The concept of destination management

Sustainability and competitiveness requires the cooperation of many stakeholders with conflicting interests, as well as the thorough knowledge of the governance of tourism. Therefore, it is necessary to establish an organisation which will manage and coordinate the relevant tasks and involves all the stakeholders in the activities. This organisation will make its decisions involving all the stakeholders, and it has the

freedom and independence, resources and instruments to implement these decisions.

Therefore, a bottom-up approach (starting from the stakeholders), professionalism, partnership, and financial resources for independent action are all needed (Lengyel, 2008). Permanent success cannot be hoped for without professional skills and knowledge, so a destination management (DM) organisation can include all the stakeholders as members of the organisation. However, for managing the day-to-day practical work, an operational working body of staff led by a professional manager is needed, and this would deal with the implementation of the organisation’s decisions.

The bottom-up approach is justified by the fact, that it is only the local level, where all the actors and stakeholders of the tourism sector are present.The aspects of sustainable competitiveness are handled at the local level in practice, by the conscious activities of local stakeholders: accommodation providers, restaurants and pubs, providers of entertainments and programmes, and the local population. Therefore the key to successful DM systems is to involve all these local stakeholders, and establish their cooperation. This is the reason why organisation of a DM system should start from below, with direct participation of local actors. The process of building a DM organisation should, however, be supported and encouraged from above, providing support by the national government (Lengyel, 2008).

Ritchie and Crouch (2003) stress the multidimensional character of tourism policy, and underline the issues of competitiveness and sustainability as central ideas. They describe in detail the various types of tourism destinations, explaining the relevant aspects of tourism policy for each one. The positioning and branding of destinations are mentioned as core aspects, together with destination development, monitoring and assessment, situation analysis, demand-orientation and destination marketing. The authors consider destination management to be the key to sustainable competitiveness of a destination. While summarising the organisational issues and functions of destination management, the authors state, that marketing, the identification of target markets, and the building of the destination image are the most important components, together with the process of monitoring, the branding of the destination, the evalulation of brand efficiency, the positioning of the destination, market segmentation, the design of logos and promotional material, search for information and research, human resource management, the attraction of private capital to financing tourism-related developments, visitor management and the responsible stewardship over natural resources.

One of the most important functions of DM organisations is planning the development strategy of the destination, the process of strategic thinking, strategy building, which is closely related to the concept of destination marketing (Könyves ed., 2011).

Lengyel (2008) underlines the importance of running an efficient tourism information system which is absolutely necessary for the successful implementation of all the other tasks.

The tools of information technology are of outstanding importance among the instruments of destination marketing, but there are many other innovative instruments to promote the destinations (tourism cards, tourism ambassador programmes, innovative solutions to communicate information for tourists, utilisation of available project funds, construction of a website for the DM organisation (Könyves, ed., 2011).

For efficient destination management the cyclical flow of a series of steps should be followed, which lead to permanent sustainable development in the destination. The process is divided into 8 separate steps, which are complementary and are closely related to each other (Nyírádi-Semsei, 2007):

 Searching for attractions (values of the area),

 Development of attractions towards creating tourism products,

 Building tourism products and product groups,

 Embedding the developed tourism products into the destination,

 Taking the destinations and the embedded tourism products to the market,

 Selling the products,

 Providing perfect experience for visitors,

 Retaining the satisfied customers as visitors for the future.

The success of the tourism sector in the destination depends mainly on the careful planning of the process of efficient management, and on managing its individual steps according to the plans. For this the following should be done:

 The social framework should be established in the area, which ensures the long-term cooperation of the stakeholders, and makes available for them the whole set of instruments of local, regional and higher level cooperation, that has been successfully used in Western Europe for decades;

 A suitable information and knowledge base should be constructed, which facilitates the professional planning and implementation of the destination management process;

 Financial resources should be raised for the needs of managing the whole process, and a system of motivators and incentives should be established, that can mobilise the local entrepreneurial and sponsoral capital as well as the financial resources available at the higher, regional level, at the national government and the European Union.

 Destination management is actually nothing else, than planning and guiding the implementation of these steps (Nyírádi-Semsei, 2007).

Figure 1.1. The operation of destination management organisations Source: Panyor et al,. 2011 (page 15).

The destination management system should rely on the ’self-organisation’ of the stakeholders, but this process should not be a one-time campaign, and it should not be oriented solely to raising financial support. It should rather be based on professional principles and ideas, and should be implemented as a well established, efficient development process (Panyor et al., 2011).

The basic units of the system are the DM organisations, and these should carry out varied functions: maintaining partnerships, research, planning, development, project management, attraction management, quality assurance, monitoring, destination marketing, preparing project proposals, project evaluation, administration, coordination, professional training, advisory assistance. To manage all these tasks in an efficient way –relying on the general European experience – a three-level

bottom-up organisational system, i.e. a network of DM organisations seems to be the best choice. The organisations working at various levels of this structure are responsible for managing their own destinations, but the emphasis of their tasks should hopefully differ according to the different functions of the various levels in the organisational structure (Nyírádi-Semsei, 2007).