A community creates a destination organization for one simple reason. It is not about heads in hotel beds, seats in restaurant seats, or return on investment. It is about helping a community achieve its goals by leveraging the power of destination promotion. This means that travel or destination professionals are essential, necessary, and extremely important to the vitality of a community.

Destination professionals bring strategies to achieve awareness and positive impressions, brand development, management and communication, promotion, marketing, sales, and visitor engagement. Destination organizations are the experts. They have the tools, knowledge, and relationships to provide the solutions. And most of all, they have something that no outside person will bring to the table: They have a love of their community to see it through.

We put this all in an infographic titled The Work of a Destination Organization, which we released at last fall’s Advocacy Summit. We call it the Community Vitality Wheel. Below, you can find a downloadable copy on our website here.   

We call it the Community Vitality Wheel because it shows how destination organizations and the destination professionals who work in them are catalysts for vitality in their communities. The other thing I said at the Advocacy Summit was that we in the destination organization field are essential, absolutely necessary, and very important. And I promised that Destinations International would prove it. On February 29th, we will keep that promise by releasing a new research report titled Destination Promotion: A Catalyst for Community Vitality. And we will share it with the world.

Mark your calendars – February 29th is Catalyst Day!