Future eDestination Marketing: Perspective of an Australian Tourism Stakeholder Network

Tourism destinations are difficult to manage due to the complex relationships of their diverse public and private stakeholders. At the same time strategic marketing efforts are important for destinations to foster positive consequences of tourism, particularly given the range of opportunities and challenges created by the emergence of social media that destinations can use advantageously. This paper aims to explore future eDestination marketing from Australian tourism stakeholder network perspectives. Workshops were convened in July 2012 in Melbourne, Australia, for select stakeholders invited to contribute to the futures national tourism technology strategy. They presented a stakeholder network approach to futures strategy development which aims to contribute to that used in recent national tourism plans and strategies for Australia developed by government. Building on theories of stakeholder networks and futures, the paper demonstrates the value of a futures stakeholder network method compared to traditional government approaches by critically analyzing outcomes of both.