Tourism Institutions at the Service of Sustainable Territorial Development

Institutions can be fragile in the face of a disconnect between sets of rules, even informal ones but at least recognized in local customs, which lead to a loss of cogency, prestige and usefulness of them. Observed that it is possible to choose and evaluate institutions by conceptualizing them through a functional or cognitive criterion or by being guided by a relational approach. Considered that in the territory, referring to the tourism theme, there is an intermediation agency called destination marketing organization (DMO). The hypothesis to be verified is whether, in a perspective of territorial sustainability and participatory platform, there can be a review of this organization and its evolution into an institution with a relational approach that allows overcoming the fragility of this agency. Fragility that is found in the current orientation in which there is a tendency to increase the competitiveness of a destination through the collaboration of only the authorities/entities/businesses of the tourism sector, which can be overcome, for example, by identifying partnerships aimed at proposing/facilitating a collective and sustainable vision of the territory. The activities carried out by DMOs are also indicative of fragility, namely supporting destination branding, strategic planning, coordinating promotions with local stakeholders and travel trade intermediaries, public relations, maintaining the destination’s social media presence, providing networking opportunities with stakeholders as well as information/information brokerage in the tourism distribution system. These activities, integrated with others, need to be reformulated to meet the challenge of overcoming fragility with the awareness that technology is also rapidly integrating into every part of our lives nowadays, so it should not be surprising that it has also impacted one of the most important industries of the twenty-first century: the tourism industry. New actors and activities that lead to the result of an institution that provides sustainable territorial development not tied to an extractive vision of tourism.