Destination leadership: a new approach to managing destinations
Tourism researchers and practitioners have developed different approaches to help
understand and promote the sustainable competitiveness of tourist destinations (see,
e.g. Kozak and Rimmington, 1999; Ritchie and Crouch, 2003; Bramwell and Lane, 2011).
Whereas destination planning adopted a spatial and infrastructural perspective that made
great efforts to integrate a range of development goals into the context of tourism concepts
and guidelines (see Goeldner and Ritchie, 2006), destination management complemented
this with a sophisticated business orientation inspired by strategic and operative
management. Destination governance became concerned with the inter-organizational
ties and organizational boundaries in destinations as well as with steering flows across them.
Processes and structures became the focus. Destination leadership sets out to complement
the structural and procedural perspective of destination governance by considering the role
played by emotions, creativity and values in destinations.