I-DEST is an integrated digital tourism platform designed to support destinations, tourism businesses and visitors in the transition towards more sustainable, inclusive and data-driven tourism.

The platform brings sustainability management, digital destination management and visitor communication into a single ecosystem. Its sustainability framework is aligned with the Global Sustainable Tourism Council (GSTC) criteria and the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), translating international sustainability principles into practical tools that destinations and tourism SMEs can use in their everyday operations.

For destinations and Destination Management Organisations (DMOs), I-DEST provides digital monitoring and benchmarking tools, sustainability indicators, stakeholder and service-provider data, visitor insights and decision-support dashboards. Data collected from participating tourism businesses can be standardised, anonymised and aggregated at destination level, helping DMOs identify strengths, gaps and development priorities and supporting evidence-based destination management.

Tourism businesses can use self-assessment tools to evaluate their sustainability and accessibility practices, monitor progress, compare their performance with relevant benchmarks and identify opportunities for improvement. This also enables destinations to involve local SMEs directly in their sustainability transition rather than limiting sustainability management to the destination authority or DMO.

I-DEST also connects sustainability data with the visitor experience. Travellers can discover tourism services, attractions and experiences according to sustainability, accessibility and other relevant criteria. Interactive maps, thematic and cultural routes, multilingual content, audioguides, visitor feedback tools and sustainability challenges help destinations turn sustainability information into practical visitor engagement.

The platform therefore connects three levels of the tourism ecosystem: destinations and DMOs, tourism businesses and visitors. Local actions and business-level data contribute to destination-level intelligence, while destination sustainability objectives can be translated into practical actions and visitor communication.

I-DEST combines the green and digital transition of tourism in one scalable system and can be applied by individual municipalities, destinations, regions, tourism networks and cross-border initiatives.