Destination Brand international

Project description

In this independent research project, the German Institute for Tourism Research at the FH Westküste University of Applied Sciences is dedicated to researching the perception of destination brands from an international perspective.

The project builds on the Destination Brand study series that has been developed for the German market since 2009. The study, conducted in cooperation with inspektour GmbH, focuses on the brand value and perception of destinations in nine foreign markets. The aim of the analog study design with an international perspective is to uncover differences in the perception of travel destinations between nations and to generate interesting, up-to-date data for teaching in the ITM degree program.

The Destination Brand international project is about researching destination brands – a topic that the German Institute for Tourism Research has been working on intensively for more than ten years. As part of this international research project, since 2018 the institute has been dedicated to transferring the German approach to measuring the brand competence of regional destinations to foreign source markets. Comparative destination brand analyses are carried out by means of population-representative surveys in a total of nine source markets. In 2018, surveys were conducted in Austria, Switzerland and the Netherlands, and in 2019 the study was conducted in China. Surveys in the UK, France, Spain, Italy and the USA followed in 2020. In addition to the perception of the destination brands, further current issues were addressed. For example In some markets, the attitude towards sustainability when traveling was examined comparatively. Since 2020, relevant issues have also been added in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. In addition to using the findings for teaching purposes, various scientific publications have been published based on the results in 2021. The results on sustainability attitudes were published in a specialist article in the Journal of Tourism Science. A holidaymaker typology was calculated from the findings on changes in attitudes towards vacation travel in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic and published as part of a working paper. The results were also presented to practitioners in the form of webinars in the first quarter of 2021.
The study is part of an overall internationalization project that will run from 2016 to 2021. In addition to the cooperation partner in the implementation – inspektour GmbH – the project is supported by the following practice partners: German National Tourist Board e.V., Berlin Tourismus & Kongress GmbH, Ruhr Tourismus GmbH, Schwarzwald Tourismus GmbH, Tourismus Marketing Gesellschaft Sachsen mbH.