Flanders' Travel to Tomorrow: tourism as a means, not an end

When Visit Flanders, the tourism agency of Belgium's Flemish Region, published its strategic plan in April 2021, the foreword made a claim that few tourism boards put in writing: tourism is no longer an end in itself, but a means of creating added value for everyone involved in a place ³. The programme behind that sentence, Travel to Tomorrow (Reizen naar Morgen in Dutch), has since been written into two successive Flemish tourism policy notes ³⁵. That longevity makes it one of the more useful European cases for asking what changes when a tourism agency stops treating visitor growth as its main measure of success — and what remains unproven.

From growing to flourishing

The rethink predates the pandemic. Visit Flanders' own account dates the start to April 2017, when staff began sharing travel stories, followed in October 2017 by a gathering of about 130 Flemish tourism professionals at which the consultant Anna Pollock introduced the idea of a 'flourishing destination' ¹. A listening exercise then collected travel experiences from 1,348 Belgians and 296 international travellers; five think-tanks between January and June 2018 involved 379 participants; and a two-day writing workshop in September 2018 produced the vision text ¹. In a 2022 interview, a Visit Flanders director linked the reorientation partly to Bruges' experience of visitor pressure and to a wish to keep tourism perceived as a positive force ¹¹.

The backdrop was steady growth: the agency's own book notes that international tourists in Flanders rose from five million in 2000 to 7.8 million in 2019 ¹⁶. In 2020 Visit Flanders' marketing director summarised the shift with the Flemish slogan "van groeien naar bloeien" — from growing to flourishing ¹².

The 2018 magazine that reported this process was candid about what it had not solved. Success was still measured by arrivals, receipts and turnover, and the authors acknowledged that they had yet to work out how success would be measured under a new model ¹.

Tourism as a means: what it looks like in policy

The ideas Travel to Tomorrow draws on — net benefit, social return on investment, flourishing communities — overlap with what other agencies call public value or tourism for development, although Visit Flanders' documents use their own vocabulary rather than those labels ¹³. The 2021 plan describes a shift from return on investment to social return on investment and sets out five principles, including creating value for all stakeholders in a balanced way and encouraging participation ³¹⁵. The agency's 2020 book proposes judging success by the net added value for all the parties involved, rather than by overnight stays, spending and employment alone ¹⁶.

Three things suggest the framing has moved beyond a slogan. First, it has political cover: the vision was endorsed in the 2019–2024 Flemish tourism policy note ³, and the 2024–2029 policy note, submitted in November 2024 by the minister responsible, Melissa Depraetere, states that Reizen naar Morgen remains the basis of her tourism policy ⁵. Second, it has reached funding rules: applicants for Visit Flanders grants for youth accommodation must explain how quality, modernisation or energy-saving projects fit the principles of Reizen naar Morgen ⁸. Third, the 2022 sustainability plan attaches 2030 targets to it, from a 25% cut in greenhouse gas emissions from foreign visitors' travel (against 2019) to reversing the car-versus-train split among overnight visitors to the art cities ⁴.

An older, distributive strand of Flemish policy also fits a public-value reading. A decree aimed at enabling people living in Flanders to experience at least one holiday has been in place for more than 20 years, and a 2023 update extended recognition and subsidies to local social organisations that help people facing financial or health barriers to travel ¹³¹⁴.

Participation: pilots, surveys and a say

Participation is the principle with the most visible machinery. Visit Flanders ran 'proeftuinen' — pilot areas — in Mechelen, the Meetjesland and the Kempen to set up participatory, co-creative processes ²; one workshop in the Meetjesland creeks area drew 45 people, about half of them new to the organisers ¹. Since 2017 the agency has also run a resident survey roughly every two years in the five art cities of Antwerp, Bruges, Ghent, Leuven and Mechelen ⁷¹³⁶. According to Visit Flanders' description of the programme on an EU urban-practice platform, survey findings informed holiday-home regulations in Bruges and Ghent ⁷.

The 2023 survey, with 7,175 valid responses, is the most detailed public evidence. Overall, 69% agreed that they support tourism and want it to remain important, but agreement was 64% in Bruges and 63% in Ghent; in both cities, disagreement with the statements that tourism's benefits outweigh its drawbacks and that tourism should be promoted rose significantly compared with 2021 ⁶. In Bruges, 51% agreed that tourism makes them feel the city no longer belongs to residents, and half said they wanted fewer tourists ⁶.

The involvement figures matter most for a strategy built on participation. Only about one in five residents said they could be heard on their concerns or ideas, while four in ten wanted to be more involved in tourism policy ⁶. The 2022 sustainability plan targets at least 40% of art-city residents saying they have a say in ideas for tourism development ⁴¹⁰. The survey question and the target are not worded identically, so the comparison is indicative rather than exact, but it points to a substantial gap.

What is documented, and what is not

Most of the evidence on Travel to Tomorrow is first-party: Visit Flanders describing its own process, plans and surveys. The process, the targets and the resident data are well documented. What is missing, as far as our reporting could establish, is a public progress report against the 2030 targets or the 2024 intermediate milestones set for some of them ⁴, and any independent evaluation of whether the programme has changed outcomes for residents or places. The 2021 plan presented itself as the starting signal for implementation rather than a results report ³, and Visit Flanders' own case description notes that turning the vision into a shared operational strategy remains ongoing and challenging ⁷.

Measurement is evolving. The 2024–2029 policy note commits to a destination barometer covering residents, visitors, entrepreneurs and place. Its baseline shows tourism highly concentrated in space — a Gini coefficient of 0.83 in 2022 — alongside a tourism intensity of 1.28, below a risk threshold of 2.62 ⁵. The same note acknowledges that the resources available to support public and private partners are scarce ⁵.

Independent scrutiny is only beginning. A junior researcher at Breda University of Applied Sciences, Justine Bauters, is studying participatory approaches to regenerative tourism governance grounded in Flanders; the project had not reported findings when it was announced in 2026, and it names Visit Flanders' chief strategist, Vincent Nijs, as a key industry sparring partner ⁹¹⁵.

Residents' voices reach these documents mostly as survey percentages. In the sources we reviewed, we found no independent residents' or neighbourhood organisation assessing Travel to Tomorrow — a gap worth closing for a strategy whose central claim is that tourism should serve the people who live with it.