Stewardship has become an increasingly important part of the conversation about the future of tourism. There are frameworks, research, strategic plans, conference sessions, and professional education helping destination professionals understand what stewardship means and why it matters. That foundation gives our industry shared language for talking about complex issues such as resident quality of life, visitor experience, sustainability, community engagement, accessibility, economic development, and the protection of natural and cultural resources.
But understanding stewardship and practicing stewardship are two different things. The real work begins when broad principles collide with everyday decisions.
Which three photos should be featured in the spring campaign?
How should a destination respond when residents are frustrated by tour buses traveling through their neighborhood?
Should a content creator be given access to a fragile natural area?
How should visitor center coverage change during a particularly busy weekend?
Which local vendors receive destination organization contracts?
What happens when the interests of visitors, residents, businesses, and community leaders don't neatly align?
These may look like marketing, operations, visitor services, procurement, or community relations decisions, but they're also stewardship decisions. Even if they don't appear on an organizational chart under a box labeled Stewardship.
This may be one of the biggest challenges and opportunities facing destination organizations as their roles continue to evolve. Stewardship belongs everywhere.
Marketing influences which places receive attention and which stories are amplified. Visitor services influences how travelers move through and understand a destination. Community engagement shapes relationships with residents. Leadership determines priorities, budgets, partnerships, and organizational culture. Operations, sales, finance, HR, and procurement all make decisions that affect the people and places a destination organization serves.
That creates an interesting paradox: When stewardship belongs to everyone, it can easily become no one's responsibility. The answer isn't necessarily creating another department. It's building an organization where people recognize the stewardship decisions they're already making and have the knowledge, resources, relationships, and confidence to make those decisions thoughtfully.
For destination marketers, stewardship may be hiding in plain sight. Every campaign makes choices about a place.
We decide which neighborhoods receive attention.
Which stories get amplified.
Which businesses get visibility.
Which experiences attract more demand.
Which images represent the people who live there.
Which places we invite visitors to discover.
And sometimes, which places may need a little less attention.
Content isn't neutral. Marketing can influence visitor behavior, distribute demand, introduce travelers to locally owned businesses, educate people about appropriate behavior, celebrate culture, set expectations, and help visitors better understand the community they're entering.
Those are stewardship decisions. That's also why destination marketers may need to look beyond reach, engagement, traffic, and conversions when evaluating success. Sometimes the better question is: What behavior are we creating?
The same thing happens on the frontline.
A visitor asks where to eat.
Someone needs an accessible experience.
A family wants something to do that isn't crowded.
A traveler doesn't understand why access to a particular place is restricted.
A resident walks into the visitor center frustrated about tourism.
These aren't simply customer service moments. They're opportunities to listen, educate, redirect, connect, and build trust. Frontline teams also see a side of the destination that leadership may not experience every day. They're hearing visitors' questions, confusion, frustrations, interests, and needs in real time. That information shouldn't stop at the visitor center desk. It should travel back through the organization.
Listening is part of stewardship, too.
The same principle applies to residents. Destination organizations can't begin building community trust only when they need support. Relationships need to exist before the difficult conversation, funding debate, overcrowding concern, crisis, or controversial decision. That means listening when there isn't an immediate problem to solve. It means helping residents understand tourism's role in their community while also being willing to hear where tourism creates friction.
It means creating opportunities for local people to influence how their home is represented and experienced. And it means recognizing that residents possess knowledge about their communities that can't always be found in a visitor profile, economic impact report, or dashboard. Community engagement shouldn't simply be something destinations do for residents. It should be something we build with them.
Some stewardship decisions are obvious. Others look like budgets, hiring decisions, vendor contracts, technology investments, partnerships, or internal policies. Leadership determines where resources go, which ideas receive support, whose voices are included, what gets measured, and what an organization ultimately prioritizes. Organizational culture matters here, too.
A destination organization can't credibly talk about community well-being, inclusion, collaboration, and sustainability externally if those values aren't reflected in how people work together internally. Stewardship isn't only about how an organization treats a destination. It's also reflected in how an organization operates within it.
Perhaps this is where the gap between understanding stewardship and practicing it becomes most important. A strategic plan can establish priorities and research can help us understand what's happening. Data can help us identify patterns and measure change and frameworks can give us a process.
Even with all of those resources and strategies, people still have to make decisions, and those people need opportunities to learn. Teams need space to discuss difficult scenarios, understand different perspectives, learn from data, listen to residents and visitors, question assumptions, and recognize how their individual decisions connect to larger destination goals.
They also need to be comfortable saying:
We don't know yet.
Let's ask.
Let's listen.
Let's learn.
Let's try something and pay attention to what happens.
Stewardship doesn't require having every answer. It requires building organizations capable of continually learning better questions.
The future of destination stewardship won't be determined only by the plans we create or the language we use to describe it. It will be shaped by thousands of decisions made throughout destination organizations every day. So perhaps one of the most useful places to start is with the decisions already sitting on our desks.
Ask:
Who benefits from this decision?
Who could be affected by it?
Whose perspective haven't we considered?
What behavior might this encourage?
What are we trying to protect?
What are we trying to improve?
What could we learn from what happens next?
Then ask one more question: Who owns this? You may discover that stewardship already exists throughout your organization. The opportunity is to make it more intentional.
About the Author - Sarah Benoit
Sarah Benoit is a marketing strategist, technology expert, and adult educator passionate about helping destinations, nonprofits, tourism businesses, and purpose-driven brands connect with their audiences through authentic storytelling and innovative digital marketing. Since 2003, Sarah has spent more than two decades helping organizations navigate emerging technologies, build meaningful relationships online, and develop sustainable marketing strategies that drive measurable results. As Lead Instructor at Learn Tourism, she is a sought-after speaker and trainer specializing in digital marketing, AI, social media, community engagement, and leadership. She empowers professionals to embrace change and lead with curiosity, creativity, emotional intelligence, and confidence. Through her work, Sarah champions lifelong learning and believes that technology is most powerful when it strengthens human connection.
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