Prototyping a destination means changing one’s mental posture before changing tools. It means stopping the habit of considering territories as containers of “ready-made” experiences and starting to read them as complex organisms, shaped by relationships, fragile balances, distributed skills, and often diverging expectations. In contemporary tourism, where market pressure often arrives before local systems have fully matured, this distinction is not theoretical: it is a matter of the long-term viability of the offer.
In recent years, a concrete response to this challenge has begun to emerge: territorial living labs. Not showcase spaces, not creative laboratories detached from reality, but real contexts in which the territory becomes an environment for continuous experimentation. Here, tourism operators, local communities, institutions, researchers, and in some cases visitors themselves co-design, test, and refine new travel experiences as they take shape. The value does not lie in the brilliant idea, but in the process that makes it sustainable, replicable, and fair.
A living lab works when it succeeds in holding together four dimensions that in tourism often move out of sync: governance, local capacity, impact metrics, and iterative learning. It is an approach that accepts error as part of the journey but does not tolerate improvisation; that privileges listening but demands responsibility; that does not promise immediate scalability but builds reliability. In this sense, the destination is not “launched”: it is prototyped as a living system.
In the Amazon, in Puerto Nariño, this approach takes on a form deeply consistent with its context. Here, tourism is not conceived as a lever for quantitative growth, but as a tool for balance between biodiversity, Indigenous culture, and community well-being. The Living Lab for Sustainable Tourism was created precisely with this aim: to build an environment of innovation that does not import external models, but works on the immaterial resources of the territory, starting with local knowledge and community relationships.
The work begins with a question that is only apparently simple: how is the travel experience actually lived, and what happens along the entire value chain, from the choice of destination to the return home? Visitor testimonies become material for shared analysis, not to adapt the territory to market expectations, but to identify where the system works and where it breaks down. Transport, accommodation, food, activities, and relationship with the environment: every step is observed as part of an interdependent ecosystem.
In this context, innovation is not primarily technological. It is organisational, cultural, and relational. It means helping local micro-enterprises understand where they generate value and where they lose it, building shared standards without distorting traditional practices, and above all, developing a collective awareness that the travel experience is all the more authentic the more coherent it is. This path unfolds during a phase of strong growth in Colombian tourism: in 2024, the country recorded a historic peak in international arrivals of around 6.7 million, depending on the statistical definition adopted. In such a scenario, the ability to govern flows becomes just as decisive as the ability to attract them.
In Asia, around Lake Toba in Indonesia, the living lab takes on a different yet equally significant form. Here, the starting point is a tension well known to emerging destinations: developing rapidly without replicating growth models that elsewhere have produced environmental and social imbalances that are difficult to correct. The pathway launched with the involvement of applied universities, local administrations, and operators overturns the traditional relationship between research and territory.
The place is not studied in order to later deliver a report; instead, work takes place within real problems, together with those who will have to live with the solutions. Waste management, pressure on natural resources, workforce skills, and redistribution of economic benefits: issues often considered “peripheral” become central elements in the design of the tourism experience. The living lab thus acts as an intelligent brake on the temptation to accelerate without control, while at the same time serving as an accelerator of quality.
For those who build tourism products, the message is clear: there are no memorable experiences if invisible infrastructures do not work. An itinerary, an activity, a destination narrative must already incorporate a response to systemic frictions. The value of the living lab lies precisely here: making interdependencies visible and turning them into design choices before they become operationally critical.
In Oceania, on Flinders Island in Tasmania, the living lab emerges from an even deeper fracture: the loss of trust between community and tourism. In this case, tourism development was perceived by part of the resident population as something imposed from outside, without listening or consent. The response was not a new marketing strategy, but a patient effort to rebuild the relationship between territory and decision-making.
The project, launched as a two-year programme in 2021, adopts the model of a “collaboratory”: an experimental space in which tourism becomes the entry point for a broader conversation about the future, resilience, and collective well-being. Here, prototyping does not concern only the experiences offered to visitors, but the very way decisions are made. Adaptive approaches, community leadership, incubation of local initiatives, institutional advocacy: the living lab becomes a social infrastructure before it becomes a tourism one.
The underlying principle is simple and powerful: a place that works for those who live there also works for those who visit it. In this perspective, tourism ceases to be an end in itself and becomes a tool. No longer an autonomous objective, but a lever to strengthen relationships, skills, and the territory’s capacity for self-determination.
Viewed together, these three cases reveal a shared trajectory. Territorial living labs work when they accept complexity and renounce shortcuts. They do not promise immediate results, but build reliability. They do not chase innovation as a value in itself, but as a process of collective learning. Above all, they shift the centre of gravity of design from marketing to real delivery capacity.
For the trade, this change is anything but marginal. The tour operator is no longer just a distributor of experiences, but a validation partner. The DMC evolves from executor to orchestrator of local ecosystems. Communities stop being “authentic” extras and become actors who define boundaries, benefits, and responsibilities. Success metrics change as well: not only arrivals, but quality of spending, distribution of value, continuity of local enterprises, resident satisfaction, and visitor behaviour.
The destination of the future does not simply tell its story. It puts itself to the test. It accepts being incomplete, improvable, in the making. And it is precisely this willingness to be tested that makes it more credible, more resilient, and, paradoxically, more desirable for the market as well.
Appendix
Sources and Project References
Puerto Nariño (Colombia)
Laboratorio Vivo de Turismo Sostenible de Puerto Nariño – Amazonas.
Project promoted and documented by the Stockholm Environment Institute (SEI), with institutional recognition from the Colombian Ministry of Commerce, Industry and Tourism as a living lab for sustainable tourism and bioeconomy.
Lake Toba (Indonesia)
Living Lab for the sustainable tourism development of the Lake Toba area.
Programme coordinated by CELTH – Centre of Expertise Leisure, Tourism & Hospitality, based on multi-year co-design activities, stakeholder workshops, and scenario building (“Lake Toba 2030”), within the framework of Indonesia–Netherlands cooperation.
Flinders Island (Tasmania, Australia)
The Islander Way – Regenerative Tourism Living Lab.
Regenerative tourism project developed with the support of Tourism CoLab, oriented towards a community-led approach, with a focus on territorial resilience, community well-being, and participatory governance.
