Author Tonya Fitzgerald has assembled a thorough, readable handbook for any practitioner who works to care for places. No stranger to the topic himself, Executive Editor Jonathan Tourtellot takes a look and likes what he sees.
This inaugural book about our key subject deserves your attention
Just out in April 2026, Tonya Fitzpatrick’s book on destination stewardship is, to my knowledge, the first ever devoted entirely to the topic. The full title is Destination Stewardship: Drive Sustainability, Economic Renewal, and Cultural Integrity. Since I appear too often in its pages to be objective, I’ll restrict this review to a description of what it contains.
Which is a lot. I believe Ms Fitzpatrick has done a great service by collecting such an impressive amount of information that practitioners can actually put to use. While well-traveled herself as a journalist and occasional tour leader, she was new to destination stewardship as a conceptual framework when she accepted the assignment from her publisher, the UK based KoganPage. She told me it changed her perspective, helping her connect her established grounding in social impact, sustainable travel, and conservation to see tourism differently – as less about individual choices and more about how destinations are actually run.
The result is a very practical handbook tinted with an aspirational glow. The book, she says, “is written for those who believe that destinations are not products to be consumed, but places to be cared for.” It is packed with readable principles, strategies, and examples, suitable for busy people.
The text is divided into three parts – on the rise of the destination stewardship idea, to the business case for responsible tourism, and on implementation. Arrayed within them are nine chapters loaded with concise, globe-trotting “Real-World Examples” – from Slovenia’s Green Scheme to Rajasthan’s heritage restoration to the community-based model in Los Angeles. (Readers of the Destination Stewardship Report will be familiar with several of these.)
Each Real-World Example is broken into mini sections such as Context, Governance, What It Does, and Why It Matters – and sometimes the ever-useful What Went Wrong. It’s an efficient way to learn. Here’s one quick example, on how Columbus, Ohio, USA, changed its branding orientation:
“Context” – Explains growing resident discontent with tourism marketing;
“What Happened” – Bullet points lay out the “community-shared value” approach that the city adopted;
“Why It Matters” – The author summarizes: “…branding is not simply about visitor acquisition but about sustaining a social license to operate.”
So many examples cannot be evergreen, of course; places change constantly, and in a book so full of hard information nit-pickers will find things to quibble over.
That’s not the point. Ms Fitzpatrick has amassed an avalanche of encouraging accomplishments. Destination stewardship is a relatively new concept, and every step in the right direction takes us closer to that much-needed paradigm shift in how we take care of distinctive places. It’s a process. Fitzpatrick helps by ending each chapter with a bullet point list of “Key Insights for Practitioners” and copious footnotes to help anyone who wishes to go deeper.
This book is one such step. A big one, radiant with hope.
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