The Destination Storytelling Roadmap

Showing the way to giving local people the tools to tell their destination's story

Every place has authentic stories worth travelling for, yet most of them remain untold…

This is a proposal for the destination marketing organisations, destination management companies, travel companies, tourism development organisations, and community-tourism projects that want to change that.

Travel writing traps: saying the quiet part out loud

We’ve all read the same old destination pieces by writers who flew in for three days and never ventured beyond a fully escorted itinerary. Where villages are inevitably ‘tucked away,’ cafés are always ‘hidden gems,’ and every elder ‘has tales to tell’ (though they’re not shared with us).

And like us, AI models have read them too (all of them!). But unlike us, they can’t tell what’s reliable, so they cut, paste, and feed it back indiscriminately – but now, at a remove from lived experience – when publications bypass people in favour of profit.

Meanwhile, the stories with an actual heartbeat – traditions, crafts, wisdom passed through generations – stay right where they have always been, inside the community. And potential visitors who would gladly travel to discover them are none the wiser.

The travellers who would care most about your destination – the ones who book longer stays, put more of their travel spend into local hands, and, best of all, revisit – can spot fakes from a mile away. And so they keep scrolling, seeking the real thing elsewhere.

What we do

Resonate.travel is a travel storytelling platform founded on a single editorial ethos: local stories about a place are written by people with roots there. We champion the work of local writers who are carefully edited, paid properly, and published with full credit.

Our mission is to nurture local pride and heritage as the most sustainable asset in any community – by giving local people the space to share their own stories and let the narrative be driven from within.

Our chief editor and content manager, Emily Cathcart, herself a writer, has been encouraging Resonate writers from the initial idea through to publication since 2023. While our body of work has grown, our standards remain the same.

What’s new and exciting is harnessing what unlocks the power of storytelling: training. The key that turns people who have stories but have never been published into people who can pitch, write, and bring their work to readers.

Our Three-Pillar Model

Find Them
Shape Them
Share Them

What you get

There is a choice of two tracks, both leading to the same goal: trained local writers with publishable work to their name, and a destination whose stories are finally being told from the inside.

The model is built on three pillars: find them, shape them, share them. First, we help you find the stories your community holds; then, we train your writers to shape those stories into something a traveller will read, enjoy, and be inspired by; finally, we guide you on how to share the finished work with the readers who are actively looking for it.

Track One

Start Smart

Online training and guidance What you walk away with

A cohort of four to six local writers, each with a finished article written about your destination. Each completed piece that meets our editorial standards progresses to publication on Resonate.travel – with a backlink to your destination – and the writer is paid for it. Every participant who completes the programme leaves with a certificate and the practical skills to keep breathing life into their ideas and uncover local stories.

How we get there

Six weeks; four online group workshops in weeks one to four, plus a final group sum-up. Two one-to-one coaching sessions per participant – one near the start when the idea is taking shape, one near the end when the draft is being finished. Email support throughout. The course works through the three steps of destination storytelling: mapping it out, staying the course, and reaching your destination.

Best for

Destinations and projects that want to build long-term storytelling capacity without needing us to fly in. The most straightforward option, it is lower in cost and scales easily.

Track Two

Go Deeper

Offline, on-the-ground training What you walk away with

Everything Track One delivers – plus a list of stories we identified together while we were physically in your destination. Some of them were never going to surface in an online workshop, because some stories only emerge when someone is sitting on the right verandah at the right time, having the right conversation.

How we get there

We come to you. We run the training in person, alongside your writers, in the rooms and landscapes that the stories will eventually be set in. While we’re there, we also help you find the stories worth telling – the ones that aren’t on any tourism board’s keyword list yet, but should be.

Best for

Destinations and projects with a content ambition larger than one cohort, or where the storytelling itself is part of the development objective.

What this means… depending on who you are

Destination Marketing Organisation (DMO)

You stop being dependent on outsiders to create content about your destination. You build a permanent local content engine. The result is a library of stories nobody else can produce, written by people who actually know the place – exactly the kind of content that turns curiosity into bookings.

Destination Management Company (DMC)

The same trained cohort can write for your website too – not just for Resonate. Itineraries, blog posts, story-led product pages, outreach copy, the possibilities are nearly endless. A local team that can write is an asset that keeps paying back, year after year, across every channel you own.

Travel Company or Tourism Development Organisation

Your own staff are sitting on more storytelling material than you realise. Trip designers, guides, country managers, and product specialists all have firsthand stories. Train them, and your own channels start to read like the evocative guide to a place worth seeking out.

Community-Tourism Project or NGO

This closes two gaps that workshops alone won't: the publication-and-payment gap, and the marketing gap. Community initiatives work at the grassroots level, and marketing rarely makes it into the funded proposal. This programme hands the project an extra asset: a way to reach out with the destination's story, create engagement, and inspire travellers to come and visit.

The chain can be this direct

These are measures reportable in the language funders use – economic empowerment, dignified storytelling, livelihood diversification – grounded in something concrete enough to point to.

Pride
→
Stories
→
Travellers
→
Income

The Destination Spotlight Bundle

An all-in-one offer designed to make the decision easy.

  • The full six-week Start Smart programme for a cohort of four to six writers from your destination – with every workshop, every coaching session, every minute of editorial guidance from Emily.
  • Three published stories featuring your destination on Resonate.travel within six months of the cohort starting – each written by a local, edited to publication standard, and linked back to you.
  • A locally-trained pool of writers who can keep pitching to us – and to others – long after the programme ends, building your destination's presence organically over time.
  • One set price, with fixed deliverables and no surprise add-ons.

Why training your own people pays off

The value of training your own people has far greater mileage than commissioning a single feature ever can. Three published pieces during the programme are just the beginning. A trained cohort keeps producing – for Resonate, for your own channels, and for any other partner who values stories told from the inside.

A free starter, before you commit to anything

Before you decide whether to work with us, here is something to take away today.

Tell us about your destination – it takes about six minutes – and we’ll send you The Destination Storytelling Roadmap: a step-by-step guide to identifying, training, and publishing local storytellers from your community. It’s the same framework we use ourselves, written down, ready to follow, even if you never end up working with us.

Then, if it looks like there’s a fit, we’ll reach out to talk about a programme tailored to your destination – with a cohort size, scope, and price built around what you actually need.

  • The Roadmap is yours to keep. No call required.
  • We don't tailor a proposal until we've heard from you and you've told us you'd like one.
  • The price for any tailored programme is built around your destination – your cohort size, level of support, and ambition all shape what makes sense.

Get the Destination Storytelling Roadmap →

Tell us a little about yourself and your destination – we'll send the Roadmap PDF straight to your inbox.

Are you ready to share your community's genuine stories with the travellers who are looking for them?

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Resonate.travel is the storytelling community where local writers tell the stories of the places they belong to. We work with destination marketing organisations, destination management companies, travel companies, tourism development organisations, community-tourism initiatives, and conservation-linked tourism projects that want their places told from the inside. Resonate.travel is powered by Ethical Travel Portal AS.