Measuring What Matters
When the Colorado Tourism Office (CTO) launched the Destination Stewardship Strategic Plan in fall 2024, it marked a shift from measuring tourism success primarily through visitor counts and spending to taking a more comprehensive view of how tourism influences Colorado’s communities, environment, and visitor experience.
To support this broader approach, the CTO led a year long Destination Stewardship Research Project in partnership with tourism researchers, academia, land managers, and community leaders. Together, they identified the indicators that matter most to Colorado’s tourism stakeholders and aligned them with reliable, publicly available data sources.
The resulting framework is informed by leading international standards, including the Global Sustainable Tourism Council (GSTC) and the UN World Tourism Organization’s Statistical Framework for Measuring the Sustainability of Tourism (SF-MST), connecting Colorado’s local data to global benchmarks for the first time.
Colorado Destination Stewardship Dashboard
The Colorado Destination Stewardship Dashboard brings this work to life. It combines CTO research with trusted public data sources to track performance across key dimensions of Colorado’s visitor economy, providing a more complete and transparent view of how tourism relates to communities, the environment, and the visitor experience.
About the Research
The indicators in this dashboard are the product of a rigorous, collaborative research process involving focus groups with DMOs, protected area land managers, state agencies, and academic researchers. To learn more about how these indicators were selected, how they align with international frameworks, and what the data shows, download the Colorado Destination Stewardship Dashboard Companion Guide and Technical Report
Get Involved
We invite those interested in contributing to data collection and impact monitoring to contact us. Your involvement is crucial to our ongoing improvement and successful achievement of our destination stewardship goals. Discover how you can help shape the future of tourism in Colorado by getting involved today.