Destination Management

What does it involve?

The County Durham Tourism Partnership is a Destination Management Organisation. Destination management covers six main areas of activity that relate to the visitor economy. The areas are listed below with a short explanation; all of them are interlinked. A destination is most successful when it has got all six areas right.

The County Durham Tourism Partnership has strategic responsibility for tourism, and therefore for destination management, in County Durham. However, many other people are involved in delivering destination management activities; one organisation cannot do it alone, which is why we are a partnership. The Partnership will take a different role in each of the areas depending on need and existing arrangements.

• Business Support

This is essentially providing support to tourism businesses to help them improve business performance and make them more profitable. The support can range from business planning and human resources advice, to accessing training, applying for grants, to finding investment capital and helping businesses gain accreditation or a quality mark.

• Information Services

Visitors need information to get the most out of their visit both at the planning stage and while they are on a short break or holiday. They get their information from a wide variety of sources - the internet, guide books, travel supplements, travel agents, tourist information centres, brochures, mobiles, recommendations from friends and family etc. A destination management organisation can help the visitor in many of these areas either directly or by working with commercial and non commercial information providers.

• Marketing

This is essentially about communicating what a destination has to offer to a customer so they decide to make a visit. The range of marketing activity aimed at the customer includes PR, direct marketing, advertising, campaigns, customer relationship management etc. Destination management organisations are also often involved in business to business marketing which is trying to influence third parties such as tour operators.

• Product Development

The product is what a destination sells through marketing and what we tell visitors about through information services - the hotels, B&Bs, attractions, events, shops, restaurants, landscapes etc. Destination management organisations can work in a whole range of ways, from capital projects such as building a new hotel, to raising standards through quality initiatives, to packaging up bits of a destination's product so that it is easier to sell and developing events to attract visitors.

• Visitor Experience

The environment that visitors experience when they visit a destination must meet their expectations or they won't return or recommend. Destination management organisations can get involved in many ways including signage, public realm - which means are the streets clean, are the car parks and loos up to scratch - as well as the kind of welcome that visitors get from businesses and the public. The tourism suite of 'welcome host' programmes all fit under visitor experience.

• Workforce Development

To ensure that visitors have a good experience when they visit a destination it is important that the people they meet, particularly those that they interact with in tourism businesses, are welcoming and professional. A destination management organisation can be involved in this area by working with employers to meet their training and skills needs, working with training and skills providers to ensure that programmes they run meet employers needs and participating in careers events and training activity.