Destinations International, a global association for destination marketing organizations, released its 2026 Tourism Lexicon, a list of 25 words it suggests that destination officials use to improve their communication with residents, elected officials, businesses and stakeholders. Features editor Emma Weissmann interviewed Andreas Weissenborn, its senior vice president of advocacy and destination advancement, to learn more.
Andreas Weissenborn
Q: You've been updating the Lexicon each year. Why did you decide to create it in the first place?
A: This started in 2016-2017. At the time, we realized destination organizations were some of the biggest sectors for perpetuating the visitor economy. But we started to recognize this disconnect -- not so much of people not valuing the tourism industry but [of them] not connecting the dots back to destination organizations and destination promotion at large. We were noticing some of our members being defunded, devalued, disrupted. We started to recognize that part of the issue is actually, literally, how we speak about our work. When we talk about our work, we have to talk about it with an emotional context prior to, maybe, a logical context.
Q: What do you mean by that?
A: By logical, I mean as binary. Numbers and facts. Now, we have to talk about ourselves as emotion, as story, and then back it up with stats and ROI. The Tourism Lexicon is our way of showcasing that. This has been done for political parties for decades, where they take their work and rewrite that narrative to hit their emotional points.
Q: What goes into the process of choosing the words that appear each year?
A: We look at rhetoric of elected officials. In the U.S., for example, I look at every time an elected official makes mention of something like clean water. I'm looking at the bills they pass or propose. I'm looking at their Facebook posts, their X [account], their YouTube clips. And then we're looking at the words that surround them. What are other things they're implying, direct or indirect? And since elected officials change, rhetoric around public goods changes. We get this window of values adjusting every year.
Q: Can you give me an example?
A: One thing that we often talk about in the tourism industry is tourism creating jobs. But when you actually look at public officials and how they address other public goods, "jobs" is not a word that comes up. Instead, elected officials are talking about how they put people to work in their community, how they're providing opportunities, investments, so on.
Q: How do you hope tourism professionals use this resource in their own organizations?
A: The first is training internal teams. PR, communications, marketing. Train your board of directors so that way they're speaking the same language you are. [Then] the stuff on your website: some statement of what you do, why you do it and how you do it. Then, you start going further: owned assets, social media, newsletters, press releases. Then you get more strategic, things like your business plan, strategic planning, your annual reports. Finally, verbal communications.
Q: Is the hope that a destination could drive more visitation by using these words?
A: It really is [about], "How do we use these words to talk about what our value proposition is?" Words matter so much for us, because words are the only thing we have to convey our value. And because we live in such divisive times, where you have people basically picking and choosing between logic and emotion, values are the only thing that sit in the middle of that.
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This interview has been edited for length and clarity.