Tourism is measured in value

Not a destination to promote, but a territory to strengthen.

For years we have built tourism policy around the concept of the destination: identify the attractions, build the product, promote it, bring in visitors, rack up overnight stays.

It's a model with its own internal logic, and it still offers useful monitoring indicators. But today it risks being incomplete.

A destination shouldn't only be asking how to become more attractive — it should above all be asking how to become stronger. Because a destination is not just hotels, restaurants, museums, events and attractions. It's businesses, workers, residents, farmers, craftspeople, shopkeepers, infrastructure, housing, services, culture, environment and relationships.

The visitor enters this system temporarily and brings with them something very important: external demand.

But the point is not just knowing how much the tourist spends. It's understanding how many economic activities that spending manages to activate, how much value it generates along the chain, and how much of that value stays in the territory.

This framing inevitably changes governance too. If tourism is treated as a separate sector, the decision-making table will be made up mainly of tourism operators. If instead tourism is treated as a lever for territorial development, those who are not in tourism must also have a seat at the table: Commerce | Agriculture | Crafts | Culture | Construction | Mobility | Education | Labour. And above all, residents.

Not to create yet another consultative roundtable, but because tourism value is born from the interaction between these actors.

The tourism plan, then, could evolve into something different: a concrete territorial development plan, in which tourism represents one of the main levers of demand and economic activation. There is no need to abolish the tourism plan. What is needed is to broaden its function.

If a destination has no strong leisure tourism vocation today, it might have a business one tomorrow. The growth of a territory — especially for smaller municipalities — is not found in tourism; it is found in the capacity to attract even small public and private investments, to create employment that is ideally year-round, to attract young people by guaranteeing them efficient basic services. For tourism development to be genuine, it must start from territorial development, and to do that it must speak first and foremost to residents.

A more useful dashboard

If the objective is not just to attract visitors but to strengthen the territory, the measurement system must evolve too. Alongside arrivals, overnight stays and average length of stay, a destination can adopt a territorial tourism value dashboard articulated — for example — across four dimensions:

Dimension	Guiding question	Examples of indicators
Flows	How many visitors arrive?	Arrivals, overnight stays, average length of stay, seasonality
Value	How much do they spend, and where?	Average spend, total spend, estimated value added
Local retention	How much stays in the territory?	Share of local purchases, territorial suppliers, external intermediation
Territorial benefit	What improves for the place?	Year-round employment, permanent business openings, accessibility, distribution of spend, residents' perception

Cumbria: the plan that treats tourism as an economy

The English county of Cumbria (Lake District, Hadrian's Wall) has written a Destination Management Plan 2024–2030 that starts from a different question: how much economic value does tourism generate, and how much of it stays in the territory.

The body that manages it, Cumbria Tourism, is — among other things — a self-financing business development hub that creates value.

Looking at its services, you discover that the organisation offers territory businesses — not tourists — bespoke agency-style marketing, market research and visitor behaviour intelligence, B2B marketing opportunities reserved for local suppliers, destination PR activity, and even office space and meeting rooms for hire. It is a non-profit organisation that reinvests its commercial revenues into benefits for businesses and the sector.

How many Italian tourism offices genuinely offer this to local businesses? Market research accessible to a small operator? Support in intercepting grants and funding? Promotion of external investment in the territory? Shared marketing for those who cannot afford an agency? Physical spaces for businesses to meet? Many local authorities still concentrate their resources on the institutional communication of the territory rather than on business development. That is a huge difference, and it is probably the easiest one to close — because it requires no new laws: it only requires deciding, for instance, that the tourism office (or perhaps the Pro Loco, the local voluntary tourism association) starts working from tomorrow for the territory's businesses, not just for the municipality's image and visitor welcome.

The World Travel & Tourism Council (WTTC) says as much in its latest report, Destination Stewardship: Creating Value for All: the conversation must move beyond visitor numbers, towards how destinations manage growth.

Some principles and examples of what cities that applied them have done:

The WTTC summarises them in seven points in its report. Here are some useful prompts for an Italian administration, with a concrete example for each.

Understand before you act. In Benidorm it seemed as though water supplies were insufficient to sustain tourism. An analysis showed the problem was network efficiency, not demand: today the city recovers 95% of water within its own water cycle and has become a European model. A note for those who see tourist taxes as the solution to overcrowding: the WTTC points out that in the majority of cases they have minimal or zero impact on visitor numbers. They raise cash, but they don't regulate pressure.

Distribute across time and space. The mayor of Dubrovnik put it this way: "the problem wasn't the numbers, it was the flow" (euronews.com, 24/07/2026). Previously, five or six cruise ships would arrive on the same day. Now a maximum of two dock, with stays of at least eight hours, and visits to the historic centre are staggered: the numbers remain high, the pressure does not. The same principle applied elsewhere: spreading arrivals across more seasons and more places reduces pressure without turning anyone away.

Listen to residents the way you listen to arrivals data. Switzerland has added a new indicator alongside nightly stays: "tourism acceptance" — the percentage of the population with a positive perception of the sector. If it falls, it is as much a warning signal as a drop in revenue.

Plan with data before the emergency. Bogotá has built an annual visitor behaviour survey system since 2021. In 2026 it became the first city with over 8 million inhabitants to be recertified as a Smart Tourist Destination, exceeding 80% of an international standard on governance, sustainability, accessibility and innovation.

Return value in a traceable way. In Barcelona the tourist tax finances public projects listed one by one online: whoever pays the tourist tax can see exactly where that money goes.

Have a plan before the crisis. In Athens, access to the Acropolis has for some years been on a booked time-slot basis, with a cap of 20,000 visitors per day decided before the site reached breaking point, not after.

Tell residents what is changing, with real data. In Ljubljana an annual campaign explains to citizens what tourism funds in the city. In 2024, 23% of those who saw it reported that their opinion of the sector had improved (figure cited in the WTTC report).

All these examples, however, assume that tourism has already arrived. Not every destination has a tourism vocation: there are territories where tourism has not yet come, and perhaps never will in any recognisable form. No hotels, no flows to measure. For these territories the entire reasoning laid out above is premature, and it would be a mistake to force it.

But the principle underpinning it remains the same — indeed, it becomes clearer: a territory does not grow because tourists arrive. It grows because it has already decided, before anyone turns up, what it wants to become. If tourism does arrive, it will find that decision already made. Tourism will not be the one making it on the territory's behalf.

The difference between destinations that hold up and those that burn out is not how many visitors arrive. It is whether the territory, even before the tourist, already knows who it wants to be.

A strong territory decides what role to give tourism. A weak one settles for whatever tourism leaves behind.