Before we tell tourists the story of a destination, the people who live there must know it.

Locals are the best ambassadors of a destination. And that's true, but only someone who truly knows their city, its history, people, and lesser-known stories can be an ambassador.

Dubrovnik through DUB PUB ​​QUIZ opens up an interesting model of local community involvement, while the "Get to Know Your Country" project has been showing for years how valuable it is to become a tourist in your own city, at least for a day.

In tourism, we talk a lot about storytelling, the identity of the destination, the dispersion of tourist flows and the involvement of the local population. But before all that, there is one simple question: How many people living in a destination actually know the place they live in?

Not just its most famous attractions, but the people, events, neighborhoods, villages, local expressions, historical details and little stories that make a certain place special.

This is precisely why the example from Dubrovnik is interesting, where the Dubrovnik development agency DURA organizes thematically as part of the People Powered Tourism project DUB PUB ​​QUIZ "How well do you know your city outside the walls?".

The quiz will take place on September 25th at Love Bar, and the focus will not be on the most famous painting of Dubrovnik, which is known to almost the whole world, but on Gruž and Dubrovnik's Upper and Lower Villages.

Through a fun and interactive format, the participants will check how much they know about local attractions, people, places and history, but the quiz also has a much more serious destination dimension. The event is used to collect feedback from the local community on the results of mapping and valorization of local natural and cultural resources. Citizens thus participate in validating the catalog of local resources and, what is even more important, in shaping the identity and stories of their own destination.

At first glance, it looks like “just” a pub quiz. In fact, it’s a very good example how to involve the local community in the destination development process without conference rooms, presentations of a hundred slides, and yet another document that will end up on some website.

A local must first get to know their own destination.

We often repeat that local people are the best ambassadors of their city or region. They certainly are and can be. But not automatically.

Becoming an ambassador for a destination is not just about living somewhere. You need to know the area, understand its stories, and have something to share with others.

How many residents of a city really know why a certain street bears its name? How many know the story of an old house, industrial complex, local custom, or person who marked the development of their city? How many people can offer a guest who asks them "What else is worth seeing here?" more than a few of the most famous locations that the guest will find on the Internet anyway?

This is where a much more important conversation begins about destination storytelling.

If we want to discover lesser-known places for tourists, create new experiences, and direct them beyond the busiest tourist zones, these stories must first be known by the people who live in the destination.

And it's not enough to create a catalog, app, website, or tourist brochure.

Information in itself is not yet a story.

It needs to be given a context. To connect a place with people, history, emotion, and identity. Only then does a building cease to be just a building, a street just a street, and a village just a dot on a map.

This is the value of the Dubrovnik example. Citizens are not only told what they should know about their destination, but they are also invited through a quiz to test their own knowledge, discover something new, and also confirm, comment on, or supplement the stories that are being formed about their space.

Because the people who live in a space must be one of the main sources of knowledge about that space.

Perhaps a certain story that institutions consider important to the local community means almost nothing. Or perhaps there is a completely different story, person, event or custom that never ended up in the official tourist interpretation, while local people consider it an important part of their identity.

This is precisely why local community participation should not be a formal item in strategic documents, but a continuous process.

There's nothing better than occasionally becoming a tourist in your own city.

This principle has been demonstrated in Croatia for years in its own way. "Know your country", design Croatian tourist guide associations through which tourist guides organize free tours for citizens every year.

The concept is extremely simple, and that is why it is so powerful: become a tourist in your own city. 

Because we quickly stop looking at the city we pass through every day through tourist eyes. For us, locals, many things are simply commonplace. We grew up with them, we see them every day, and that's why we often don't recognize how interesting they are and what kind of story they tell.

The blindness of the known

In psychology, this process is called habituation or getting used to a stimulus that we are constantly exposed to, causing us to pay less and less attention to it over timeIn everyday language we could also describe it as a kind of ""the blindness of the known"What we pass by without thinking, a tourist or visitor sees for the first time. And it is precisely in something that is quite ordinary to us that he can recognize the special and authentic.

We walk the same streets, pass the same buildings and squares, but we don't really notice them anymore. A good tour guide can completely change that perspective in just an hour or two. Suddenly we learn the story of a building we've been passing for decades, discover a detail we've never noticed, or hear the story of a person and an event that gives a space that was previously quite ordinary to us a new meaning.

That's why sometimes we need a tour guide to see our own city through the eyes of a guest again.

And therein lies perhaps one of the best models for creating local ambassadors.

There's no better way to get to know a destination than to occasionally become a tourist in your own city.

A resident who discovers a new story about their city will talk about it differently tomorrow. They might tell it to a friend who is visiting, a business partner from abroad, a guest in their apartment, a tourist sitting at the next table, or someone who simply asks them what else they might see.

And that's when promotion becomes natural.

Not because someone gave the resident a pre-prepared marketing message that needs to be repeated, but because they discovered something that they found interesting and worth sharing.

DUB PUB ​​QUIZ and "Know Your Country" use completely different formats, but the same logic is behind them: to allow people to rediscover the place where they live.

One does it through questions, socializing and interaction, the other through the interpretation of tourist guides and walking around the city. Both approaches show that learning about one's heritage does not have to be formal or boring.

Dispersion of tourist flows begins with knowledge

Dubrovnik is particularly interesting in this context precisely because of the question asked in the title of the quiz: How well do you know your city outside the walls?

This is also one of the key issues of tourist management in Dubrovnik. If we want tourists to leave the most famous and busiest area of ​​the city, they must have a reason to do so. We will not achieve the dispersion of tourist flows just because we marked a location on a digital map or created a new brochure.

Stories, experiences and recommendations are needed. And the local population can be one of the strongest channels of such dispersion.

The receptionist, taxi driver, waiter, host in a private accommodation, guide, shopkeeper or simply a citizen whom a guest asks for a recommendation have a direct influence on what that guest will do in the next few hours.

If everyone gives the same answer, all the guests will end up in the same places.

If local people know the wider area of ​​their destination, a completely different possibility opens up. One will direct the guest towards Gruž, another towards the hinterland, and a third will recommend a local story, gastronomy, or place that they might never have found through Google, Tripadvisor, or Booking.com.

It is organic dispersion of tourist flows, and it begins with knowledge.

That's why investing in introducing local people to their own destination is not just a nice social initiative. It can be very concrete. destination management tool.

The same logic applies when we expand the conversation from cities to the whole of Croatia: How much do we actually know about our own country?

How much does a resident of Zagreb know about Slavonia, a Dalmatian about Međimurje, a Slavonian about Lika, and how much do we all know about the dozens of smaller towns and places that have difficulty finding space in the main tourist narrative of Croatia?

If we want to expand tourist flows both spatially and temporally, then we need to better understand what we offer. Not only as a tourism sector, but as a society. Because residents are not just potential domestic tourists. They are everyday communicators of Croatia's identity.

Every conversation with a foreign friend, guest, or business partner is a potential recommendation. But we can only recommend what we know. That's why destination storytelling shouldn't start with communication with the guest.

His the first audience should be the local community.

Of course, the goal is not to turn every citizen into a tourist guide or to impose yet another obligation towards tourism on the local population. Quite the opposite. The goal is to enable people to get to know the place they live in better, discover its lesser-known stories and participate in defining what their space represents.

When local people understand a story, feel it belongs to them and are proud of it, they won't have to learn it as a tourist slogan.

They will tell it themselves.

And before we try to tell the world the story of our destination, perhaps the first step is just this: make sure we know how to tell it to ourselves.