More Different Perspectives

Resident Sentiment: The Power of Perspective

September 3, 2025

For years, DMOs have known that resident sentiment matters. It shapes how visitors are welcomed, how tourism is discussed locally, and how successfully a destination can grow without friction. But too often, resident sentiment has been treated as a score to report—rather than a compass to guide strategy.
At Clarity of Place, we’ve seen across dozens of projects that when communities feel heard, destinations thrive. The question isn’t whether to measure resident sentiment, but how to reframe it so it becomes actionable, credible, and embedded in decision-making.
David Holder underscored this point during his recent panel at ESTO alongside three visionary destination leaders: Vanessa Cabrera of Visit Tucson, Beth Erickson of Visit Loudoun, and Eliza Voss of Aspen Chamber Resort Association. Together, they highlighted how true alignment goes far beyond survey scores or topline numbers. It’s about listening to residents, embedding their perspectives in decision-making, and showing that tourism success prioritizes real community impact.
(Ideas That Travel: Reframing Resident Sentiment panel featuring Vanessa Cabrera, Beth Erickson, and Eliza Voss ESTO 2025)
If you missed the session, this blog expands on the same core idea: moving beyond numbers to build genuine community alignment. That’s where we help destinations find clarity.
Why Reframing Matters
Resident sentiment is more than research. Done well, it:
Creates alignment with community priorities. Creating alignment with community priorities begins with listening. Residents surface what matters most — no matter whether it involves preserving a small downtown’s character, attracting overnight visitors who drive economic value, or managing visitor behaviors to ease cultural and environmental strain. As Eliza Voss noted at ESTO, Aspen applied resident input on visitor volume to adjust its marketing approach to seasonal shifts. When destinations center local perspectives in this way, they shape smarter strategies and build the trust needed for long-term support.
Strengthens the value of tourism. Resident perspectives help reposition tourism as a driver of quality of life, not just visitor growth. By showing how visitor dollars contribute to infrastructure, workforce, and local amenities, DMOs can reframe tourism as a shared community benefit. Visit Loudoun, for example, has used tourism’s value to address community concerns around land use, business vitality, and managing the pressures of rapid growth in a picturesque countryside.
Reveals opportunities for destination direction. Resident feedback isn’t only reactive — it points the way forward. Communities often surface insights that refine a destination’s long-term strategy, from diversifying funding to shaping new events and product development. In Tucson, resident sentiment helped reconnect longer-range strategies with community priorities, allowing Visit Tucson to leverage local goodwill in its vision of becoming a world-class destination.
Go Beyond the Survey
One survey won’t build alignment. The real shift comes from using sentiment as a bridge—asking residents how they experience tourism and showing how their perspectives shape strategy. When destinations close that loop, listening delivers trust, and trust fuels support for funding, product development, and what comes next.
When framed with intention resident sentiment can:
Shape messaging: Aligning campaigns with community values and organizational expectations, allowing marketing to reflect the destination’s authentic story.
Strengthen support: Demonstrate how tourism dollars contribute to community well-being, not just visitor counts.
Guide strategy: Use local perspectives to prioritize what really matters—whether that’s downtown vibrancy, workforce, or sustainability.
From Data to Alignment
When communities see their perspectives shaping decisions, the narrative shifts from “tourism is for outsiders” to “tourism supports us.” That’s where resilience is built.
At Clarity of Place, we believe reframing resident sentiment isn’t about seeking approval but creating durable partnerships with the people who define a place. Together with our colleagues at Longwoods International, whose Resident Sentiment Research sets the industry standard, we help destinations turn local perspectives into actionable strategies that balance resident priorities with business needs.
If your destination is asking how to reposition tourism’s value or use sentiment to chart a stronger future, let’s start that conversation.
Resident sentiment shouldn’t just be measured—it should be leveraged.

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The Ghosts of Tourism: Past, Present, and Future

By: Hailey Post

We all have a few ghosts in our destinations. While some of us may have local legends of supernatural specters, for others it’s the ghosts of lingering policy decisions, shifting trends, community expectations, and organizational challenges that haunt us.

Ghosts appear in every strategic planning process we lead, even if we don’t always name them. So, in the spirit of the season, we’re giving them the stage: the Ghosts of Tourism Past, Present, and Future—but without the rattling chains.

The Ghost of Tourism Past
Destinations are shaped as much by accumulated decisions as they are by unsolved disruptions. Our industry has weathered our share of unexpected challenges over the last 5 years—COVID’s lasting impact, the local businesses that never returned, workforce worries, internal struggles like staff turnover or leadership changes, the ever-evolving desires of our young travelers, policies creating roadblocks. The effects of these challenges can linger and without clear acknowledgment and intentional mitigation, they risk compounding over time rather than resolving. That’s why we approach each project uniquely, knowing that each organization has its own history, constraints, and capacity, and that meaningful progress starts by meeting places where they are, not where we wish they had been.

The Ghost of Tourism Present
Less spectral—and more the partner or colleague who labels each meeting as “urgent”, this ghost represents the realities of managing our destinations today. These pressures range from balancing resident expectations and organizational capacity to navigating policy constraints and shifts in visitor behavior. Or perhaps it is fending off the ghastly funding grab by another organization or municipal partner that undervalues the role and importance of the destination organization. Strategic planning requires an unvarnished understanding of what challenges continue to beg for first priority. Recognizing these pressures is where intention begins, allowing leaders to sort urgency from opportunity and focus energy where it will matter most.

The Ghost of Tourism Future
This final ghost is a product of an unknown, repeatedly unprecedented world. This ghost poses questions, ones that will determine a destination’s resilience over time: How will demographic shifts reshape the workforce and visitor profile? What pressures will population growth or land-use changes place on natural assets, infrastructure, and community identity? What destination assets need to be added to produce the most meaningful impact? How will technology, including AI, alter visitor management or organizational operations? Which policies must evolve to sustain funding models and protect a destination’s character? Our role as destination advisors and planners is to help you surface these questions early, identify the opportunities and tools available, and build strategies that keep your destination adaptive, grounded, and ready for what comes next.

When we make space for all three ghosts in the planning process, strategic planning feels a little less ominous and far more achievable. That’s where the real success can take root, allowing destinations transform from feeling haunted to building confidence and optimism for years to come.

Happy Holidays from all of us at Clarity!