by Kristin Dunne, Director – Destination Stewardship, Miles Partnership

Destination organisations beginning their journey towards a stewardship model often don’t know where to start. After all, there’s no single governing body providing guidelines for destination stewardship, and best practices from other industries don’t always apply to travel, where we must manage a complex relationship between visitors, a destination, and its residents. It’s easy to become paralysed by the sheer volume of challenges, data points, and conflicting stakeholder opinions.

At Miles Partnership, we’ve dedicated significant time and resources to helping our clients navigate the complicated road to stewardship. This year, we debuted the Wayfinder, an industry-first destination management tool enabling tourism organisations to measure, monitor, and improve destination stewardship capability and outcomes.

Through our work in this sector, we’ve been able to identify a few core best practices that DMOs can use to begin the stewardship planning process.

Frame stewardship as an evolution, not a revolution

Thinking about stewardship as a complete shift in a DMO’s priorities and processes can be daunting for both you and your key stakeholders. However, becoming stewards of your destination is the next logical phase of destination management. An effective stewardship model builds upon destination management and marketing, expanding your current mission to encompass a holistic view of tourism’s impact on your destination and its residents. For example, where a DMO’s traditional practices might emphasise promoting visitation to support local businesses, a stewardship-centered approach might promote and expand off-season visitation to support local businesses during need periods based on community feedback

Stewardship doesn’t replace any of the traditional tasks associated with managing a destination—the marketers will still market and the project managers will still manage. Rather, it unites all of a DMO’s functions under a single, unifying mission to create a thriving destination for all stakeholders.

Balance visitor and community needs

At its core, effective stewardship balances both community and visitor needs in four key areas:

• Economic prosperity: This principle is most familiar to DMOs under the traditional management model. An effective, community-focused DMO takes a leading role in fostering entrepreneurship, supporting local businesses, and promoting sustainable tourism practices.
  
  
• Identification & preservation of culture & heritage: Preserving and celebrating a destination’s heritage and culture are central to destination stewardship. This may mean engaging Indigenous communities in safeguarding their cultural identity, traditions, and heritage or educating visitors about the destination’s history, customs, and sites of cultural significance.
  
  
• Social wellbeing: Through meaningful community participation, a destination stewardship approach strives to cultivate an inclusive and vibrant visitor experience that showcases and celebrates diverse peoples and promotes a sense of belonging for all individuals.
  
  
• Environmental preservation & ecological balance: By involving the community and visitors in stewardship efforts, DMOs can help to improve ecological balance through responsible tourism practices that encourage environmental protection and conservation and use tourism as a catalyst for positive climate and environmental action.

Understanding how these four principles play a role in your destination’s identity is key to developing a realistic, effective stewardship pathway. A tool like the Wayfinder can help you assess and strengthen your DMO’s performance in these areas.

Work with your stakeholders

The impact of tourism on a destination’s residents and other stakeholders will be unique to the destination, so there isn’t a one-size-fits-all approach to improving community engagement within the industry. However, there is one simple way to get started: talk to them. From holding an open community meeting and investing in resident sentiment research to conducting regular surveys, engaging your community early and often will do more to encourage collaboration and trust as you begin enacting change.

Understanding what your community partners like and dislike about your destination’s ecosystem will allow you to develop solutions that serve both your community and your visitors. And as you continue on your stewardship journey, continue to foster that open communication between you and your stakeholders and incorporate their feedback into your strategy.

Select relevant KPIs

One of the biggest hurdles to stewardship for a DMO is measuring success. Without concrete data showing the impact of these initiatives, it’s hard to convince your stakeholders that stewardship programs deserve your DMO’s funding. Becoming a community-focused DMO requires an evolution that goes beyond traditional KPIs. Of course, you’ll still need the commerce-driven numbers to understand the economic impact of your visitor economy, but these numbers don’t provide the full picture.

Consider creating KPIs reflecting your stakeholder’s pain points and your stewardship goals. Destination leaders might look at stakeholder engagement, destination development, resiliency, risk and crisis management, and other metrics to gain a holistic picture of their destination’s health. For example, 4VI (formerly Tourism Vancouver Island) uses a variety of specialised KPIs to track their progress on their stewardship journey, including the percentage of tourism businesses across Vancouver Island with sustainability policies and practices, the percentage of locally-owned tourism businesses on the island, and the number of residents purchasing Indigenous-owned tourism experiences.

Once you’ve determined your KPIs, use a systematic approach to track your progress holistically. You might use a tool like the Wayfinder, which gives you the tools to demonstrate progress across stewardship outcomes—including the four key areas mentioned above. The tool's interactive dashboard visualises and tracks progress across a destination organisation's selected priority areas. Because stewardship is a multifaceted mission, seeing all of its components in one place gives you a better understanding of the progress your DMO has made—and how far it still needs to go. It will also help you identify where you need to allocate more resources, an all-important part of annual budget planning.

Understand that stewardship is an ongoing journey

While it’s tempting to think of stewardship as an end goal, the process of stewarding a destination never stops. It’s a living process, where each iteration improves on the one before and reacts to current world events and technology trends. For example, we understand more about the environmental impact of tourism than we did twenty years ago—and we’ll understand even more twenty years from now. New challenges will present themselves, from pandemics to economic shifts, along with new tools to overcome these challenges.

When creating a stewardship pathway, it’s important to leave room for change. A flexible, agile approach will ensure that your DMO can achieve its goals while adapting to shifting trends and emerging technologies.

Want to learn more?

Join us for the webinar, Charting a Course to Destination Stewardship, on October 1, at 3pm BST / 10am EDT. This interactive webinar will explore a data-driven approach to destination stewardship, how destinations are balancing the needs of residents and visitors, and what it takes to transform challenges into opportunities for your destination. Sign up here!

About the Wayfinder

The Wayfinder is an industry-led, evidence-based destination management framework built around a tried and tested platform, guiding destination organisations through a continuous improvement pathway that measures, monitors and improves destination stewardship capability and outcomes. The Wayfinder is transforming destination management, allowing tourism organisations to strengthen their role in stewardship and accelerate the pace of change for destinations and the communities they represent. Learn more at www.DestinationWayfinder.com.

Ready to get started? Contact us to request a free demo of the Wayfinder platform.

About Miles Partnership

Miles Partnership is a strategic marketing consultancy focused exclusively on travel and tourism. The company works with more than 150 destinations, hospitality businesses and other travel industry clients worldwide to develop marketing and management strategies that amplify local experiences, boost visitation, improve community relations and increase overall economic impact. Learn more at www.MilesPartnership.com.