The line between travel, staying in a place, work, and lifestyle choices is becoming increasingly blurred. In the age of artificial intelligence and new forms of mobility, the relationship between people and places is changing, and destinations face a new challenge: shifting from marketing tourist flows to a broader approach to managing their appeal.
In the tourism industry, we’ve always asked ourselves why someone would choose a particular place, which markets to target, what positioning to establish, what experiences to develop, and how to make a destination recognizable and desirable.
We’ll naturally continue to do so, but today that same question seems to have broadened.
The 18th edition of BTO is dedicated to Offbeat Tribes: increasingly fluid and temporary tribes, rapidly changing behaviors, and a sense of belonging shaped in part by algorithms and recommendation systems. For regions and operators, the criteria for relevance are also changing: being recognizable to people and, increasingly, to the automated systems that influence their choices.
People, behaviors, and travel patterns are changing, and it’s inevitable to wonder whether the very meaning of “destination” can remain the same.
The line between visitor, temporary resident, student, remote worker, professional, and new and current resident is becoming increasingly blurred: a trip can turn into a longer stay, a temporary experience can evolve into a professional or personal relationship, a student may decide to stay after graduation, and a remote worker who arrived for a few weeks may choose to stay longer.
Not every tourist will become a resident. But the relationship between people and places is becoming increasingly complex: the traditional customer journey can thus evolve into a sort of community journey, continuing well beyond check-out.
From Destination Marketing to Complex Regional Attractiveness
All it takes is to compare data on who is arriving with data on who is leaving to reveal an increasingly obvious contradiction: some areas may become more desirable while at the same time becoming more vulnerable from a demographic, social, and economic standpoint.
As early as 2023, the European Commission identified 82 regions—accounting for nearly 30% of the EU’s population—that were severely affected by a decline in the working-age population, a low proportion of college graduates, or negative youth mobility. This is the phenomenon that Europe refers to as the “Talent Development Trap”: a combination of demographic trends, economic weakness, skills shortages, and reduced innovative capacity in so-called fragile areas.
It is no coincidence that the concept of the “Right to Stay” has also entered the European debate. The Commission is preparing a strategy focused on regions experiencing population decline and, as part of the review of cohesion policy, links the right to stay to the availability of jobs, public services, education, and healthcare.
The “Right to Stay” does not call into question the freedom of movement; rather, it highlights the need to create conditions that make leaving, returning, or staying genuine choices.
This is where the topic fully intersects with tourism, place branding, and regional appeal.
Through its “Rethinking Regional Attractiveness” program, the OECD takes a comprehensive approach to assessing regions’ ability to attract investors, talent, and visitors: its Regional Attractiveness Compass goes beyond a purely economic interpretation of attractiveness and links connectivity, appeal to visitors, the natural environment, residents’ well-being, land use, and housing.
What makes a place interesting to visit and what makes it interesting to live in are not the same thing, but they increasingly belong to the same territorial value proposition. A destination can be extraordinarily desirable for a few days and, at the same time, see its services, opportunities, and quality of daily life decline.
Simon Anholt explained this well when discussing “competitive identity”: a place’s reputation is built through strategy, substance, and consistent actions, and communication cannot substitute for what is lacking in reality.
This is why regional marketing cannot become a narrative compensation for what the region can no longer sustain. Portraying a destination as authentic, welcoming, vibrant, and desirable requires that this promise be fulfilled even beyond the short-term visit; otherwise, we risk crafting a beautiful story about a place whose everyday reality tells a very different story.
A destination’s appeal, then, depends on the consistency between what we promise to those who arrive and what the place offers to those who stay.
A smart destination brings together human and digital intelligence
Digital technology, too, is changing scale. In tourism, we’ve approached the digitization of destinations primarily in terms of the travel experience: inspiring, informing, selling, guiding visitors, and collecting data on their behavior. Today, that same infrastructure supports much broader and more enduring forms of engagement with the destination.
A city’s online reputation—what algorithms associate with a place—the quality and accessibility of information, maps, community-generated content, digital services, and connectivity all contribute to shaping how the city is perceived, along with the ability to easily find information on transportation, events, coworking spaces, career opportunities, education, and cultural life.
Generative artificial intelligence makes this continuity even more evident. The same system can be used to choose a vacation, find a place to work, or evaluate a potential move. A region’s online presence therefore requires information that is understandable, structured, and consistent across the various digital ecosystems that guide our choices.
It’s one of the themes that BTO 2026 places at the heart of Offbeat Tribes: interpreting signals, data, and new communities using tools already familiar to the tourism industry—destination intelligence, behavioral analysis, CRM, community building, digital reputation, and content personalization—to engage with increasingly fluid audiences and maintain a connection that can extend beyond the trip.
A useful benchmark comes from Singapore, where the Singapore Tourism Board has developed STAN—the Singapore Tourism Analytics Network—an infrastructure that provides public and industry data, analytical tools, and experimental environments to support businesses and stakeholders in their decision-making. The most interesting aspect concerns the governance model: various entities share data and tools to build a richer understanding of the destination and translate that understanding into decisions.
The perspective broadens even further by bringing together information that currently belongs to different domains. Arrivals, visits, demand, reputation, and mobility tell us, above all, who arrives, when, and how they move; understanding longer-term relationships between people and places will increasingly require supplementing these indicators—through aggregated and interoperable data, while respecting privacy—with information on length of stay, return visits, housing, professional opportunities, use of services, and participation in communities.
This opens the door to a broader form of destination intelligence that focuses on people’s journeys over time: who arrives, what they’re looking for, and what happens next.
Eindhoven: From Acquisition to Retention
This is a topic that BTO had already touched on in 2023, when—as part of the Destination program—we explored how regions could become attractive to tourists, talent, and new digital communities. Among the case studies presented was the best practice of Eindhoven365, the city marketing organization for the city of Eindhoven.
Its 2022–2030 strategy marks a shift in perspective: after years of focusing on attracting new talent, Eindhoven365 explicitly identifies retention as a priority and is working to build physical and digital communities that connect people, skills, and the city.
A study published in June 2026 shows that career opportunities remain a key factor in the decision to stay, and that personal networks, the quality of life, and the ability to find affordable housing also play a role. The social onboarding program aligns with this approach by connecting residents and international employees through activities and communities, extending the onboarding process far beyond the workplace.
Tulsa Remote: When Philanthropy Supports Regional Marketing Strategies
From a completely different context comes Tulsa Remote, one of the most prominent international benchmarks in this field, which we will be meeting this year at BTO.
The program, launched in 2018 with support from the George Kaiser Family Foundation, offers selected remote workers $10,000 to move to Tulsa and stay there for at least one year. The incentive is complemented by settlement assistance, workspaces, networking opportunities, and initiatives designed to help participants integrate into the city.
An analysis published in 2025 by the W.E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research estimates that between 58 and 70 percent of participants’ relocations would not have occurred without the program and that, in the model used by the study, the benefits to Tulsa residents exceed the costs incurred by more than four times. However, the same report emphasizes that retention, entrepreneurship, support services, and housing availability are at least as important as the financial incentive.
In Tulsa, the most significant aspect of the program becomes apparent after the incentive is provided: building an ecosystem that supports the relocation, measures its effects, and works over time to foster the relationship between newcomers and long-time residents.
An Action Research Study on Destination Management
It’s a transformation that I’ve been able to observe and experience firsthand. In Brindisi, starting with Sea Working in 2020, we began working on attracting remote workers as a lever for destination marketing and regional development, which led to the creation of a dedicated municipal strategy and the selection of the city—in collaboration with the Puglia Region— in 2022, as one of the 20 international destinations in the Airbnb Live and Work Anywhere program. This initiative then aligned with the regional strategy #mareAsinistra, where people, businesses, brands, networking, and management all contribute to the same concept of attractiveness.
These experiments have given rise to a line of action research that I have been pursuing for several years on the relationship between regional attractiveness, development, and social innovation. Today, I summarize this as the concept of “Positive Energy Destination”—a lens through which to examine the future of regions seeking new balances, new sources of energy, and new skills.
Being Destinations in the Global Economy of Attractiveness
We have learned a great deal about regional marketing. Now we need to complement it with a broader approach to managing a region’s appeal.
Housing, education, employment, transportation, and social policies remain the responsibility of entities other than DMOs, but destination management now operates in a context where tourism can hardly be considered a sector in its own right. Managing a destination requires stronger connections between tourism, government, businesses, universities, culture, innovation, and social development.
A destination may offer professional opportunities, quality of life, services, and culture, yet still fail to attract visitors if it cannot understand its target audiences, establish a recognizable brand identity, and remain relevant over time. This is where tourism brings a wealth of expertise: transforming identity into a promise, understanding target audiences, utilizing data, designing experiences, welcoming visitors, and building a reputation.
Broadening our perspective beyond the visitor also changes place branding: the quality of the temporary experience is complemented by the concrete conditions for living, working, participating, and building connections. This requires greater specialization in what the region has to offer, the involvement of stakeholders, and a more careful assessment of the opportunities for those who already live there and for those who might choose to move there in the future.
To the traditional question in destination marketing— “Why should I come here?” —we should therefore begin to add another: “Why might I choose to build a part of my life here?”
At BTO 2026, we’ll discuss this topic during the panel “Destinations Beyond Tourism—How to Attract Talent, Skills, and New Residents,” bringing together the international experience of Tulsa Remote, the Puglia Region, and the CDP Foundation to explore how public policy, philanthropy, and local stakeholders can work together as a system.
The destination of the future may increasingly be the place we want to visit and, at the same time, the place with which we choose to build a relationship: to arrive, to contribute, to belong, and, sometimes, to stay.
The article was written by Emma Taveri, scientific coordinator of the “Destination” topic. Roberta Milano served as the editorial editor.
The discussion on these topics will continue at BTO – Be Travel Onlife, in Florence on November 10 and 11, 2026.
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