Contents
A destination management plan is a shared agreement, usually covering several years, about how a place will manage tourism: where it stands today, what it wants to change, which actions will get it there, who is responsible for each of them, what they will cost and how progress will be checked. It should contain an honest picture of the current situation, a small number of priorities, actions with owners and budgets, the visitor flows and the everyday life the plan affects, and a way of measuring results that counts residents as well as visitors. Everything else is detail.
That definition sounds modest, and it is meant to. Many plans fail because they try to be everything at once: a brand book, a wish list, a market study and a promise to every stakeholder in the same document.
Looked at from the event and visitor side of destinations, where I work, a pattern shows up quickly. The good ones are often shorter than the bad ones, and the people who carry them out can explain them without opening the file.
What goes into the plan, and what usually gets left out?
The core of a workable plan is not complicated. At its simplest it holds:
- a short assessment of the current situation, based on evidence rather than impressions
- a vision for the next few years and three to five priorities, not twenty
- a clear statement of who leads, who takes part and who decides
- actions, each with an owner, a budget line and a date
- how visitor flows, seasons and pressure points will be managed
- how the plan connects to marketing, events and everyday public life
- indicators, a reporting rhythm and a date for review
What tends to be left out is the uncomfortable part of that list. Situation analyses are often generous to the destination and silent about its problems. Priorities multiply as each partner adds its own. Actions appear without owners, or with “all stakeholders” as the owner, which means nobody. Budgets are mentioned as “to be identified”. And the review date, if there is one, quietly passes.
The GSTC Destination Criteria set a useful standard here. They ask for a multi-year destination management strategy and action plan that is publicly available, suited to the destination’s scale, developed with stakeholder engagement and grounded in sustainability principles, and they expect it to consider socio-economic, cultural and environmental issues and risks. Read as a checklist, that already rules out many of the plans I have seen: the ones nobody outside the commissioning office can find, and the ones written without anyone from the places they describe.
Who is the plan actually for?
On paper, everyone: the destination body, local businesses, residents, visitors, the institutions that manage roads, parks and heritage. In practice, a plan is for the people who will have to act on it, and that list is shorter and more specific than the stakeholder map at the back of most documents.
VisitBritain’s guide to destination management planning describes the purpose plainly: for stakeholders to agree on a set of priorities and actions to grow and benefit from the local visitor economy. I like that wording because it puts agreement first. A plan written by consultants and presented to partners at the end is a report. A plan whose priorities were argued over by the hotel association, the destination management organization, the people who run the city’s parks and venues and a few resident voices is closer to a contract, even if nobody signs it.
Does that make the process slower? Yes, noticeably. It also makes the plan harder to ignore later, because the people around the table recognize their own sentences in it. When I see a plan that nobody in the destination can quote a single priority from, I can usually guess how it was written.
Residents deserve a specific mention. They are listed as stakeholders in almost every plan and consulted in fewer. A plan for a place where people live should say, somewhere near the front, what it intends to do for them: quieter peak hours in certain streets, better use of public space in the off-season, jobs that last longer than a summer. If it cannot say that, it is a visitor plan, which is a narrower thing than destination stewardship.
Why do so many plans turn into marketing plans?
Because marketing is the part that destination bodies control most directly, and the part that is easiest to show. Campaigns, fairs, a new logo, a social media push: these produce visible results within a year. Managing visitor flows, improving a bus connection to a heritage site or extending the season needs cooperation with many other actors and takes much longer.
So the plan drifts. The section on product development shrinks, the section on city branding grows, and the action list becomes a promotion calendar with a few infrastructure wishes at the end. I don’t think this is anyone’s bad intention. It is the natural pull of what a team can deliver on its own.
The result, though, is a place that keeps inviting more people without knowing its tourism carrying capacity or deciding where they should go, when, and what they will find when they arrive. That is how places end up with crowded centers in August and empty ones in November, and why discussions about overtourism so often start too late, after the marketing has already worked.
A useful test is to cover the marketing chapter with your hand and read what is left. If there is still a plan, with actions on access, seasons, product, public space and skills, then marketing is serving it. If very little remains, the document has a misleading title.
Where do events and everyday recreation belong in it?
Usually in an appendix, if anywhere, and I think this ranks among the most common weaknesses in destination plans. Events are among the strongest tools a destination has against seasonality in tourism and for spreading visits across neighborhoods, and the meetings sector in particular brings visitors in the months when leisure travel is quiet. Yet the events calendar is often managed separately, the convention bureau has its own targets, and the plan mentions both in a paragraph.
A plan that takes event tourism seriously says which periods it wants events to fill, which venues and public spaces are available for them, how the calendar is coordinated so that two large events do not compete for the same hotels on the same weekend, and what support small and recurring events can expect. That is planning work, not promotion, and it belongs in the main text.
The same goes for everyday recreation. Parks, promenades, sports facilities, cultural centers and markets are what visitors use for most of their day, and they are run by people whose first duty is to the local population. Bringing recreation management into the plan means listing that offer next to the attractions, asking its operators what visitors could share and what they should be kept away from, and treating the quiet months as something residents and visitors can enjoy together. This is the side of destination development that plans most often forget, and it is the one that decides what a place feels like outside the peak weeks.
How will anyone know if it worked?
This is the section most plans write last and fund least. The usual indicators are arrivals, bed nights, occupancy and spending, sometimes with a satisfaction score. They matter, though taken alone they reward growth, whatever the growth does to the place.
The GSTC criteria ask for more: a system that monitors and responds to the socio-economic, cultural and environmental effects of tourism, with results recorded and made public at least once a year and the monitoring itself reviewed from time to time. That is a demanding standard, and few destinations meet it fully. Even moving partway towards it changes the conversation, because what is published gets discussed.
A handful of indicators beyond arrivals tell most of the story. How evenly visits are spread across the months and across districts. Residents’ attitudes toward tourism development, asked the same way every year. How the visitor experience holds up in the busiest weeks, not only on average. How many tourism jobs last the whole year. Whether the actions in the plan were actually carried out, which is the indicator nobody likes to report.
A destination management plan is only as real as its weakest action owner, because the document cannot do anything that a named person with a budget has not agreed to do.
That is also why the review matters. A plan reviewed every year, with actions that were not done marked as not done and the reasons written down, is still alive. A plan that is replaced by a new one after five years, without anyone asking what happened to the old one, was never really a plan.
A plan short enough to keep on the desk
The strongest destination management plans tend to have something in common that owes little to methodology. They are short enough that the people responsible for each action keep a copy within reach, specific enough that each of those people knows what is expected of them this year, and honest enough about the destination’s problems that partners trust the rest of the document.
A plan like that does not need a large consultancy budget. It requires a few months of real negotiation between the people who sell a place, the people who run it and its residents, a willingness to choose a small number of priorities and drop the rest, and, long after the launch event, the habit of opening every partner meeting with the same plain question: which of this year’s actions have actually moved, and whose name is next to the ones that have not?