Visitor Flow Management for Balanced Tourism Growth
With sustainability the cornerstone of tourism strategies, we are investigating the best approaches to build transparent models that fully account for the impact on society and the environment.
With sustainability the cornerstone of tourism strategies, we are investigating the best approaches to build transparent models that fully account for the impact on society and the environment.
Overtourism has become a perennial challenge facing destinations. Despite a desire among tourists to explore and immerse themselves within destinations, tourists tend to congregate in the same locations. This creates significant challenges for destination management to avoid carrying capacity being exceeded.
Destinations are responding to this challenge in innovative ways, utilising technology, data and/or strategic marketing activities to shape tourist behaviour and help them locate undiscovered hidden gems. This Workstream aims to discover the most effective approaches to spreading the benefits of tourism across the entire destination.
This section outlines the key challenges the Workstream seeks to understand better and the impactful results it aims to achieve in addressing them.
Monitoring visitor flows requires significant quantities of data, such as purchase behaviour or mobility data. Such data sources can be expensive to purchase, while they provide information about past behaviour and not real-time insights.
Tourists are increasingly using social media to gain travel inspiration. With this word-of-mouth attention to trending destinations outside the control of DMOs, there is a need to understand the best approaches for alleviating visitor pressure.
The traditional role of destination marketing is to increase visitor numbers, promoting the most iconic and popular locations to inspire potential visitors. However, sustainability isn't always integrated into marketing campaign planning.
The outputs are defined and later refined by members of the Workstream and serve as the guiding objectives defining the group's scope of work and priorities.
A detailed overview of the visitor management approaches currently being undertaken by destinations and the key learning outcomes from their implementation. This will include an overview of the data sources and technological solutions that help destination management.
A detailed overview of the visitor management approaches currently being undertaken by destinations and the key learning outcomes from their implementation. This will include an overview of the data sources and technological solutions that help destination management.
Development of an interactive solution allowing participating members to explore visitor flow challenges and solutions across different types of destinations tackling a wide range of challenges which relate directly to visitor flow management.
The Workstream will also collaboratively develop visitor flow scenarios for member destinations as well as exploring hypothetical destinations and scenarios, incorporating the insights and best practices from the Workstream. The workshop will provide a unique group and sounding board to collaborate with, for experimenting different approaches and identifying potential solutions.
Throughout the development of the Workstream, members can choose to invite Academia, Partners or Specialists to contribute to process.
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