The world’s leading destination sustainability benchmarking and improvement programme, the Global Destinations Sustainability Index (GDS-Index), announced its 2022 results and award winners at the 61st ICCA Congress in Krakow on the 9 November 2022.
The Leadership and Most Improved awards result from comparing data from 65 destinations that submitted their performance for benchmarking in 2022. The Innovation award winner is chosen by how impactful, modifiable, and scalable a GDS-Movement member’s submitted project is.
2022 GDS-Awards Winners
- 2022 GDS-Index Leadership Award – Gothenburg, represented by Göteborg & Co
- 2022 GDS-Index Most Improved Award – Bangkok, represented by Thailand Convention & Exhibition Bureau (TCEB)
- 2022 GDS-Movement Innovation Award – Belfast, represented by Visit Belfast, for its “Changing the Menu. For Good” initiative
The Big Picture
2022 shows one of the steepest growths in improvement across almost all metrics, raising the bar for destinations that will benchmark in 2023.
There has been a stunning 33% increase in average performance in seven years across all destinations and a 44% increase in the Top 10. This data proves that GDS-Index participants are raising the bar to become regional, national, and international leaders in the journey towards better destination management.
The GDS-Index data overall highlights that there are many reasons to be hopeful and positive about the future of travel and events. Destination management organisations around the world are stepping up, scaling up and speeding up the development and implementation of their sustainability strategies.
“GDS-Movement salutes its members’ continuous commitment to measuring and managing the sustainability contributions of their tourism and events. Every step in the journey towards a destination’s social, environmental, and economic well-being counts dramatically and all GDS-Index participants are stewards of positive change. Given the reach of Business Events, it’s critical that this sector, specifically, further leverages the opportunity to act now, raise the bar, and invest in a thriving destination on a journey towards greater regenerative destination management, today and going forward. Working together, we all win.”