Exploring Destination Brand Communities: A Business Model For Collaboration In The Extremely Fragmented Tourism Industry

Intense global competition in the tourism industry forces destinations to develop strong, unique and competitive destination brands. This is not an easy task since the sector is extremely fragmented and many images are beyond their control. This working paper explores the concept of destination brand communities which provides a platform for facilitating connectivity, trust building and decision making amongst a wide range of tourism stakeholders and other related destination image producing industries, in order to develop and maintain a sustainable destination brand strategy. Furthermore, the destination brand community should try to emotionally connect with consumer communities in order to match its narratives with the hot buttons of the tourists, thereby creating significant pull effects. The final part of the paper addresses the design of the destination brand community in a polycontextual environment as it has to connect dispersed stakeholders with different backgrounds, cultures and interests. It is argued that destination brand communities should focus on making sense of mind space, social space, information space and material space in order to facilitate effective and efficient decision making.