Contents
- Vision statements that could belong to any coastline
- What does a strategy choose that a vision does not?
- The choice nobody wants to write down is the one that says no
- Who should the destination be for, and in which months?
- Where does the strategy usually break?
- A work plan is a calendar with names and money on it
- How do events and everyday recreation enter the strategy?
- Reading a strategy in its third year
A vision says where a destination would like to be. A strategy says what it is prepared to give up to get there. The two are usually printed in the same document and treated as one thing, and I think that confusion explains why so many destination strategies read beautifully and change very little. A destination strategy is the small set of choices a place makes about whom it wants to attract, in which months and in which parts of its territory, with which products and which partners, and what it will stop doing, followed by the translation of those choices into a work plan that names who does what, with what money and by when.
Without the choices, a strategy is a vision with more pages. Without the work plan, it is a set of intentions that nobody is obliged to act on.
The distance between those two ends is where most of the effort goes, and where most of it leaks away.
Vision statements that could belong to any coastline
Read five destination visions side by side with the names covered. Most of them promise a sustainable, authentic, year-round destination offering unique experiences to visitors and a high quality of life to residents. Nothing in that sentence is wrong. It simply fits almost every place on earth, so it decides nothing.
The authors are not really at fault. A vision has to be agreed by many partners, and the easiest sentence to agree on is the one that excludes nobody. Consultancies have learned this as well, which is why the same paragraphs travel from one destination’s binder to the next with a new photograph on the cover. (Our side of the business recycles conference concepts in exactly the same way, so I say this without any feeling of superiority.)
A useful vision is narrower. It says something that would sound odd coming from a different destination: a city that wants to become a dependable host for medium-sized scientific congresses in the shoulder months, a mountain area that wants its summer walking season to support the winter rather than compete with it, a coastal district that wants its evenings to belong to residents again outside August. Each of those excludes something, and that is precisely where its value lies.
What does a strategy choose that a vision does not?
The core choices are few, and they are uncomfortable because each of them disappoints somebody.
The first concerns visitors. Which segments does the destination really want more of, and which is it content to keep where they are? The full range of types of tourism a place could host is always wider than what it can serve well, and a strategy that tries to grow leisure, business, culture, sport and nature at the same time usually grows whichever one was already growing and lists the rest. The second concerns time and space: which months need more activity and which already have too much, which districts can take more visitors and which need a rest. The third concerns the product: what tourism product development has to build, improve or package so that the chosen visitors find something to do once they arrive. The fourth concerns tourism partnerships and money: who leads each priority, and where its budget will come from.
The list itself is familiar. What strikes me is how rarely these choices are written plainly. They are hinted at in the analysis, softened in the priorities and dissolved entirely in the action list, where every segment and every district gets its own line so that no partner feels left out.
The choice nobody wants to write down is the one that says no
Strategy is as much about what a destination will not pursue as about what it will. Will the city stop chasing every large event that arrives with a request for support? Will the coast stop featuring the one beach that is already overcrowded? Will the tourism body stop attending a fair that brings little business but has always been in the calendar?
These are hard sentences to put in a public document, and I understand why they get left out. Every “no” has a constituency. The fair has its loyal exhibitors, the beach has its hotel owners, the large event has an organizer with good contacts. Still, a strategy without a single “no” in it is a fairly reliable sign that the choosing never happened.
The private side of our industry makes this harder than it needs to be. Hotel groups press for promotion in their weakest month whether or not the destination has anything to offer then. Agencies push for event formats they already know how to sell. Operators want the iconic image in every campaign because it is what their clients already book. Each request is reasonable on its own. Together they pull the strategy back towards doing a little of everything, which amounts to having no strategy at all, and overtourism in a few famous spots is often the visible bill for that drift.
Who should the destination be for, and in which months?
Answering this well takes evidence, and here the work often starts on weak ground. The GSTC Destination Stewardship Starter Kit is a modest, practical tool, and I appreciate that it emphasizes creating a baseline for measurement and setting achievable targets, while treating its steps as a guide whose order each destination can adapt to its own needs. A baseline sounds technical, but it is just an honest picture of who comes now, when, where they stay, what they spend and how residents feel about it, drawn before anyone writes a target.
Many strategies skip the baseline and jump straight to ambition. The target then floats: grow international arrivals, extend the season, raise spending. Grow from what? Extend from when to when? Without a starting point, nobody can tell after three years whether the strategy worked or whether the market simply moved on its own.
Residents belong in this question from the beginning, not in a consultation chapter added at the end. Watching destinations over the years, I find that residents’ attitudes toward tourism development hinge less on the total number of visitors than on where and when they arrive: the same volume spread across more months and more districts feels very different from the same volume packed into six weeks and three streets. A strategy that chooses its months and districts well is already a strategy for residents, whether or not it says so.
Where does the strategy usually break?
In the middle. Most destination strategies have a strong top (vision, analysis, priorities) and a long bottom (a list of actions), with very little holding the two together. The missing layer is the one that turns a priority into a program of work: what exactly happens in the first year, which team does it, with which budget, and what will count as progress.
VisitBritain’s planning guide for destinations organizes its stages around plain questions, among them “Where do we want to get to?” and “What do we need to do to get there?” Those two questions sit right on either side of the break. Most documents answer the first at length and the second with a list.
The list is the problem. Fifty actions, each with “all partners” in the responsibility column and “to be identified” in the budget column, are not a work plan but an inventory of good intentions. A destination management plan that works tends to hold far fewer actions, and each of them has a name and a number beside it.
A work plan is a calendar with names and money on it
The step from strategy to work plan is less mysterious than it looks. Take each priority and ask what would have to be visibly different in three years, then ask what has to happen this year to make that possible and who will do it. Put the answers into a calendar, attach the budget lines that already exist, mark the ones that do not, and then sit down every quarter and look at that calendar together.
A destination strategy becomes real on the day its first-year actions appear in somebody’s own annual budget, not on the day it is launched.
Strategies most often stall here, because the budgets belong to many organizations. The tourism body has its marketing money. The culture department has its program. The park operator has its maintenance plan. The hotel association has its membership fees. A work plan that only spends the tourism body’s money will only do tourism-body things, which in practice means promotion. One that has persuaded the others to place their own lines next to the shared priorities can actually move a place.
The yearly rhythm matters as well. A strategy covers several years, while a work plan is renewed every year, with unfinished items reported plainly, year after year. I trust a destination that publishes a short list of unfinished actions far more than one that publishes a long list of achievements.
How do events and everyday recreation enter the strategy?
As tools when the strategy is good, and as decoration when it is not. Events are among the most direct ways a destination can act on its choices about time and place: a congress placed in a quiet month, a sports event in a district that needs visitors, a festival that brings residents and visitors into the same square. Event tourism can carry a strategy, but only when events are chosen because they serve it, not added to the calendar because somebody offered one.
Everyday recreation is the less visible half. Parks, trails, sports halls, markets and cultural centers fill most of a visitor’s day and serve residents all year. Recreation management rarely gets more than a sentence in a destination strategy, yet the strategy’s promises about the quiet months depend almost entirely on it. A shoulder season with nothing open and no local program running is a promise the strategy cannot keep.
City branding belongs here too, as the outcome of what the place does rather than a separate stream of work. A strategy that chooses well, builds the product and fills its calendar sensibly will have something true to say. One that starts from the campaign tends to promise more than the place can deliver.
Reading a strategy in its third year
The best moment to judge a destination strategy is not the launch but the third year, when the photographs from the presentation have been forgotten and the work plan has either taken root or quietly stopped. By then you can see which priorities attracted money from partners other than the tourism body, which actions were carried over unfinished every year, and whether the months and districts the strategy chose are behaving any differently from the rest.
The strategies that hold up, in my observation, are rarely the most ambitious ones. They made three or four clear choices, said no to a few things in writing and kept a modest yearly work plan with names in it. So when the next strategy for your own destination is presented, with its vision on the first page and its long action list at the back, will anyone in the room think to ask which of the previous strategy’s first-year actions were actually done, and by whom?