Visitor Streams in City Destinations : A Study of Stockholm City

Stockholm hosts nearly eleven million commercial guest nights annually, and is ranked as one of Europe’s top ten destinations.The county population is 2.1 million (Stockholm Visitors Board, 2014). In order to pursue economic, effective, and sustainable tourist destination development, it is important to understand its characteristics. In this study “city destinations” are focused on using sub-characteristics such as “visitor attraction clusters”. For understanding these characteristics, a clear definition of destination has to be used (Framke, 2002). The following components can be used to conduct an analysis of a destination: geographical place, visitor, image, complete tourist product, and interacting business and public sector (Andersson, 2013). Tourist destinations can be studied at the following different geographical place levels: the regional (e.g. the Stockholm region), the local (e.g. the old town) and the attraction-based destination point (e.g. Friends arena). The Stockholm Tourism Strategy 2020 project group has proposed a number of criteria that must be fulfilled before a destination can be considered mature. In order to gain an understanding of the demand (and revenue) side of destinations, unique criteria can be used for visitor segmentation in the city, such as visitor purpose. There are changing patterns of visitor streams in Stockholm, however, such as the dramatic increase in the number of cruise passengers (Stockholm harbour, 2015). Therefore the visitor stream planning has to be up-dated. By using criteria for visitor segmentation and characterization of the destination, economically strong and reachable visitor segments such as city-breakers can be identified. Visit Sweden has identified a number of segments, such as “double income no kids” (DINKs), that can serve as an overall category for citybreakers. Research purpose: To obtain deeper understanding of how regional, local, and point destinations can be developed using knowledge of the destination character and visitor streams within the destination. The theoretical framework is based on the concept of destination, the characteristics of city tourism, visitor segments, and streams. Methodology: As a starting point, approximately 150 destination plans have been written by my undergraduate students, and a pilot study and a literature review have been conducted. The next step will be a main case study on regional, local, and point destination levels in Stockholm and the associated visitor streams. The final step will be to draw conclusions about the model of visitor streams in city destinations