Modeling Destination Competitiveness: The Unfamiliar Shift for Destination Rebranding, Restructuring, and Repositioning With DMOs

Introduction And Background

One of the biggest challenges for the tourism industry is the need for travel destinations to enhance their competency holdings with an improvised competition and global market. This challenge is critical and crucial and is represented by various prominent complications. The increased competitiveness of the destination among international destinations perceived the significance of brand value and destination quality as an important element to make the destinations attractive. Concurrent studies have indicated the destination product as a widespread experience provided by the destinations in the tourism industry. This experience is emulated not by a single stakeholder but by many significant players/actors who engage in the travel and hospitality business. This is subsequently impacting the tourist experiences; mainly tourism stakeholders and other organizations supporting the DMOs and public sector who is often considered as the facilitator or aggregator who take the lead role which improvise public infrastructure such as roads and other general developments as well as government departments, other local residents and community.

The multiple stakeholder perspective in the tourism industry involves various supply and delivery services required for the tourist experience which make the destination management comparatively complicated than management of other products developed by a single organization. For effective and efficient tourism, there should be proper coordination and cooperation among the various participants. A collaborative effort by the Government bodies, local community, Non- Governmental Organizations and other stakeholders result in tourism success thereby leading to the success of the destination (zuzic, 2012). Tourism, being one of the largest economic sectors, plays a very important role in regional development.

To emerge successfully as a competent destination, the tourism sector should be backed by the strong network of policies, laws and decision-making capabilities. This calls for systematic planning and research before making giant leaps in the market. The fragmented nature of tourism industry requires utmost coordination and collaboration among its players. Tourism in its vitality plays a very critical and crucial role not only in the overall economic development but also in globalization and maintaining cordial relations at the global front. It unites the whole world to come together with fewer border concerns and facilitates being global. Tourism has a multiple benefit in the economy if not appropriately managed can even lead to exploitation of destination resources. This leads to a disaster component starting from limited employment opportunities for the local community to environmental issues and social deterioration. An unmanaged destination can also cause irrevocable and irreparable damages to the destination and its resources.

For effectively managing a destination, the government and the other regulatory bodies formulates policies and plans to standardize the tourism practices in a destination (Marzano & Scott, 2009).It is prominent that a destination modeling is a result of factors based on the destination cycle. Several DMOs most importantly marked quality and value as a significant element to rejuvenate the products and as critical objective to revitalize the destination. Depending on different approaches of developing tourism, destination is defined as an amalgam of various products and services that can attract various people beyond its spatial confines. Quality is the positive distinguishing characteristics, which is an initiative for destination marketing and pricing of a quality experience when combined perfectly will lead to a visitor feedback as value they got (Murphy, Pritchard, & Smith, 1999).