The St Gallen Model For Destination Management PDF Download

The discussion on purpose, legitimacy and reason of existence of destination management organisations (DMOs) is on-going. Recent literature suggests that their current activities have gradually shifted away from fulfilling the actual needs of tourists and stakeholders. Yet, DMOs are still funded by predominantly public but also private sponsors and often in absence of any performance agreement. It is therefore to question by means of what activities DMOs create value to their destination and how they capture value in form of revenue streams. This thesis addresses both issues with a special regard to business models being defined as activity systems. It reconstructs and analyses business models of DMOs following a multiple case study approach examining 16 cases in Switzerland. Throughout all cases, it identified a total of 19 value creating and capturing activities. The reconstructed state-of-the-art business models were clustered into six dominant configurations that mainly differ among their prioritisation of activities. Finally, the case analysis revealed characteristics of emerging business model configurations such as DMOs providing specialised services, DMOs fulfilling specific mandates, DMOs granting mandates or single service providers (i.e. virtual DMOs) bundling several touristic mandates besides managing cross-functional processes.