A tourist destination, is just a place that attract visitors from somewhere for a limited period of time. We can use this word referring to a small or big portion of space, describing for example a small village, a big city, a country etc. Anyway, a part from the place itself, this word includes as well all the experiences and services offered to the visitors.
The individuation and implementation of marketing strategies for tourist destinations, gained, in the last thirty years, a greater and greater sophistication and importance of the methodologies applied. This is in part due to the easiness by which today we can reach any corner of the world, which increased the competition among the various tourist destinations in the planet.
According to the World Tourism Organization:
“...destination marketing covers all the activities and processes to bring buyers and sellers together; focuses on responding to consumer demands and competitive positioning; is a continuous coordinated set of activities associated with efficient distribution of products to high potential markets; and involves making decisions about the product, branding, price, market segmentation, promotion and distribution”.
To improve the tourism activity in a territory through a destination marketing plan, brings not only an important economic benefit, but also an improvement of the destination image useful for attracting external investors, an enrichment of the services offered to residents and the birth of a sense of pride in these ones through their land. Furthermore, tourism can make easier the obtaining of founding useful for the valorization of the territory; and it can represent a valid tool for the safeguard of the local culture (when the tourism activity is conscientiously planned).
The biggest challenge for the correct operation of a destination marketing plan, is to manage to efficiently involve all the actors that operate in the tourism sector of a destination. The tourism product is extremely fragmented: in its production are involved public and private organizations, residents, local and external entrepreneurs. All these actors, considered individually, possess a certain grade of control (more or less important) to the marketing of the destination; considering also that, anytime its image could be damaged by external factors. Obviously, also the efficiency of public administrations plays an important role: in fact, they could not have the necessary resources, flexibility and make everything slower because of a too inefficient bureaucracy.
For all these reasons, the only possible way for making possible the good operation of a destination marketing plan, is the collaboration: which has to be constant and efficient among all the private actors, and between these ones and the public administration. An efficient collaboration allows to reach better promotional impacts on potential visitors and, a more equals distribution of the incomes among all the stakeholders. Concluding, many scientific researches have revealed that single individuals, working in team, get better results than working alone.
Sources:
World Tourism Organization (2004). Destination Marketing for the 21st Century. In Baker, M., Cameron, E. (2007). Critical success factors in destination marketing. Tourism and Hospitality Research [online], 8 (2). Available on <http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1057/thr.2008.9> [Accessed: 23/01/2017].
Bennett, O. (1999). Destination Marketing into the Next Century. In Ibidem.
Baldwin, D., Migneault, R. (1996). Humanistic Management by Teamwork. An Organizational and Administrative Alternative for Academic Libraries. Englewood: Libraries Unlimited Inc.
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