Destination Management Organisations and Their Shift to Sustainable Tourism Development

Competition between tourism destinations on national, regional and local levels continues to intensify due to the pressure of globalization (Friedman, 2006). Accordingly, destination Management Organizations (dMOs) have to constantly reevaluate and re-engineer the same time, tourism development pressures destination areas through increased resource consumption and, land fragmentation while policy measures to promote more sustainable tourism are progressing only slowly due to local resistance. Therefore, destinations are one ferent stakeholder groups (Carmin et al., tween the economic development of tourism destinations, the conservation of their resources and the well-being of the local population has become a challenging task for many dMOs conducted in 2011 in seven European countries among 72 managers of destination Management Organizations (dMOs). The research objective was to evaluate the dMOs’ efforts and their role in the set-up and implementation of sustainable tourism principles in the management of tourist destinations by means of a quantitative and qualitative analysis.