How Much Tourism Value Stays in Rural Communities?
Tourism brings visitors and spending into rural communities.
A visitor books accommodation, eats at a local restaurant, joins an activity or buys a local product.
- We can count the
- We can measure the
- We can calculate tourism
The first transaction is easy to see.
What happens to the value next?
For rural communities, that question matters.
The first transaction is only the beginning
Imagine a visitor spending €100 at a small rural hotel.
That €100 creates direct revenue for the hotel. The value journey has started.
The hotel buys food, energy, cleaning, maintenance, technology and other services. It employs people. It recommends restaurants, experiences and local producers.
Those businesses purchase goods and services and pay employees.
Every connection creates an opportunity for value to circulate through the local economy.
Every missing connection creates an opportunity for value to leave it.
A destination can increase visitor numbers and tourism expenditure and still retain relatively little of the value locally.
OECD highlights stronger local tourism value chains, locally owned businesses and connections between tourism businesses, farmers, artisans and cultural actors as important ways to strengthen local value creation and retention.
This leads to a simple question:
How much of the value created through tourism stays, circulates and contributes to the place over time?
Look at the system around the visitor
Through Tourism Value Systems™, we explore tourism as a connected system of visitors, businesses, suppliers, communities, governance and external markets.
For rural destinations, these connections can be particularly important.
- A small accommodation provider may source food
- A restaurant may connect visitors with nearby
- A farm may add visitor experiences to its existing
- A cultural organisation may create reasons for visitors to stay
- Local transport can connect businesses and experiences across the
Destination organisations and public actors can create conditions that make these connections easier to build.
The strength of the tourism economy is influenced by how these actors connect and how value moves between them.
This creates another development question:
How can each visitor contribute to a stronger local value system?
Tourism can connect rural economies
Tourism has an unusual ability to connect sectors.
Accommodation, agriculture, food production, culture, transport, retail, experiences and local services can all become part of the visitor economy.
Each connection creates opportunities for value to move further through the local system.
UN Tourism and the European Committee of the Regions have highlighted integrated rural value chains and collaboration among rural tourism stakeholders as important for strengthening tourism’s contribution to local development.
This gives us a wider set of questions.
- Does visitor spending reach other local businesses?
- Does it strengthen local supply chains?
- Does it create opportunities for producers and entrepreneurs?
- Does it contribute to skills, knowledge and investment in the community?
- Does some of that value circulate again?
These questions reveal something visitor numbers alone cannot:
the capacity of a place to retain and build value over time.
From tourism activity to rural resilience
A visitor can initiate a value flow.
What happens afterwards depends on the connections within the destination.
Those connections can strengthen businesses, create opportunities for local producers, build knowledge and skills, and allow value to circulate further through the community.
For rural destinations, this creates a powerful ambition:
Build tourism systems where more of the value created contributes to the place that created it.
As a Rural Thrive 2050 Supporter, GAMENG wants to bring this systems perspective into the conversation and learn from rural communities, destinations and development organisations working with these questions.
And it leaves us with one simple question:
If tourism generates value in a rural community, how much of that value is still there tomorrow?
References
OECD (2026). OECD Tourism Trends and Policies 2026 – Enhancing the Social Benefits
of Tourism. OECD Publishing. OECD – Enhancing the Social Benefits of Tourism
UN Tourism & European Committee of the Regions (2024). Rural Tourism and Development in Europe. UN Tourism – Rural Tourism and Development in Europe
Disclaimer
This article represents GAMENG AB’s perspective as a Rural Thrive 2050 Supporter and forms part of our ongoing development of Tourism Value Systems™. The views and interpretations expressed are those of GAMENG AB and should not be considered official positions of Rural Thrive 2050, the RURALITIES project, its consortium partners, or the European Union. Tourism Value Systems™ is a framework developed by GAMENG AB.
Tourism Value Systems™ is an independent framework developed by GAMENG AB to help destinations understand, strengthen and redesign how value is created, shared and retained across the visitor economy.
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