The Obsession With Control

For decades, tourism boards around the world have operated under a shared, largely unquestioned assumption: that desire must be carefully managed. Images must be approved. Messages must be aligned. Experiences must be scripted. Risk must be minimized.

This obsession with control has shaped the modern machinery of destination marketing, from press trips choreographed down to the minute to brand guidelines so rigid they leave little room for spontaneity. The result is a paradox few institutions are willing to confront. In attempting to control perception, tourism boards are steadily eroding the very thing they seek to create: desire.

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The Institutional Fear of Misrepresentation

At the heart of this obsession lies a legitimate anxiety. Destinations, particularly those outside traditional Western tourism circuits, have long been misrepresented. For many tourism boards, control emerged as a defensive strategy, a way to protect national image from stereotypes, scandal, or misinterpretation.

Yet protection has quietly become confinement.

In institutional logic, unpredictability is treated as a threat. Spontaneity is equated with reputational risk. Authenticity is welcomed only when it can be rehearsed. This logic explains why so much destination content feels sanitized, interchangeable, and emotionally distant.

Control promises safety. But safety rarely produces desire.

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The Illusion of Perfect Messaging

Tourism boards often behave as if destinations were products, and branding were a matter of precision engineering. If the right message is repeated often enough, across enough channels, the thinking goes, perception will follow.

But places are not products. They are lived environments, full of contradiction, friction, and surprise. When messaging attempts to smooth out those textures, it does not create clarity, it creates suspicion.

Audiences today are deeply literate in marketing. They recognize staging. They detect scripts. They sense when enthusiasm is manufactured. Content that appears too controlled is not reassuring, it is distancing. It signals that something is being hidden.

Desire does not emerge from perfection. It emerges from tension.

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Press Trips and the Theater of Authenticity

Nowhere is the logic of control more visible than in the press trip. Designed as curated experiences for journalists and creators, press trips are meant to showcase the best of a destination. In practice, they often reveal its limitations.

Tight itineraries leave no room for exploration. Carefully selected encounters replace genuine interaction. Every moment is optimized for capture, not experience. The destination performs itself.

What is sold as authenticity becomes theater.

This choreography produces content that looks polished but feels hollow. It lacks the unpredictability that makes places memorable. And in an era where audiences value presence over polish, such content struggles to resonate.

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Control Versus Credibility in the Platform Age

Digital platforms have fundamentally altered how trust is built. Credibility today is not granted by institutions. It is earned through consistency, exposure, and perceived honesty.

Ironically, excessive control undermines all three.

When tourism boards insist on approval processes, pre-defined talking points, and visual conformity, they flatten difference. Content becomes repetitive. Audiences see the same angles, the same phrases, the same framing, regardless of who is speaking.

This repetition does not reinforce credibility. It erodes it.

In contrast, content that feels slightly messy, unscripted, even contradictory often travels further. Not because it is more flattering, but because it feels more real.

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Why Desire Requires Risk

Desire is inherently unstable. It thrives on uncertainty, curiosity, and the promise of discovery. When everything is explained, mapped, and controlled in advance, there is little left to want.

Tourism boards tend to confuse reassurance with attraction. They believe that removing all ambiguity will make destinations more appealing. In reality, ambiguity is often what draws people in.

The most compelling travel experiences are rarely those that went exactly as planned. They are shaped by chance encounters, unexpected detours, moments that resist scripting. These are precisely the elements institutional control seeks to eliminate.

By doing so, it removes the emotional core of travel.