Destination Personas; Playing Ball With Sports Tourism in Central Florida
Earlier this month, we took the stage at our 2024 Annual Convention in Tampa Bay, Florida to give an update on the Destination Promotion Community Index project. We’ve partnered with Zartico to explore a new set of measures that better capture and communicate the value of work destination organizations do for their communities.
Zartico CMO Ted Sullivan joined us on stage to share the latest development, a unique set of destination “personas” that invite organizations to consider their community’s unique attributes as they determine the performance indicators that best tell their stories. If every community is unique, it warrants our sector to cultivate indicators and measurements that match up to the brand and story our destinations share. This approach helps us move away from the prior tenets of our industry in describing us merely as tier 1-3, convention/sports/college identities.
The net benefit of this approach is to begin laying the foundation from our industry brief of connecting our destination promotion work with how our residents and community see us. In the hope of beginning to close the gap of our communities not only understanding what we do but also valuing us. Below you will find the starting point for this work and where we hope to continue to go.
Here’s a sampling (find the full list here):
- Getting on the Map (emerging, rural) — Download the first destination case study spotlighting ROOST.
- Diamonds and Dreams (sports development)
- Fork in the Road (culinary opportunities)
- Ending the Feast and Famine (balanced demand)
- Zoomtown Boom (remote work impact)
- Town and Gown (college towns)
In addition to outlining our personas at DI’s Annual Convention, we also released our latest report inspired by one of the personas. Our latest destination case study, in partnership with Zartico, draws on the “Diamonds and Dreams” persona to look at the evolution of sports tourism in Seminole County, Florida. We encourage you to read through and click below to understand how this destination adheres to the Diamonds and Dreams persona.
In 2016, the county opened a 100-acre, 15-field sports complex in Sanford, adding to the community’s collection of sports venues. In the 2023 fiscal year alone, sports brought in more than 200,000 visitors — thanks in no small part to substantial community investment and the leadership of the destination organization, Orlando North.
Download the report to learn how leaders in Seminole County are using destination data and innovative metrics to:
- Evaluate the lodging usage footprint of the 2016 Boombah Sports Complex
- Plan for a potential tourism improvement district and construction of a new indoor complex
- Foster understanding with stakeholders so they’ll go to bat for sports in Seminole County
- Uncover the broader community impact of sports tourism and the greater potential to elevate quality of place
Look for additional destination case studies later this summer and fall and into Advocacy Summit, digging into more personas and creative solutions to community challenges.
About the Author
Introduced to the world of destination organizations by a random internship application to Visit Baltimore (then known as Baltimore Area Convention & Visitors Association), Andreas Weissenborn began an unexpected career into hospitality that left him with a continued passion towards the tourism industry.
Weissenborn spent just short of 11 years with Visit Baltimore helping with its Research, Technology, and Information Systems across the organization. In 2017, he joined the Association on behalf of a Destinations International Foundation initiative to be a dedicated research source for Destinations International.
As part of his responsibilities, include supporting our core advocacy and research initiatives such as the community shared value, the tourism lexicon, the event impact calculator, and various reporting platforms, and our belief of destination promotion being a common good for the greater good.
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