Adventure travel businesses compete every day for travelers, talent, and market share, but they also share risks, responsibilities, and reputation. From safety and sustainability to destination credibility, many of the factors shaping success lie beyond the control of any single operator. This is where coopetition—strategic collaboration among competitors—has become not just useful, but essential.
Destination Reputation Is a Collective Asset
Adventure travelers rarely evaluate a company in isolation. Their decisions are shaped by perceptions of the destination as a whole—safety, authenticity, environmental care, and community benefit. When businesses collaborate through associations and networks, they strengthen the collective reputation of the destination, an outcome that benefits all participants even as they continue to compete for bookings.
In practice, a traveler’s experience with one operator, guide, or supplier influences how they perceive every other business operating in that place. Coopetition helps align expectations and reduce weak links across the visitor journey, from arrival to departure.
Coopetition Is a Strategic Choice, Not a Compromise
In tourism research, coopetition is understood as a deliberate strategy in which firms collaborate in some areas while continuing to compete in others. Studies of tourism businesses show that companies are far more willing to engage in coopetition when they share source markets and operate within strong destination or industry networks, such as business associations or alliances. These structures reduce risk, build trust, and clarify boundaries around what can and cannot be shared.
For adventure travel, this framing matters. Many operators serve the same markets, rely on the same guides or suppliers, and face the same external pressures, from climate impacts and safety expectations to growing traveler scrutiny around sustainability. Competing in isolation on these issues is inefficient and, in many cases, ineffective.
Shared Challenges Demand Shared Solutions
Adventure travel operators and destinations face a common set of pressures:
- Safety and risk management: Remote locations and high-risk activities mean that incidents rarely affect just one operator’s reputation.
- Environmental and cultural stewardship: Overuse, mismanagement, or extractive practices by one group can damage ecosystems and communities that everyone depends on.
- Traveler trust and credibility: Inconsistent sustainability claims or uneven quality standards confuse travelers and erode confidence in destinations as a whole.
- Market access and visibility: Many adventure destinations compete globally with limited marketing resources, making collective storytelling more powerful than fragmented promotion.
None of these stand alone as concerns for a single company. They are systemic, affecting entire destinations and regions. Research shows that organizations are more likely to collaborate when they perceive these shared risks and benefits clearly—and when a neutral platform exists to coordinate action.
The Role of Industry and Destination Organizations
Industry associations, destination management organizations, and multi-stakeholder platforms play a critical role in making coopetition workable. Businesses operating within strong associations show greater openness to collaboration with competitors, particularly in pre-competitive areas such as standards, training, and destination promotion.
In adventure travel, organizations like the Adventure Travel Trade Association and destination-level alliances often serve as conveners rather than competitors. They create shared frameworks that allow companies to align on fundamentals while preserving brand independence.
Join the conversation in the ATTA Member HUB to learn how coopetition can work for you.
Common areas of coopetition include:
- Guide training and safety standards, raising professionalism across a destination
- Sustainability and climate action frameworks, reducing greenwashing and improving consistency
- Crisis preparedness and response, improving resilience to natural disasters or geopolitical shocks
- Destination storytelling, shifting competition away from price and toward value and impact
- In some cases a tour operator will represent several ‘soft-competitors’ at events
In some cases, a single tour operator may even represent several “soft competitors” at trade events or in joint marketing efforts. These approaches ensure that competition happens on experience quality and innovation—not on who can cut corners the fastest.
Drawing Clear Boundaries
Successful coopetition depends on clarity. Collaboration does not extend to pricing, customer lists, or proprietary business strategy. Instead, it focuses on shared foundations: safety, sustainability, destination readiness, and market credibility.
Tourism research underscores that trust and structure are key. When businesses understand the purpose of collaboration and the limits of information sharing, coopetition becomes a source of strength rather than suspicion.
Real-World Examples of Coopetition in Action
Coopetition is already delivering measurable impact across the travel and outdoor sectors:
- In mountain destinations, local guides share rescue training programs and safety data.
- River and ocean adventure hubs coordinate environmental monitoring initiatives.
- Community-based tourism networks pool marketing resources to tell region-wide stories.
- Multi-district trail systems coordinate access, infrastructure, and visitor management.
Beyond destinations, coopetition has proven effective at the industry level. In 2025, eleven travel associations—organizations that technically compete for members and influence—set competition aside to form the Beyond Borders Tourism Coalition, working together to strengthen tourism flows between the U.S. and Canada during a challenging political climate.
The outdoor industry offers an even earlier example. In 1989, Yvon Chouinard of Patagonia called his top competitors with a simple proposition: compete in the marketplace as usual, but join forces on conservation. That call led to the creation of The Conservation Alliance, which has since helped protect more than 125 million acres of land and awarded approximately $34.5 million in grants. This model later inspired the Adventure Travel Conservation Fund.
More recently, new frameworks such as travel flow corridors have emerged, emphasizing reciprocal tourism and coordinated destination management as a way to balance demand, resilience, and community benefit across regions.
A Forward Path for the Sector
Coopetition encourages the adventure travel sector to reframe competition. Instead of guarding every piece of intellectual property or avoiding collaboration, operators and destinations can ask:
- Which challenges do we solve better together?
- When does working together drive more demand for our region than working independently?
- How can we protect and promote our shared assets?
Join the conversation in the ATTA Member HUB to learn how coopetition can work for you.
Adventure travel has always lived with productive tension. Operators work hard to differentiate themselves through unique itineraries, storytelling, expertise, and brand identity. At the same time, they depend on shared landscapes, communities, infrastructure, and reputation. Trails, rivers, reefs, mountains, airlift, safety systems, and visitor perceptions are rarely owned by a single company.
The most resilient adventure destinations will be those that compete not just on experiences, but on the strength of the collaboration that makes those experiences possible. In an era of accelerating traveler expectations and mounting external pressures, aligned competitors are better positioned to innovate, build trust, and collectively compete against the impacts of mass tourism—while delivering lasting value to destinations and communities.