Reimagining Tourism’s Purpose: Why place is the anchor we've been searching for

Reimagining Travel’s Purpose in a Changing World

World Travel Market (WTM) London hasn’t held back in 2025. Its headline theme, “Reimagining Travel’s Purpose in a Changing World,” is frank, timely, and thought-provoking.

That this question is being tabled by World Travel Market London, which is one of the industry’s biggest, most mainstream, and most commercially driven gatherings, makes it all the more significant. WTM is a global showcase of destination marketing and a place-promotion powerhouse. So for it to spotlight purpose over promotion marks a striking and timely shift.

It doesn’t point to minor course corrections. It suggests a deeper shift, a questioning of the very foundation we’ve built tourism on.

It speaks directly to those working in or with the public sector, to those in national, regional and local authorities who are tasked not only with developing tourism, but with ensuring that it delivers real value for people and places.

Because the question at the heart of this theme is not simply: How do we grow?

It’s not even: How do we grow sustainably?

It is: Why do we exist in the first place?

It is also: Who and what are we here to serve... really?

Multiple Purposes, Competing Priorities

One of the enduring tensions in tourism strategy is that we’re navigating multiple definitions of success – jobs, revenue, airport arrivals, length of stay, visitor satisfaction. These metrics are familiar, even useful. Yet on their own, they fall short in a world where climate stress, cultural fragility, and community wellbeing are rising to the top of the agenda.

We are stuck in measuring those things that are now easy to count – volume, spend, online visibility. We are being challenged to measure those things that speak to purpose - the health of places, the vitality of culture, the resilience of local businesses, the lived experience of host communities.

Public sector leaders know this tension well. It shows up in funding decisions, in community consultations, in policy reviews, and in trying to square national targets with local realities. There is now a constant challenge to balance ambition and growth with responsibility and stewardship.

So WTM’s theme of reimagining purpose is not an abstract one. It’s really practical and highly pertinent.

Why Place Can Become an Anchor

This idea of reimagining purpose resonates strongly with us.  

While tourism can mean many things to many people, it only exists because of place. More than that, it only thrives when place thrives. That simple truth is often overlooked in traditional tourism frameworks, which tend to focus on visitors, products, and infrastructure. Place is often treated as a backdrop or a resource, something to be packaged and promoted, rather than the living system that makes everything else possible.

But what if the place isn’t the product for tourism?
What if the place is the point of tourism? What if it’s the true purpose of tourism?

Every tourism experience is a direct interaction with the place – its lands, its streets, its people, its culture, its atmosphere.  Every decision we make in tourism affects that place, whether we acknowledge it or not.

At The Tourism Space, we have been using The Place Paradigm™ for quite a while, as a framework that reflects this shift and re-orientates on purpose. Instead of asking ‘How do we get more visitors here?’ or ‘How do we get them to spend longer and more?’, we start by asking ‘What does this place need in order to thrive? What does success look like for this place now and 100 years from now?’  And once we have a clear and shared vision on that, then we get to ask ‘How can tourism help bring that about?’  

This shift changes everything. It reframes tourism from a numbers game to a regenerative force. It centres decisions on the lived reality of communities and ecosystems, not just market segments. It generates experiences that are authentic and rooted in that place. Crucially, it gives us a share anchor - something that all stakeholders, from policymakers to local residents to visitors, can connect to. Place becomes the Point of Common Purpose and offers a way to align diverse priorities around something tangible, meaningful, and enduring.

A Quiet Shift is Underway

In recent years, we’ve seen more and more public sector professionals exploring a deeper alignment between tourism and place. Some because they are personally motivated to do so, others because they are professionally mandated to do so.

They’re asking and sitting with a host of questions:

• How do we build strategies that reflect the distinctiveness of each place?
• How can we support community participation and nurture social licence?
• How do we design investment and development frameworks that replenish rather than deplete?
• How do we know we’re making a difference? What should we actually be measuring if our true aim is to support thriving places?

These are not easy questions. They demand cross-departmental thinking, whole systems thinking, and deeply courageous leadership. They also call for spaces where new ideas can be explored openly, old patterns questioned honestly, and shared priorities redefined with care.  (As it happens, those are exactly the kind of spaces that we specialise in hosting and facilitating.)

If you’re a senior tourism leader grappling with how to reframe, refocus, or renew your destination’s approach, it’s clear that this is not a solo journey.  As WTM’s conference-wide theme for this year demonstrates, the reimagining of tourism’s purpose is no longer a fringe folly. It sits firmly front and centre on the mainstream stage.

If you'd like to know more about The Place Paradigm or our strategic listening and speaking spaces, email [email protected] to set up a chat.