Who Is Tourism For?

Tourism is one of the few industries we celebrate simply for getting bigger.

More visitors. More hotel rooms. More flights. More conventions. More restaurant spending. More tax revenue.

Every year, destinations announce record-breaking numbers as evidence that tourism is working. The assumption is rarely challenged. If more people came and spent more money, the community must be better off.

But is it?

That depends on whom you ask.

Ask the hotel owner, restaurant operator or attraction executive, and the answer may be yes. Ask the destination marketing organization, and the answer will almost certainly be yes. Ask the worker commuting farther because they can no longer afford to live near the job tourism created, and you may get a different answer.

Ask the resident sitting in traffic, paying higher rent, competing for public space or watching neighborhood businesses become visitor experiences, and the calculation becomes considerably more complicated.

Tourism can generate enormous economic value. It creates jobs, supports small businesses, funds cultural institutions and introduces people to places they might otherwise never experience. I have spent much of my career in tourism and hospitality. I believe deeply in its power.

But believing in tourism should not exempt it from scrutiny.

It should make us more determined to get it right.

This is not a new question for me. I touched on the idea of residents sharing more directly in the value tourism creates before The BIG Idea existed. At the time, I was thinking primarily about some form of tourism dividend. But the more I have considered it, the more I have realized that the dividend is only one possible answer to a much larger question.

Who is tourism actually for?

We Measure What Tourism Produces, Not Who Benefits

The traditional tourism scorecard is designed to measure activity.

How many people visited? How long did they stay? How much did they spend? How many hotel rooms were occupied? How much tax revenue was collected?

Those are useful metrics. They tell us the size of the tourism economy.

They do not tell us how its benefits were distributed.

A destination can break records while its residents struggle with food insecurity. It can generate a budget surplus while teachers, hospitality workers and first responders are priced out of the communities they serve. It can invest millions in attracting more visitors while the infrastructure residents use every day remains strained.

Under those circumstances, can we still call tourism an unqualified success?

Tourism employment matters, but a job is not the same as prosperity. Tax revenue matters, but collecting it is not the same as delivering a tangible return to the people who live in the destination. Capital investment matters, but not every project described as a public benefit improves the daily lives of residents.

We have become very good at calculating the economic impact of the visitor.

We are far less disciplined about calculating the resident’s return.

The Tourism Dividend

Alaska offers an interesting, if imperfect, point of comparison.

The state’s Permanent Fund Dividend allows eligible residents to share in a portion of Alaska’s mineral wealth through an annual payment. The 2025 dividend was $1,000 per eligible resident.

Tourism revenue is not oil revenue, and destinations are not sovereign wealth funds. The comparison is conceptual, not structural. Alaska starts with a simple premise: when a publicly connected resource creates extraordinary value, the people who live there should participate in that value.

Why should we not apply similar thinking to tourism?

A tourism dividend does not have to mean an annual check. It could take many forms: free school meals, reduced transit fares, resident parking benefits, workforce housing, childcare support, cultural access, neighborhood improvements or direct investment in food security.

The form should reflect the needs of the community. The principle is what matters.

Residents should be able to identify something in their own lives that is better because millions of people visited their home.

That benefit should not be theoretical. It should not require an economist to explain the multiplier effect. It should be visible, measurable and meaningful.

The Current System Was Built to Feed Itself

One of the greatest obstacles is that tourism revenue is often restricted to tourism-related uses.

Florida law, for example, establishes specific authorized uses for tourist development taxes, including tourism promotion, convention facilities, certain cultural activities and other designated tourism purposes. These restrictions mean that even when tourism produces substantial public revenue, local governments may have limited authority to redirect it toward the most pressing resident needs.

Miami-Dade County reported in 2025 that it relied on approximately $57 million from the Tourist Development Tax and another $44 million from the Food and Beverage Tax.

That is meaningful public revenue, but the central question is not simply how much tourism generates. It is how much flexibility communities have to use that value in ways residents can feel.

The system is frequently designed to reinvest tourism revenue into generating more tourism.

More promotion. More events. More facilities. More reasons to visit.

There is an economic rationale for that cycle. Tourism competes globally, and destinations cannot stop investing in themselves.

But an industry that continually reinvests its public proceeds in expanding itself without establishing a clear resident return risks becoming extractive. It asks the community to absorb the costs of growth while promising that the benefits will eventually circulate back.

Sometimes they do.

Sometimes they do not.

From Visitor Volume to Community Value

Some destinations are beginning to reconsider the bargain.

Hawaiʻi increased its Transient Accommodations Tax by 0.75 percentage points beginning in 2026 through what has become known as the Green Fee. The revenue is intended to support environmental stewardship, climate resilience, hazard mitigation and sustainable tourism.

Hawaiʻi’s 2026 state budget included $129 million in Green Fee projects.

Venice has taken a different approach, testing an access fee for certain day visitors on selected dates. In 2026, the fee ranged from €5 to €10, depending on when it was paid.

Neither policy answers every question. A fee can become another charge without sufficient accountability. A sustainability program can still leave residents wondering how the money improved their lives.

But these experiments represent an important shift. They recognize that tourism creates costs as well as benefits and that visitors can be asked to contribute to the places they enjoy.

The next step is to move beyond managing tourism’s negative effects and begin designing an affirmative resident return.

Contribute More Than You Consume

I have a simple mantra in business, philanthropy and life:

Contribute more than you consume.

It should apply to tourism as well.

Visitors consume infrastructure, public space, natural resources, municipal services and the character of a place. They also contribute through spending, taxes, cultural exchange and support for local businesses.

The goal is not to portray visitors as a burden. It is to create a tourism model in which their presence leaves the destination stronger.

That requires destinations to ask different questions.

Are tourism workers earning enough to live in the community they serve? Are residents receiving priority access or meaningful benefits from the attractions and cultural institutions their taxes help support? Are tourism-generated funds reducing food insecurity, improving transportation or protecting neighborhood character? Are visitors contributing to the preservation of the natural and cultural assets they came to enjoy?

Most importantly, would residents vote for more tourism if they clearly understood both the costs and the return?

That may be the most honest tourism metric of all.

A New Social Contract for Tourism

The future of tourism cannot be built solely around the needs of the traveler or the businesses that serve them. It must include the people who make the destination worth visiting in the first place.

Residents are not part of the tourism product.

They are the community.

Their neighborhoods are not backdrops. Their culture is not inventory. Their quality of life is not an acceptable casualty of economic growth.

This does not mean abandoning tourism promotion or diverting every tourism dollar into general government. It means establishing a transparent resident-benefit standard alongside the traditional economic scorecard.

Every destination should be able to answer three questions:

What does tourism consume?

What does tourism contribute?

Who receives the difference?

If we cannot answer those questions clearly, then record visitor numbers may be disguising a deeper failure.

Tourism should generate more than arrivals. It should produce stronger communities, better opportunities and a visible return for the people who call the destination home.

So before we decide how much tourism we want, perhaps we should answer the more fundamental question.

Who is tourism for?

That is all. As you were.