The visitor experience begins with travelers' first exposure to a destination-- marketing materials or perhaps a friend's impression of a desination-- and never truly ends. Visitors relive the trip, sometimes for years, as they describe it to friends and page through their photo albums.
ESI believes that sound tourism development planning must address all aspects of the system influencing how visitors experience the destination. Commercial and non-profit attractions, hospitality industry members, local and state government agencies, and myriad others affect visitor satisfaction in both obvious and subtle ways. All play a role in producing an enjoyable travel experience that will motivate business and leisure visitors to return and recommend the distination to others.
Too often, tourism development organizations focus on producing brochures, building websites and placing ads, without examining how to improve the delivery of the visitor experience and persuade all players to adopt a visitor-centric approach to tourism development. Motivating the industry to take action for the common good entails understanding a destination's existing and potential markets and clarifying the potential benefits of realizing additional visitor activity.
But communities feature widely varying economic, historic, scenic, cultural, recreation, and organizational attributes. What makes sense for one area may not make sense for another. Ideally, however, all reinforce each other, contributing to the destination's competitiveness as a place to live, work and visit.