The Community Vitality Wheel: Rethinking Destination Marketing and Management

The Community Vitality Wheel – Source: www.destinationsinternational.org

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In the evolving landscape of tourism, destination marketing and management is no longer just about attracting visitors: it’s about building thriving, resilient, and inclusive places.

The Community Vitality Wheel, introduced by Destinations International, offers a compelling framework to rethink the role of destination management organizations and elevate their impact on the broader community.

At its core, the model is a virtuous cycle connecting four key dimensions: Visit – Live – Work – Invest.

Each phase builds on the previous, showing how effective tourism promotion can lead to wider economic growth, improved quality of life, and sustainable place development.

It All Starts with a Visit

The Community Vitality Wheel begins with an apparently simple statement (adapted from a concept developed by Maura Gast, Visit Irving Texas):

“If you build a place people want to visit, you build a place where they’ll want to live, work, and invest.“

This is the starting point for community vitality.

Destination promotion acts as a first trigger, drawing attention, resources, and energy toward a place.

But this is only the beginning.

The real value lies in what happens after the visit.

1. Visit: Visibility and experience are the gateway. Visitors discover the destination, contribute to its economy, and share their stories.
2. Live: If the experience is positive and the place is welcoming, some visitors may choose to stay, relocate, or even advocate for the destination.
3. Work: A livable destination attracts talent, remote workers, and entrepreneurs, who bring new skills and opportunities.
4. Invest: When people want to work and live in a place, public and private investments follow, reinforcing infrastructure, services, and local identity.

This is not a linear process; it’s a loop.

Once a destination reaches the “invest” stage, the cycle restarts and accelerates. Investment improves the destination’s attractiveness, encouraging new visits, and so the wheel keeps turning.

Strategic Roles in Destination Management

A key insight from this model is that keeping the wheel in motion requires more than just communication efforts.

Destination Management Organizations (DMO) must take on three interconnected strategic roles:

1. Brand Management

Branding isn’t just about logos or slogans. It’s about curating the narrative of the place, managing perceptions, and reinforcing a shared identity for all audiences: visitors, residents, investors, and talent.

Strategic Questions:

• Are we managing a brand that reflects both external appeal and internal authenticity?
• How does our place brand support long-term reputation and trust?

2. Place Stewardship and Investment

Destination Management Organizations must become stewards of place value, ensuring that tourism growth aligns with community interests, environmental limits, and economic resilience.

Strategic Actions:

• Support investment in infrastructure and services that benefit both tourists and residents.
• Prioritize inclusive development and accessibility.
• Collaborate with planners, educators, cultural institutions, and NGOs.

Strategic Questions:

• Are we creating a destination that supports well-being, not just footfall?
• Are we aligning our efforts with sustainability and regeneration principles?

3. Communication and Sales

Sales and communication remain essential, but they must be data-informed, community-backed, and strategically aligned. The goal is to attract the right people at the right time, for the right reasons.

Strategic Questions:

• Are our campaigns attracting high-value, low-impact audiences?
• Are we balancing seasonal flows and spreading benefits across the destination?

Rethinking KPIs: From Tourism Metrics to Vitality Indicators

Traditional tourism KPIs (arrivals, occupancy, spend) are insufficient to measure community impact.

The Community Vitality Wheel encourages us to adopt a new set of metrics, including:

• Resident satisfaction and tourism sentiment
• Talent attraction and retention
• Business investment and startup rates
• Housing affordability and inclusivity
• Environmental footprint and regeneration capacity
• Cultural vibrancy and local identity

These metrics help us answer a bigger question:
Is our destination becoming a better place to live, not just to visit?

From Transactional to Transformational Tourism

This model also aligns with broader trends in tourism innovation:

• Regenerative tourism: Moving beyond minimizing harm to actively creating benefits for nature and communities.
• Community tourism: Empowering local people to shape the experience economy on their own terms.
• Remote work and lifestyle migration: Attracting long-stay visitors who may become residents or investors.
• Cross-sector integration: Aligning tourism with health, education, housing, and mobility policies.

Final Thoughts: Building the Future of Places

The Community Vitality Wheel is a call to action for all destination leaders: Let’s stop thinking of tourism as an end in itself, and instead use it as a tool for place-making, community building, and social progress.

It challenges us to ask:

• Are we managing tourism to serve the long-term needs of our communities?
• Are we designing experiences that reinforce belonging, identity, and pride?
• Are we promoting our destinations with integrity and purpose?

If the answer is yes, we are no longer just destination managers.

We are community catalysts and this is the future of destination management.

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Dive deeper into the model and download the visual toolkit here:
Destinations International – Community Vitality Wheel