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The purpose of the paper is to study how the local stakeholders of three different tourism destinations consider who is responsible for the development of a tourism destination (if identifiable) and why.

This study takes a multiple case study approach. Three different destinations are compared. A qualitative research method was chosen. The data are based on the interviews of tourism and wellbeing professionals (tourism entrepreneurs, experts and regional developers).

The interview results suggest that destination leadership seems to be context-dependent. Competition, co-operation and coopetition all occur in different forms in different regions. Various kinds of co-operation are distinguishable between stakeholders of case regions, and the level of leadership among actors varies in the regions; one region is strongly managed by marketing company, while on other the co-operative store chain is apparently dominant. The roles of local educational institutes also varied depending on the case area. In addition, some entry barriers were identified.

The data were collected three to four years ago, so some changes in the areas and in the roles and relationships of diverse stakeholders may have occurred.

By identifying challenges faced in diverse regions diverse destination managers can identify challenges likely to occur at destinations with similar management structures.

The paper discusses the challenges and roles of diverse stakeholders in destination management by using empirical cases.

Lake tourism is a growing academic sub-field of tourism studies with an emerging body of literature. However, little research attention has been given to lake-destinations’ projected or perceived tourism images. Specifically, there has been a scarcity of literature investigating the variables involved in the formation of a lake-destination image. Therefore, this study aims to explore the main attributes that might potentially influence this type of destination, and simultaneously, contribute to conceptualizing and defining lake tourism as recent research area. An explorative study was then conducted in order to generate a set of image variables through the use of textual and photographic data. The results will contribute to characterize potential lake-destinations and to develop a final list of variables specifically related to this type of destination.