Exclusively for Community Index Magazine, GUY BIGWOOD, Chief Changemaker and CEO @ Global Destination Sustainability Movement shared valuable insights regarding the current status and the bright future of destination management.
The Global Destination Sustainability Movement (GDS-Movement) unites and enables destination management professionals to create flourishing and resilient places to visit, meet, and live in. Its mission is to co-create sustainable and circular strategies, mindsets, and skill sets to enable destinations of the future to thrive, and society and nature to regenerate.
For 17 years, Guy Bigwood has been delivering award-winning consulting services focused on helping cities, governments, corporations, and associations to step up, scale up and speed up their sustainability programmes and regenerative practices. Guy’s pioneering work has been recognised with 22 sustainability awards, including the Events Industry Council Pacesetter Award and recognition as a Fellow of the Institute of Environmental Management and Assessment.
1. The Global Destination Sustainability Movement brings together the sustainability pioneers of the business and leisure tourism world and works with destinations to benchmark, measure, and improve their sustainability performance in order to catalyse regeneration. How does the GDS-Movement manage to unite the destination community in order to create flourishing and resilient places to visit, meet, and live in?
GDS-Movement unites destinations based on shared goals to develop the visitor economy so that people, the planet, and profits can prosper. It achieves this in a variety of ways.
It offers the leading sustainability benchmarking and improvement programme for destinations around the world, the GDS-Index.
The GDS-Academy, an immersive learning experience, provides training for event and destination management professionals to turn sustainability concepts into action. Courses like the “Certificate in Regenerative Destination Management” and the “Storytelling and Communication Strategies for Regeneration Masterclass” receive great feedback from the participants.
As a community, we encourage knowledge sharing for all destinations through Feeling the Pulse webinars, white papers, reports, benchmarking insights, and best practice recommendations.
GDS-Movement works with destinations in a consulting capacity to assist their regenerative endeavours in vision and strategy development, capacity building, stakeholder engagement, and communications.
2. The GDS-Index is a benchmarking tool that measures and ranks global destinations based on their sustainability performance in the tourism and events industry. How are the Destination Management Organizations (DMOs) that are benchmarked changing the way they work to become more sustainable?
By participating in GDS-Index, destinations commit to a long-term journey to improve their sustainable contributions with GDS-Movement’s support. They commit to measuring the social, environmental, and economic performance of their tourism and events industry, and then work to improve its performance.
They do this by increasingly engaging, educating, and involving their stakeholders in the co-creation of new solutions. They build their staff and supply chain capacity with tools, sustainability training, standards, and certifications. They empower and support their partners to create new experiences and services in the destination, and to develop a culture of positive storytelling and inspiring communications.
Destinations Tirol, Geneva, Goyang, and Belfast developed noteworthy sustainable strategies with consulting support from GDS-Movement. These strategies are well aligned to the GDS-Index criteria, and therefore to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (UN SDGs), making them more comprehensive and impactful.
3. What are the benefits of a global benchmarking system for destinations that evaluates sustainability performance?
Key benefits of joining the leading sustainable destination benchmarking and performance improvement programme include:
1. Benchmark to drive better decision making
2. Gain expert advice to improve strategy
3. Catalyse collaboration and innovation within a destination
4. Offer clients a trusted third-party endorsement
5. Promote a destination’s sustainability story
6. Save money and time – GDS-Movement knows what is necessary to become a regenerative destination.
The winner of GDS-Movement Most Improved Award is a great example – Lyon, France through the Office du Tourisme & des Congres du Grand Lyon. In 2021, Lyon made the most dramatic improvement in one year with a whopping 42% increase in its overall benchmarking score, thanks to year-on-year improvement in the supplier and DMO performance categories. We salute their continued efforts.
4. In 2020, the GDS-Movement team was recognised as the winner of IMEX-EIC Innovation in Sustainability Award, “the Oscars” of the Sustainable Events industry. Why is the MICE industry a powerful accelerator of sustainable development and competitiveness?
Unlike leisure travel, the MICE industry generally involves more participants, which demands more hotel rooms, bigger F&B providers, better transportation systems, and more resources, forming much bigger and more complex value chains. With its larger scope, the MICE industry generates larger impacts, too, which can accelerate sustainable development if approached strategically. MICE has many stakeholders, thanks to its vast supply chain. The knock-on effect of investing in its own sustainability is that it can also empower others to do the same, leading to exponential positive impacts.
5. Which MICE destinations around the world are winning the sustainability race?
We do not see sustainability as a race, as sustainability has no finish line – we can always do more for all to flourish and profit more. Instead, we view it as a regenerative journey that is not about competitive advantage but rather a collaborative advantage.
Destinations like Iceland, Zurich, Vienna, and Hawaii have chosen a 5-to-10-year timeframe to achieve their goals through their sustainability strategy. Other destinations may map their own path appropriate to their capacity and context, and we offer support every step of the way.
We see some destinations in the GDS-Index making amazing progress thanks to their tremendous improvement in the regeneration journey. GDS-Movement awards these destinations with our special ‘Most-Improved Award’ and Goyang (2018), Ireland (2019), and Lyon (2021) have each won the award at a critical stage in their evolution. We hope to see more destinations reaching their pace (and exceeding it!) in the coming years.
6. You consider 2021 “a tipping-point year, not only for increased action in sustainability but also as the year when regenerative thinking started to be more widely integrated into destination management and stewardship plans – the year when destination management really took precedence over destination marketing.“ What can DMOs do to accelerate this Regenerative Revolution and build back better?
We encourage destinations already participating in the GDS-Index to continue this journey as data shows that consistent benchmarking improves overall sustainability performance.
A strong sustainability strategy is the single-most effective tool for positive systemic change, but it often takes a mindset shift to see the value of that systemic change, which our immersive, collaborative learning experience through the GDS-Academy offers.
We invite those destinations not benchmarking to join the GDS-Movement and accelerate regenerative revolution with us. Our knowledge-sharing platforms including Feeling the Pulse webinars, white papers, reports, newsletters and social media, provide insightful information and data to support a destination’s regeneration journey. We support this by developing sustainability strategies or providing in-house workshops and GDS-Academy courses.
7. Unfortunately, some destination marketers only reference sustainability in promotion, as it is something that is not part of their KPIs. What can destination marketers do to encourage a sustainable, post-pandemic tourism experience that would reopen borders and truly revive the tourism economy?
Yes, unfortunately, that is sometimes true. But these destinations will get “caught out” by their stakeholders and at some stage will have to step up and scale up their actions.
Instead of merely marketing a destination, DMO professionals can:
- Focus on destination management or “changing the system”, by educating, advocating, and developing new policies and initiatives that will improve the destination and make it a better place to visit.
- Bring stakeholders together to co-create their destination’s sustainability strategies with shared objectives, indicators, targets, and systematic methods for achieving them.
- Deepen brand integrity by basing strategic sustainability messaging on goals, actions and results, rather than basing actions on intentions and aspirations.
- Communicate the destination’s sustainability story consistently, humbly, and honestly, using facts and people-based stories. Not telling your story – “green hushing” – is as damaging as greenwashing. Green hushing is when a destination fails to tell of its efforts (perhaps because it feels they aren’t bold enough); greenwashing is claiming to be doing more than there is evidence for. Our motto in the GDS-Movement is that it’s “Progress over Perfection” that counts!
Convention Tirol is a prime example. With support from GDS-Movement, Tirol created a sustainability strategy and an associated action plan with precise measures. These were developed in a collaborative and co-creative process with interdisciplinary working groups, under the title of “RegenerationNOW“. This sustainability strategy consists of 46 measures which were derived from 4 key objectives and 19 impact goals and are set to be completed within a year. This example serves as an inspiration for other destinations to build a more sustainable post-pandemic tourism experience.
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