Tourist Tuesday on a Wednesday, 4/23/19 (A day late)

From the World Travel & Tourism Global Summit:

SEVILLE, Spain — As the travel industry prepares for a world facing overtourism and concerns about environmental sustainability, the goals of tourism ministers and marketers are changing.

For example, Fred Dixon, CEO of New York’s official marketing arm, NYC & Company, said at the World Travel & Tourism Council (WTTC) Global Summit here earlier this month that his organization has shifted the way it measures success.

“We got caught up in the race for bigger numbers,” Dixon said. “We realized over time that the true metric for tourism is the economic and social impact on the community: job development, economic impact, neighborhood impact. If you don’t bring locals with you when you’re invigorating or building a destination, you’re missing an important part of the equation.”

Marketing success, Dixon added, is not “just about visitor volume. We as an industry should grapple with that more.”

Steffan Panoho, head of Auckland Tourism, echoed that sentiment. He said that over the past two years, New Zealand’s largest city realized it needed to revise its tourism strategy to incorporate “destination management versus just pure destination marketing.”

“Traditionally, we’ve talked about visitor numbers and arrivals and hotel nights,” he said. “Now, we have a whole new set of imperatives: sustainability and looking after our communities. There’s a whole new set of metrics we have to look at and quantify before we can make a call on whether we’ve been successful.”

For the rest of this article see: https://www.travelweekly.com/Travel-News/Government/Changes-in-destination-marketing-a-topic-at-WTTC-Summit