Mountain IDEAL LEARNING SERIES

Practical insights and effective steps for building a destination stewardship framework.

The tourism industry in resort, rural, recreation, and gateway communities is driven by outdoor recreation activities on public lands. Public lands provide refuge for endangered species, protect water quality, act as carbon sinks, and are increasingly popular with new and established outdoor recreation users. And this popularity is creating big city challenges in the small communities that surround these public lands. This includes: affordable housing and short-term rental dynamics; infrastructure, traffic and congestion; strained public and environmental resources; and under-funded land managers having to tackle overuse impacts and climate change realities. Now, more than ever, our community stakeholders need to reimage the purpose of tourism. Tourism can no longer be solely an economic goal; it needs to become a purposeful tool that invests in visitor experience, sense of place, and quality of life.

For nearly twenty years, sustainable tourism has been a concept for private industry to balance their triple bottom line. More recently, there is a call for tourism to do more than just sustain, highlighting a growing need for regenerative best practices. In destinations around the world, tourism stakeholders are convening with municipality managers, land managers, civic groups, and local residents to address issues around common pool resources which, if diminished, impact the entire community. This is known as destination stewardship and has been successful as a transformative model to improve quality of life attributes, enhance visitor experience, and safeguard a sense of place.

The Mountain IDEAL Program is a destination stewardship toolkit based on international best practices for sustainable destination management. The learning sessions will focus on how to incrementally install best practices that can help your destination meet these challenges.