Whistler defines Smart Tourism as a unified and collaborative approach to destination management.
In Whistler, this means striving to ensure our community, environment, and culture are enhanced and supported by tourism. Through Smart Tourism, we want to inspire the community to contribute to a sustainable and equitable future. Together we can shape a destination of which we are all proud.
Making tourism work for Whistler
Tourism has shaped Whistler since it became a Resort Municipality. This brings both opportunities and challenges.
Increasingly, the community recognizes tourism needs to work for Whistler, not the other way around. Smart Tourism is born from that sentiment. It is a vision and a commitment. It guides us to protect and strengthen our community, culture, environment and economy. Also, it ensures tourism continues to contribute positively to our home.
Our vision: What we’re working toward
In 2050, Whistler is a resilient mountain destination where tourism is measured by the value it creates, not the volume it attracts, and where the community, culture, and environment that make this place worth living in are protected and strengthened.
Our mission: The work we do
Our mission is to make tourism work for Whistler. We bring together people, ideas and perspectives to make smart decisions for our future. We want tourism to create lasting value for Whistler’s community, culture, environment and economy.
How we work toward our future
The Smart Tourism Committee looks toward 2050, while focusing its attention on what matters now. We think of 2050 as the destination, but today is where we act.
We cannot predict exactly what Whistler will need in the future. So we use a Framework that helps Whistler make better decisions. This decision-making Framework helps us to handle issues, opportunities and partnerships we are working on today.
Smart Tourism draws inspiration from the core principles of global destination-management practices, but our own values and priorities drive it. Our primary areas of focus are:
- Community wellbeing and belonging
- Economic resiliency
- Cultural protection and celebration
- Environmental stewardship
The Framework
Smart Tourism helps us make decisions for our community. It provides a framework for identifying today’s challenges and opportunities. It tests ideas against Whistler’s long-term vision and values. And this approach focuses our action where it can have the greatest strategic value. The process includes:
- Identify challenges, opportunities and emerging issues.
- Understand by exploring the subject, root causes and implications.
- Imagine the opportunities by generating potential ideas and responses.
- Filter the ideas against the Smart Tourism Future and Whistler’s values.
- Prioritize and identify where further work or action is warranted.
- Act through community partners, RMOW or Council direction.
- Assess what happens and feed those learnings back into future decisions.
Our 2026 focus areas
Smart Tourism is guided by four interconnected areas. These help evaluate opportunities, challenges, and future actions:
- Revitalizing mountain culture
How do we create the conditions for our mountain culture to authentically grow and thrive rather than manufacturing or replicating it?
- Responding to climate variability
How do we identify new opportunities to respond to changes in Whistler’s climate and react effectively in the face of challenges?
- Rethinking destination management and movement
How can we positively impact Sea to Sky travel and resort mobility locally and manage it as part of the tourism experience?
- Fostering innovation
How do we strengthen Whistler’s legacy of innovation and tourism leadership? How do we inspire big ideas and bold thinking?
A living system
Smart Tourism should be adaptive rather than static. The framework helps Whistler adapt as community priorities, global trends, and local conditions change. It helps us listen, learn, focus effort, and respond to new opportunities and challenges.
We are using the Smart Tourism Framework for real-world challenges facing Whistler. The Smart Tourism Committee recently used congestion as the first practical test case. This helped refine the framework and identified opportunities for future action. This work demonstrated how the framework can move from long-term vision to practical implementation through collaboration, systems thinking and partner-led action.
Smart Tourism as a 2023 to 2026 Council priority
Smart Tourism is one of four strategic priorities for Whistler Council’s 2023-26 term. The other priorities are housing, climate action and community engagement. The 2023-2026 Strategic Plan outlines the high-level direction of the Resort Municipality of Whistler to help shape community progress during this term of Council. For Smart Tourism, these key initiatives include:
- Refine understanding of capacity constraints with Balance Model.
- Explore potential initiatives and metrics and research tourism advancements in other leading destinations.
- Design parks infrastructure, programming and transportation options to encourage dispersion.
- Provide opportunities for visitors to contribute, participate and learn about Whistler’s culture.
These four priority areas are each supported by key initiatives to move them forward. They underpin all work as the organization provides service to the community.
Read about our Whistler Sessions community visioning exercise.
