The Best of All Possible Destinations

Why tourism needs to rediscover the original meaning of optimism

A profession in a dark mood

There is no shortage of things to worry about in the world of destinations and tourism. Climate change is reshaping coastlines, glaciers, and seasons faster than most destination strategies can adapt. Geopolitical upheaval disrupts source markets overnight. Overtourism corrodes the very places people travel to love. Pressure on local communities, heritage, biodiversity, and public space has become a constant feature of the destination manager's inbox. Residents grow weary of visitors. Visitors grow weary of residents growing weary of them.

The mood in many a conference room — and in the academic literature that feeds into it — is, if we are honest, rather gloomy. To be taken seriously in tourism discourse today, it sometimes seems necessary to adopt a posture of alarm. Cheerfulness is suspect. Enthusiasm for growth is practically a provocation.

If pessimism is the dominant register, what is its opposite? Most people would answer: optimism. And they would be right — but probably not in the way they think.

A word with a history

Optimism, as a concept with philosophical weight, was not coined to describe the disposition of people who see the glass as half full. It was formulated by the German philosopher and mathematician Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, most fully in his Théodicée of 1710, where he deployed the Latin term optimum — "the greatest good", the best achievable — to argue that the world as it exists is the best of all possible worlds.

Leibniz was not claiming the world is perfect. He was arguing that, given the full complexity of existence, it represents the best that could be realised — and that it is our task to strive for the optimum within it.

This is a crucial distinction, and one that Leibniz's most famous critic spectacularly missed — or rather, deliberately caricatured. When the Lisbon earthquake of 1755 killed tens of thousands, Voltaire turned his satirical pen on Leibniz in Candide, mocking the philosopher's supposed claim that all is well in the best of worlds. It was devastating as satire. It was less fair as philosophy.

Leibniz had never denied suffering, evil, or catastrophe. He denied the existence of a more perfect alternative. His optimism was not naïve cheerfulness; it was a call to strive - to work, toward the best achievable outcome. The word optimum entered the language through Voltaire's mockery, but the concept it carries is far more demanding than its popular meaning suggests.

Over the centuries, optimism has been progressively flattened into something like emotional sunniness, or a tendency to expect good news. In the intellectual world, this softening has made the word almost unusable: to call oneself an optimist in serious company is to risk being seen as naïve, insufficiently critical, or simply not paying attention. Pessimism has acquired a kind of intellectual prestige, a shorthand for rigour and realism.

But this is a loss. What if we returned to Leibniz's harder, more demanding meaning?

The paralysis of permanent alarm

Tourism discourse has a problem with pessimism — not because pessimism is wrong to raise the alarm, but because alarm produces paralysis rather than action. If every trajectory leads to catastrophe then the rational response is not to try harder but to stop trying altogether.

This is not a theoretical concern. Destination managers, planners, and marketing professionals increasingly describe a kind of strategic fatigue: the sense that whatever they do, it will be insufficient or turned against them. The research agenda in tourism studies has, for good reasons, tilted heavily toward critique — of growth models, of commodification, of greenwashing, of the very idea that destinations can be "managed" at all. The critique is often valid. But critique without a constructive alternative is not a strategy; it is a mood.

The original meaning of optimism is not the belief that everything will be fine. It is the commitment to finding and realising the best that is actually achievable — and working hard to get there.

What tourism needs, arguably, is not more pessimism and not the sugary, unfounded optimism that Voltaire rightly mocked — but the demanding optimism of Leibniz: the discipline of striving toward the optimum, within real constraints, with honest acknowledgement of what those constraints are.

Vienna and the art of the optimum

It is striking, then, that one of the most thoughtful destination strategies in Europe has placed exactly this concept at its centre — and named it accordingly.

In April 2025, the Vienna Tourist Board launched the latest phase of its Visitor Economy Strategy under the heading "Optimum Tourism". The language is deliberate and philosophically resonant. Vienna is not promising unlimited growth, nor is it predicting decline. It is defining a zone of best achievable outcomes — a sweet spot, in its own terminology — and committing to the hard work of finding and maintaining it.

The strategy defines its central objective with admirable precision: nine out of ten visitors should say they would recommend Vienna, while simultaneously nine out of ten residents should hold a positive view of tourism in their city. These are not marketing slogans. They are dual KPIs that hold visitor satisfaction and resident quality of life in deliberate tension, with neither allowed to dominate the other.

Vienna is also specific about the kind of growth it wants. Rather than pursuing visitor volume as an end in itself, the strategy targets a visitor profile: cultural tourists and congress visitors who integrate into city life, spend meaningfully, and contribute positively to the urban fabric. The goal is for two-thirds of visitors to match this "desired guest" profile, and for one in ten overnight stays to come from the meetings sector. These are not arbitrary targets; they reflect a theory of value — a deliberate answer to the question of what tourism is actually for.

To keep the strategy honest, Vienna has joined the UN Tourism International Network of Sustainable Tourism Observatories (INSTO) and established its own Sustainable Destination Observatory, tracking performance across eleven "issue areas" covering economic, ecological, and social dimensions. The data is publicly accessible. The strategy is held to account, not merely announced.

As Vienna Tourist Board CEO Norbert Kettner put it at the launch: the guiding principle is "do not destroy what your audience loves you for". That is Leibniz in plain language. Not "make everything perfect", but "protect and develop the best of what you have".

A framework with cousins

Vienna's approach does not stand alone. It belongs to a wider intellectual current that is attempting to replace the binary of growth versus no-growth with a more sophisticated model: a minimum floor below which conditions become unacceptable, and a ceiling beyond which they become destructive, with a liveable, flourishing space in between.

The most influential version of this model is Kate Raworth's Doughnut Economics, first published in 2017. Raworth's doughnut defines an inner social foundation — the minimum level of human wellbeing that no economy should fall below — and an outer ecological ceiling — the planetary boundaries that must not be breached. The "safe and just space for humanity" lies between these two rings. Growth is not the goal; thriving within the doughnut is.

Researchers in tourism have begun applying this framework directly to destination management. A 2023 paper in the Journal of Tourism Futures introduced the concept of the "Doughnut Destination", drawing on Raworth's seven principles to reframe how destinations set objectives, measure success, and govern development. The parallels with Vienna's approach are striking: both reject unlimited growth as a goal, both define wellbeing in terms of residents as well as visitors, and both insist on clear thresholds — a floor of adequate provision and a ceiling of acceptable impact.

The Doughnut Destination model resonates with other frameworks gathering momentum in tourism: regenerative tourism, which asks destinations not merely to sustain but to restore; carrying capacity thinking, which insists that every destination has limits; and destination stewardship, the approach Vienna has explicitly adopted, which distributes responsibility for the visitor economy across all stakeholders rather than concentrating it in a single agency.

What these approaches share — and what connects them to Leibniz, perhaps more than their proponents realise — is the idea that the task is not to achieve perfection, but to find and hold the optimum: the best achievable outcome within real, acknowledged constraints.

The optimistic practitioner

None of this is to suggest that the challenges facing tourism are not real, or that alarm is never warranted. Climate change is not a mood; it is a fact with measurable consequences for destinations from the Alps to the Maldives. Overtourism degrades places and communities in ways that are not recoverable on short timescales. But the response to real challenges is not permanent alarm. It is the collaborative pursuit of the best achievable outcome which is in the sense of Leibniz optimism in its original.

The destination professionals who are genuinely optimistic in this sense are not the ones who promise everything will be fine. They are the ones who do the hard work of defining what "fine" actually means — and then build the systems to get there.

Vienna's Optimum Tourism strategy, is one of the more serious attempts currently underway to operationalise this kind of optimism in a major city destination. It is a strategy that acknowledges problems while refusing to be defined by them.

Other destinations would do well to study it. Not to copy it — every city's optimum is different — but to take seriously the intellectual move it represents: the shift from asking "how do we grow?" or "how do we stop growing?" to asking "what is the best this place can be, for everyone who lives in it and everyone who visits it, within the constraints we face?

Conclusion: Finding the sweet spot

Voltaire's Candide ends not with the hero refuting optimism, but with him quietly abandoning grand theory altogether. "We must cultivate our garden", Candide concludes — a line that is itself, in its practical way, profoundly Leibnizian.

The tourism sector has spent enough time worrying about whether the garden is doomed. It is time to get back to cultivating it — with honesty about constraints, with clear definitions of what "flourishing" actually looks like for residents and visitors alike, and with the discipline to measure progress against those definitions rather than against raw volume.

That is what optimism, properly understood, demands.The highly, ambitious work of finding — and holding — the optimum.

Vienna is trying. Others should follow.

- FRANK CUYPERS

Sources & Further Reading

Leibniz, G.W. (1710). Théodicée. • Vienna Tourist Board (2025). Optimum Tourism: Visitor Economy Strategy. b2b.wien.info • Raworth, K. (2017). Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st-Century Economist. Chelsea Green Publishing. • Hartman, S. & Heslinga, J.H. (2023). The Doughnut Destination. Journal of Tourism Futures, 9(2), 279–284.