Contents
- Two calendars run every destination
- A shared problem holds people together longer than a shared logo
- The private side often brings less than it asks for
- Somebody has to own the partnership between meetings
- Research has started to measure what partnership is worth
- The second year shows what the partnership really was
In our business a tourism partnership is often thought to begin on the day the logos appear together on a banner, or when a memorandum is signed on a fair stand. That moment counts, though it is the easy part. Tourism partnerships are working arrangements in which public bodies, private businesses and often local associations agree to plan and carry out specific things together for a destination, sharing the decisions, the costs and the results. If nothing is shared except the photograph, what you have is a sponsorship or an announcement, which can be useful, but it is a different thing.
The difference shows within a year. Arrangements built around a signature tend to go quiet once the launch is over. Arrangements built around a job that neither side can do alone tend to grow, slowly and without much ceremony.
Seen from the event and destination side, where I spend most of my working time, the pattern is consistent enough that I have stopped being surprised by it.
Two calendars run every destination
A public tourism body works to a budget year, a planning cycle and procurement rules. Money approved in one autumn is often spent the following year, a campaign may need a tender, and a destination strategy runs over several years with reviews built in. A hotel, a tour operator or a destination management company works to a different clock: booking windows, the season, contract talks with operators abroad, and cash flow that has to survive the quiet months.
Both calendars exist for good reasons. Public spending rules protect fairness and accountability, and they apply to every partner equally. Private timing follows the market, which does not wait for anyone. The friction comes when each side plans on its own clock and expects the other to fit in. A business group proposes a joint spring campaign in mid-year, after the public budget for that year has been fixed. A support program for off-season events is announced after the organizers have already made their decisions for that winter. Nobody has done anything wrong, and the opportunity is still lost.
Much of this is solved by a modest habit: putting both calendars on one sheet at the start of the year. When are public budgets prepared, and by what date must a proposal reach them? When do operators close next year’s programs? When do hotels fix their group rates and allotments? A partnership that knows these dates can time its requests so that they land on a desk when somebody is actually able to say yes. I would put that single sheet ahead of any number of workshops on cooperation.
A shared problem holds people together longer than a shared logo
The partnerships that last usually began with a problem that hurt everyone a little: a season that ended too early, a trail nobody maintained, staff who could not get to work without a car, a congress the city kept losing to a rival. Most of them take one of a handful of forms:
- joint promotion, where public and private partners pool money for campaigns, fairs and familiarization trips
- product development, where hotels, guides, transport companies and site managers build an itinerary or a theme together
- event bidding and hosting, where a bureau or destination body prepares the bid and hotels and venues commit dates and rates
- skills, where businesses and schools agree on internships, training and the jobs that follow them
- shared assets, such as a trail, a beach, signage or a shuttle that serves several businesses at once
- data, where businesses share occupancy or spending figures in return for a market picture none of them could build alone
Joint promotion is the most common and, in my view, the weakest when it stands alone, because it asks the least of everyone. The other forms require partners to change something in how they work, which is precisely why they deliver. Event bidding is a good example. Event tourism brings visitors in the months a destination needs them most, but a bid only wins when hotels hold rooms at agreed rates, venues hold dates, transport is promised and someone public stands behind the welcome, and none of those commitments can be made by one party for the others.
Skills partnerships are the least glamorous and probably the most underrated. A place that complains about a tourism workforce shortage while its hotels, schools and training centers never meet in one room is leaving its most obvious lever untouched. When businesses agree on what a good internship looks like and commit to hiring some of the people they train, the conversation about tourism education stops being a complaint about graduates and becomes a plan.
The private side often brings less than it asks for
Our own industry deserves some honest words here. In many destinations, businesses join partnership boards mainly for visibility: their logo in the campaign, their property on the familiarization trip, their name in the press release. When the conversation turns to contributing money, sharing booking figures or adjusting a product to fit a shared plan, the room gets quieter. The large hotel groups and big operators speak loudest, partly because they can afford to send someone to every meeting. The small guesthouses, independent guides and family restaurants, whose work is much of what visitors actually experience, are often not in the room at all.
Business associations can drift the same way. They are meant to speak for a sector, and over time they sometimes end up speaking mainly for the members who pay the highest fees and turn up most often. That is understandable. It also means the partnership hears a narrower story than the destination really has.
The reluctance is not bad faith. Businesses are under pressure, and a morning spent in a meeting is a morning not spent selling. But an arrangement in which one side brings the budget and the other brings requests is closer to a client relationship than a partnership, and nobody should be surprised when it starts to behave like one.
What changes the dynamic is reciprocity in a form people can see: a hotel association that puts a share of its members’ marketing money into the common pot, a group of operators that shares anonymized booking data every quarter, businesses that release staff for a day of joint training, event organizers who report their attendance and spending figures honestly. Each step is small on its own; taken together they change who sits at the table and why.
Somebody has to own the partnership between meetings
Most partnerships meet a few times a year and live or die in the months in between. The GSTC Destination Criteria address this in their very first criterion, which asks for an effective organization, department, group or committee responsible for a coordinated approach to sustainable tourism, with involvement by the private sector, public sector and civil society, and with defined responsibilities, adequate funding and sufficient staff. I like that the criterion talks about staffing and funding, not only about who is on the board, because a group without anyone whose job it is to follow up is a discussion club.
The form varies from place to place. Where a DMO exists, it often hosts the coordination. Elsewhere it may be a public and private company set up for the purpose, a hoteliers’ association, a chamber of commerce or a small secretariat shared by several partners. The shape of the body is less important than three things: a named person who keeps the action list, a short list of actions, each carrying a responsible name and a deadline, and a habit of reporting what was done and what was not.
This is also where a partnership meets the destination management plan. A plan describes what the destination wants to achieve; the partnership is often the only structure that can carry out the parts that cross organizational lines. When the two are written separately, the plan becomes a wish list and the partnership a series of meetings. When the partnership’s action list is simply the shared part of the plan, both start to mean something.
Research has started to measure what partnership is worth
It is easy to talk about cooperation as a good in itself, and harder to show that it pays. One attempt comes from Diana Kvasnová, Tomáš Gajdošík and Vanda Maráková, who built a partnership index for destinations in Slovakia and compared it with how competitive those destinations were. Their study of partnerships and destination competitiveness concluded that the level of partnership positively affects destination competitiveness. One study in one country does not settle the question, and I would be careful about reading cause and effect too strongly into it. Still, it fits what most people in the field would expect: places where public and private actors work together tend to offer a more coherent product, a more consistent welcome and a calendar that makes sense.
What interests me more is why that coherence appears. In my reading, it comes from partners giving up a little of what they would naturally keep to themselves.
A tourism partnership lasts when each side brings something it would rather hold on to: the public side some control over the agenda, the private side some of its data and money.
That is uncomfortable for both, which is why it is rare. A public body that shares the agenda accepts that businesses will push for priorities it did not choose. A business that adds its figures to the destination data accepts that competitors may learn from them. Partnerships that avoid both kinds of discomfort tend to stay polite and achieve little. The ones that accept it can do work no single actor could, from keeping a trail open to shaping how the place is looked after over decades, which is what destination stewardship means once it leaves the strategy document.
The second year shows what the partnership really was
The first year of a partnership is usually its best. There is a launch, a budget that was secured with some effort, people who were part of the founding conversation and want it to work. The second year is the real test. Some of the founding people have moved on, budgets are tighter, the first disagreement about money or priorities arrives, and the photograph from the launch is no longer news.
The partnerships that come through that year share a few signs. The action list from the first year was mostly carried out, and the parts that were not are openly discussed. Both sides put money in again, even if less. New and smaller members have joined, which shows that the arrangement is seen as useful rather than as a club. And disagreements are settled inside the room instead of in the local press. When those signs appear, the partnership is becoming part of how the destination works, which is a quieter and more durable kind of destination development than any single project.
My own view is that any partnership that has not had a proper argument about money by the end of its second year probably has not started doing anything that matters yet.