Sonora Desert Museum in Tucson, Arizona

Photo © Walter Meayers Edwards

Geotourism is a comprehensive approach to managing sustainable tourism and promoting destination stewardship. The benefit of undertaking a National Geographic Geotourism MapGuide project is two fold:

It encourage travelers to take advantage of a destination’s distinctive assets, providing economic benefit while ensuring continued protection of those assets.

Residents engage in the geotourism concept through the MapGuide nomination process and learn more about their area, building pride and fostering a stewardship ethic.

Geotourism MapGuides provide a platform for destinations to showcase their authentic cultural, historical, and environmental assets. It acts as a catalyst in promoting wisely managed tourism and travel programs, geography education, and the importance of distinctiveness of place.

The National Geographic Center for Sustainable Destinations works with a community-based local Geotourism Stewardship Council to create geotourism projects to assist in projecting an accurate and detailed inventory of tourism attractions and activities in the area. The co-branded products include Geotourism MapGuides and Geoconsensus Web Sites.

Each product is developed in partnership with actively participating members of the local community to serve the following purposes:

Create markets sustainable tourism choices to foreign and domestic tourists

Increase local incomes

Build local knowledge and pride

Producs economic incentives for the conservation and preservation of geotourism assets

The process involved in developing a geotourism product helps to foster local knowledge, excitement, and support for the distinctive characteristics and tourism attractions of the region.

This approach will help to educate local residents about their significant tourism resources, stimulate local business growth through increased tourism, and work in synergy with local tourism promotional efforts to effectively market and position the destination.

A geotourism project helps local communities discover their distinctive tourism assets while providing them with economic incentives for protecting those assets.

A MapGuide project also creates an opportunity to partner with National Geographic Society in carrying out an international promotion campaign to reach a global audience, guide local change agents to implement an outreach and promotional campaign related to the development of the product, and foster the wise stewardship of the region’s tourism assets in the future.

For more information, contact the Center for Sustainable Destinations at (202) 828-8045 or sustourism@ngs.org.