Blog: Why your destination should be benchmarking sustainability performance

If there is one thing that 2022 has taught us, is that there are many organisations scrambling to catch up on sustainability. Tourism, events, venues, and destinations are ‘greening up’ but it begs the question, how do they stack up compared to others?

For destinations in Aotearoa, once the Destination Management Plan has been submitted, the sustainability strategy and policy have been developed and implemented, how can sustainability performance be measured against other destinations?

While there are a number of global benchmarking tools and methodologies, Global Destination Sustainability Movement (GDSM) offers the world leading GDSM-Index. The Index is made up of four key categories - city environmental performance, city social performance, supplier performance, and destination management performance. The Index submission requires a collaborative approach between city councils, tourism organisations, and convention bureaux due to the amount of data needed across each of the categories. In some destinations, submissions are led by local universities to ensure the integrity of the data and submission are provided at the highest possible level.

Global Destination Sustainability Movement - Index criteria for destination sustainability benchmarking

Aotearoa is already well behind our Asia Pacific neighbours when it comes to destination sustainability performance. Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Singapore, Sapporo, Goyang, Sarawak, and Thailand are a few of the Asia Pacific destinations that have been benchmarking their performance, some for up to 10 years.

While many of our cities would compete strongly in Asia Pacific, the key to enabling benchmarking in Aotearoa is ensuring city councils prioritise destination sustainability performance. This requires funding and resource for annual submissions, and a highly collaborative approach to sustainability within the city. If this can be overcome, sustainability benchmarking will play a crucial role in the future of destination management in Aotearoa.

However, without comparative assessments of performance, it means we have no baseline measurement, no determination of strengths or weaknesses and how Aotearoa stacks up, less motivation for improvements, and progress on sustainability and regeneration for destinations will be slow.

We strongly endorse benchmarking as the next step for destinations. We look forward to seeing which city in Aotearoa will be the first to step up and truly prioritise sustainability.