Tina O'Dwyer

About Tina O'Dwyer

Tina O'Dwyer works with senior leaders in public sector tourism who are carrying an expanded mandate while operating inside annual funding cycles, short-term electoral timelines and volume-based KPIs. Their accountability now extends to community wellbeing, environmental integrity, cultural continuity and long-term resilience. Their dashboards still track visitor numbers, visitor spend and GDP. Tina calls this The Metrics-Mandate Gap. Her research and field experience across Ireland, the UK and internationally led to a key insight: today's system is delivering exactly what it was designed to deliver, and its success is now the source of strain. What tourism leadership needs is a fundamentally different lens. The Place Paradigm is that lens. Published as a Strategic Leadership Paper in 2026, it gives tourism leaders a way to see, assess and measure destination health across five dimensions, with economic performance sitting within a broader framework that makes the rest of the mandate visible, credible and trackable. The paper introduces The Stewardship Spectrum, a diagnostic for where a destination sits in the current transition, and The Five Dimensions of Place Vitality, a measurement architecture that gives rigour and credibility to the outcomes leaders are already asked to deliver. Tina works with a small number of senior leaders and destinations on Strategic Stewardship, the leadership practice of holding long-term place outcomes within short-term performance systems. This can take the form of Thinking Partnerships, Strategic Facilitation, Leadership Retreats and Keynote Speaking. Email Tina directly on tina@tinaodwyer.com if you'd like to explore how these ideas might be relevant for your destination.