Tourism Lexicon
The Tourism Lexicon is a curated vocabulary resource destination organizations should use to effectively articulate their work and the value of destination promotion. Destinations International (DI) updates the Tourism Lexicon annually, reflecting how politicians discussed common or public goods in the preceding year. This analysis informs the ranking and ordering of terms, revealing emerging themes and values crucial for destination organizations to understand and leverage.
Tourism Lexicon
Words matter in politics, and they need to be chosen carefully to carry an emotional connection to people’s values and the values of our industry
Destinations International has made the case that relying merely on ROI numbers to defend the value and relevancy of a destination organization was no longer a viable advocacy strategy. Instead, we argued, destination organizations need to support the message of ROI in terms of dollars and cents with an emotional and value-based appeal to convince political leaders and community stakeholders that without a destination organization, these returns will inevitably vanish.
Read the Policy Brief
Learn about how destinations can use language to frame the conversation about how destination organizations are a critical community benefit.
International Lexicons
Our advocacy team has developed different versions of the lexicon based on analysis of local political and media databases.
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.