Contents
- Selling a place and looking after it are two separate jobs
- Who actually holds the keys to a destination?
- The industry treats the destination as free stock
- What does stewardship look like on an ordinary weekday?
- Why is success still counted in arrivals?
- Events borrow the whole place for a few days
- The person who notices first when a trail starts to wear out
Many people in our business hear “destination stewardship” as a softer, greener word for promotion, the kind of phrase that appears in a new campaign once the old slogan has worn out. That reading is understandable, and it is wrong. Destination stewardship is the shared, everyday work of looking after a place as a whole, its streets, coast, parks, culture, businesses and residents, so that it stays worth living in and worth visiting for a long time. Selling the place is one small part of that work, and not the most important part.
The difference matters because the two jobs ask different questions. Promotion asks how to bring more people in. Stewardship asks what the place can carry (the old question of tourism carrying capacity), who pays for keeping it in good shape, and who gets a voice when something starts to go wrong.
Selling a place and looking after it are two separate jobs
A destination brand can be built in an office. A good campaign needs a clear idea, strong photographs, a media plan and a budget, and in a few months it can change how a place is talked about. Looking after the same place takes years and happens almost entirely outside that office: in the depot where the beach cleaning crew starts its shift, in the meeting where hotels agree on staff housing, in the department that repairs the trail after the winter rains.
I think much of the confusion comes from the fact that the same organization is often asked to do both. The visible half gets the attention because it produces something you can show. The invisible half gets whatever time and money are left over.
The Destination Stewardship Center, which grew out of the former National Geographic Center for Sustainable Destinations, describes its cause as collaborative destination stewardship, and I find the word “collaborative” the most honest part of that phrase. Nobody stewards a destination alone. A single hotel can run itself beautifully and still sit in a place that is wearing out around it.
Who actually holds the keys to a destination?
Ask that question in a room full of tourism people and the answers point in different directions. Some will name the tourism office, some the large hotel groups, some the airlines and tour operators that decide where the flights and coaches go. Residents rarely get mentioned, even though they own most of the houses, run most of the small businesses and use the same beaches, parks and buses every day of the year.
UN Tourism’s glossary of tourism terms describes a destination management or marketing organization as the leading entity that facilitates partnerships towards a collective destination vision, and then adds, almost in passing, that not every destination has one. I like that small sentence because it is true to the field. Where a DMO exists, it can bring people to the table, but it rarely owns the roads, the water, the museums or the parks. Where none exists, the work still needs doing, and it falls to whoever is willing to pick it up: a hoteliers’ association, a group of tour operators, a chamber of commerce, a park operator with a long view.
So the keys are spread across many pockets. Stewardship starts when the people holding them agree to open the same doors at the same time.
The industry treats the destination as free stock
Our own sector deserves a fair share of the blame. Hotels, tour operators, cruise lines, event agencies and even small guiding companies all build their products on things they did not create and do not maintain: the old quarter, the public beach, the viewpoint, the clean sea, the friendly street market. The package price includes the bed, the transfer and the guide. It does not include the stone steps that thousands of guests climb each season.
A destination is the one product that every tourism business sells and almost none of them pays to keep in working order.
That is not a moral failing of individual companies. It is how the business model grew up. Contracts are negotiated on room rates and commissions, not on what a group of fifty people does to a narrow lane at eleven in the morning. When the lane gets crowded and residents start to complain, the response is often a new marketing message about “hidden gems”, which simply moves the same pressure to the next street. The patterns behind overtourism are usually written into itineraries long before they show up in the news.
The Future of Tourism Coalition’s guiding principles open with a point that sounds obvious and is ignored every day: most tourism involves the destination as a whole, not only the businesses, but also its ecosystems, cultural assets, communities and built infrastructure. If you accept that, a few habits start to look strange. Why does a tour program stop at the same three sights every operator uses? Why does a resort sell “local life” to guests while buying almost nothing locally? Why does an agency bring a large group into a small historic center at the busiest hour because that was the slot left in the run of the day?
What does stewardship look like on an ordinary weekday?
Less glamorous than the word suggests. In destinations that take it seriously, it usually shows up as a set of small agreements that somebody keeps track of, sometimes written into a destination management plan and more often simply remembered. Coach operators agree on where buses wait so that they stay off the market street. Hotels share the cost of a shuttle so that staff can get to work without driving. A trail gets a maintenance budget that local businesses contribute to because their guests use it. A fishing harbor keeps part of the quay for boats rather than for restaurant tables.
Much of it concerns the places residents use. Parks, promenades, squares and markets are where visitors spend their free hours, and they only stay lively if residents keep coming. The work of keeping public spaces busy and cared for in the quiet months is, to my mind, stewardship at its most basic, even if the people doing it would never call it tourism.
The rest concerns people. A destination where hotels hire seasonal staff in spring and let them go in autumn, year after year, with no training and no plan for winter, is treating its people as stock that runs out in October, and then calls the result a tourism workforce shortage. Stewardship includes calling the same cooks, guides and receptionists back, investing in them and giving them a reason to stay in the profession. Guests feel the difference within an hour, because so much of the visitor experience depends on people who know the place.
Why is success still counted in arrivals?
Because arrivals are easy to count and easy to report, and because every campaign needs a number at the end. I understand the appeal. A board meeting moves faster when one figure goes up. The catch is that a destination measured only by arrivals will be managed for arrivals, and the things that make it worth arriving in will be left to chance.
The same Future of Tourism principles suggest favoring metrics such as small business development, the distribution of incomes and the strength of local supply chains over raw growth figures. That is a practical shift, not an idealistic one. A hotel association could report each year what share of its food is bought within the region. A tour operators’ group could report how many different sites its programs used, not only how many guests they carried. A destination could track how residents use their own parks and beaches across the year, which is where destination development shows whether it is building a place or only a stage.
But then, who pays for counting all this? Usually the same people who would benefit from knowing it. Most hotels already collect more data than they ever read, and most of these questions can be answered with a few additions to surveys and reports that exist anyway.
Events borrow the whole place for a few days
Events show the state of a destination’s stewardship faster than anything else. A congress, a festival or a large sports weekend borrows the whole city at once: its hotels, transport, squares, halls, security and patience. If the pieces are already used to working together, the event runs on that habit. If they are not, the event exposes every gap in a single weekend.
From the organizing side, I see the same pattern in many markets. The convention bureau wins the bid, the hotels fill the room blocks, the agency builds the program, and each of them hands the city back on Monday in slightly worse shape than it found it, with nobody responsible for the difference. Good organizers now plan the return as carefully as the arrival: which streets are closed and for how long, which local suppliers are used, what happens to the temporary structures, which resident programs are moved and how they are compensated. Planned that way, event legacy stops being a closing report and becomes part of the plan.
A destination that stewards itself well also chooses its events with more care. It asks whether an event fits the season, the venues and its residents, and it is willing to say no to a profitable weekend that would damage something it needs every other weekend of the year.
The person who notices first when a trail starts to wear out
Every destination has people who see the early signs before any report does: the park keeper who notices a path widening into the grass, the guide who changes the route because a square has become too crowded, the small hotel owner whose regular guests stop coming back in May. In most places these people have no seat at the table where next season gets decided. Their knowledge stays in the corridor.
Most of stewardship comes down to building that table and keeping it set. It does not need a new institution in every case. It needs a few organizations that agree to meet before the season instead of after it, to share some figures they already have, and to give the people closest to the place a way to be heard. I have come to trust destinations that do this quietly more than those that announce their sustainability loudly, or that put their energy into the regenerative tourism vs sustainable tourism debate instead of into the table itself.
So, in the place where you work, who would be the first to notice if it started wearing out, and does anyone with a budget ever hear from them?