A Comparative Examination of the Implementation of Destination Marketing System Strategies: Scotland and Ireland

The paper examines, compares and contrasts the recent experience of Scotland and Ireland in their attempts to implement a DMS. Scotland’s vision is shown evolving through three distinct waves over more than a decade while Ireland has produced an initial and a re-engineered version of their DMS approach, Gulliver, in a five-year period. The apparently strong contrasts in the structure, technical infrastructure/architecture, funding, ownership/management, and the philosophy adopted by the two approaches is explored, and reference made to the European context. The paper concludes by examining key system attributes and problems of implementation.