other published dissertations or research on tourism, or from your advising professors. Make sure there is a professor in your program who is willing and able to act as your adviser on your research should the proposal be accepted.
Conduct a thorough literature review. This serves two purposes. First, the school expects you to become an expert in the area of tourism that you want to research. Second, you need to identify a specific research topic that has not already been done by other scholars. Reviewing the scholarly literature will help you identify a specific new topic or a creative new angle on an existing topic. Summarize your literature view in the opening paragraphs of the PhD proposal.
Define clearly the parameters of your research in the next section of the proposal. Describe exactly what you will examine, why you are examining it and how you propose to examine it. The research question must be clear and the topic feasible, realistic and measurable in some way. For example, if you want to look at the impact on tourism of specific new tourism websites, propose how you would gather the data. You might propose to look at the average annual tourism dollars spent in a region during a specific time period in comparison with the number of new tourism websites that focused on that region.
Posit your hypothesis in the next section of the proposal. You might have one hypothesis or several. Then explain how, if you are correct in your hypothesis, this fact would matter to the field. For example, if your hypothesis states that you believe people will spend more money on tourism in a region that is described in more websites, that theory might be important for knowing how to effectively promote new tourist sites.
Provide a time line for your research proposal, identifying what steps you will complete in the project and by when. If you have teaching assistant or research assistant responsibilities, consider those responsibilities in your time line as well.
Summarize your proposal in the final paragraphs. If you can anticipate questions that the committee might have, address them in the final paragraphs.