Creating Equitable Destinations: Sharing Tourism’s Value with Communities
Tourism does not always benefit the communities that host it. This project developed a roadmap to help destination management organisations make sure that tourism’s benefits are shared fairly across the whole community.
Project duration: 2023 – 2024
The challenge
Tourism relies heavily on public resources, yet its benefits often end up with a small group. Jobs can be low paid, and a large share of visitor spending leaks away from the destination. In some places, tourism even deepens existing inequalities.
At the same time, more and more destination organisations want tourism to benefit everyone, including residents who are not directly involved in it.
Our approach
The project team followed a mixed-methods approach, combining a review of existing research and practice with new data collected from destinations. Together with partners from research, industry and destination management, the team identified mechanisms that help distribute tourism’s value more fairly. Bernadett Papp (ETFI) and Ellen de Groot (Breda University of Applied Sciences) were the principal authors.
The impact
The report Creating Equitable Destinations, published by the Travel Foundation in October 2024, presents 40 mechanisms and 25 case studies from around the world. It serves as a roadmap: starting from a community’s key goals and inequalities, destinations can explore how tourism can help and how to measure the impact.
Read more: https://www.thetravelfoundation.org.uk/equitable/
What could we discover together?
Whether you have a research question, a project idea or an interest in collaborating, we'd love to hear from you.
Contact our team!