Pietro Beritelli

Developing places bears several challenging questions such as: “How can strategic initiatives be identified? How can we purposefully link businesses, attractions, and living spaces? How must we shape the environment of a place so that it allows for the emergence of a ‘good atmosphere’?” The case of Altdorf (CH) presents how a community first identified current activities by reconstructing flows of visitors. By doing so, they assessed the quality of services and the overall feeling about the town. Imminent new projects such as the enlargement of the main train station with the development of a new business centre as well as the new traffic concept in the town centre have triggered a new design of the place. This implied involving actors at different stages and combining spatial configuration and trajectories, infrastructure, services and heritage in a meaningful way. The case of Altdorf presents a practical and straightforward way of making the complexity and dynamics of a place well understandable to every person involved.

The practicalities of destination management present daunting challenges. We introduce «The Visitor Flow Approach» as a way to deal with those challenges. This practical approach to destination management is an example of how research on destination management can bridge the divide between insights and impact despite theorizing tourism as a complex social phenomenon. Specifically, we illustrate how Swisscontact, a development agency, blends the theory of flow-based destination management and the six–step method of the St. Gallen Model for Destination Management to create real impact in emerging and developing countries. We present their experiences and lessons learned from four specific contexts (Laos, Macedonia, Kosovo, and Indonesia) and additional applications across four continents.

The practicalities of destination management present daunting challenges. We introduce «The Visitor Flow Approach» as a way to deal with those challenges. This practical approach to destination management is an example of how research on destination management can bridge the divide between insights and impact despite theorizing tourism as a complex social phenomenon. Specifically, we illustrate how Swisscontact, a development agency, blends the theory of flow-based destination management and the six–step method of the St. Gallen Model for Destination Management to create real impact in emerging and developing countries.We present their experiences and lessons learned from four specific contexts (Laos, Macedonia, Kosovo, and Indonesia) and additional applications across four continents.

For actors in a tourism destination, the atmospheric turn initially means looking at themselves in a more holistic and differentiated way. Through the analysis of strategic visitor flows, it is possible to identify subspaces with high frequency, which thus become identification spaces of a destination. Together with other identification fields, they shape the destination brand understood as spatial and atmospheric entity. This enables a different view of a destination, its structure and generates new opportunities for destination management, which wll be discussed in the form of an outlook. A destination manager, for example, could in the future collaborate with governmental bodies responsible for spatial planning and with private builders on spatial design projects and introduce the perspective of the destination as a branded space.