Tourism destinations need to move beyond the “traditional metrics” of visitor numbers, bed nights and spending and measure the impact of policies.
That is according to Sergio Guerreiro, Turismo de Portugal senior director for knowledge management and innovation. He told the Global Sustainable Destinations Summit in Majorca: “Destination management organisations are in trouble.”
He said: “We’re touching on issues beyond our knowledge. We need to collaborate. We need to learn, study, monitor and act to implement change. But there is a big ‘but’.”
Guerreiro suggested destinations don’t move beyond “our traditional metrics”, saying: “How are ecosystems evolving in terms of tourism policy? We are measuring the CO2 emissions of major companies and our main source markets, measuring water quality in destinations. But what is the impact of dispersing visitors? What is the impact on air quality or water quality in coastal destinations?
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“We have been pushing for dispersion and for less seasonality, but what is it changing? Is it working? What is the impact of [our] planning? We take decisions on tourism and then don’t follow [the impact].”
Guerreiro asked: “Is it possible to find the right mix of markets to bring visitors to Portugal in a more sustainable way?”
Juan José Alvarez Brunel, secretary of tourism in Mexico’s Guanajuato State, agreed, saying: “We have to understand what impact every decision we take in tourism has on sustainability.”
Mathias Schattleitner, managing director of the tourism association for Austrian ski region Schladming-Dachstein and president of the Association of Austrian Tourism Managers, highlighted the sector’s fragmented nature and the need to manage tourism’s interaction with local communities.
He said: “In Austria, 95% of holiday offers are from family-owned businesses. Half our work is in living-space management. We have a destination population of 30,000 and 30,000 beds. We need to make tourism good for everybody – visitors and inhabitants.”
He added: “Tourism needs a good sustainability image because at the moment it does not have that. In Austria, tourism has a very bad reputation sometimes, because of snow-making for example.”
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