They're Not Plans. They're Manifestos.

There is a word we use constantly when talking about tourism: plan. Strategic tourism plan. Regional plan. Destination plan.

The problem is that these documents, more often than not, have very little to do with what we normally mean by a plan. A plan should tell us at least three things: who does what, by when, and how we will know whether it has been done.

Together with Claude, I read 16 documents of this kind: one national, eight regional and seven at destination level. I wanted to understand one very simple thing: when these documents declare an objective, can we tell who is supposed to achieve it and when it will have been achieved? In most cases, no.

And to my mind this does not mean they are badly written documents. It means that we are often calling a plan something that is, in reality, a manifesto.

Look at the sentences, not the titles

To get at this I classified the sentences declaring objectives according to two very simple criteria. First: is there someone who acts? Second: is there something we can verify? A date, a number, a threshold, a result. The outcome is fairly clear-cut. 77% of sentences have neither an acting subject nor a measurable criterion. Only 2% have both.

And there is another curious figure: in 54% of the objective-sentences there is not even a conjugated verb. We do not find "the Region will increase". We find "increase of". Not "the Municipality will develop", but "development of". It looks like a grammatical difference. It is not.

If I write "the Region will increase average length of stay", someone is going to have to increase it. And we can verify whether it happened. If I write "increase of average length of stay", I have already removed from the sentence the subject who is supposed to do it.

It is a small linguistic trick and a very effective one: it turns an action into a noun and makes it much harder to hold anyone accountable for the action.

The problem is not that they are badly written

The temptation is to say: these plans are full of vague words. But that would be too easy a criticism. The point is something else. These documents often do a different job — and do it quite well — from what we expect of a plan: they define a vision, select certain priorities, build a shared language, tell operators, administrators and citizens what kind of tourism they would like to have.

All of this is useful. In fact, in a tourist destination it can be very important. But it is not yet programming. "Enhancing the cultural heritage to strengthen the destination's competitiveness" is a sentence that hardly anyone can dispute. And that is precisely the problem: it is also hard to understand what should concretely happen for us to be able to say the objective has been reached.

Perhaps we need to change the name

That is why I think there is a very simple solution: stop calling a plan what is not a plan. We could call it a manifesto. A manifesto has a precise function: it says where we want to go. It does not necessarily have to tell us who will do what next Tuesday. It does not need a threshold for every sentence. It does not need to turn every aspiration into a KPI.

A manifesto can say: "We want a more liveable destination". Fine. That is a political and strategic choice. But then another document is needed, one that says: who must do what, by when and with what expected result. That is a plan.

The problem arises when the two documents become one. And above all when the manifesto is presented as though it also contained the plan.

So do we throw the manifestos away?

No. Quite the opposite.

A destination — or more precisely an institution charged with a public task — needs a vision. It needs to debate what it wants to contribute. It needs to build consensus around certain priorities. The problem is pretending that a vision can also do the work of an operational plan. They are two different things. And they can perfectly well coexist.

The manifesto says where the organisation wants to go.

The plan says how we try to get there, who must do what, and how we will check whether we managed it.

There is no need to turn every strategic document into a gigantic Excel spreadsheet. What is needed is something far simpler. Alongside the grand declarations, a few lines:

Objective → responsible party → action → deadline → measure.

That is all. It is not particularly sexy.

But at least, after three years, we can open the document and understand whether we did what we said we would.

And perhaps that is the point.

We do not need to stop writing manifestos. We just need to stop putting the cover "Strategic Tourism Plan" on them.

Because if it is a manifesto, that is perfectly fine.

But if we call it a plan, sooner or later someone might expect to find a plan inside.

*cover image generated with AI