On September 9th, the 2026 World Tourism Cooperation and Development Conference was held at the Shougang International Convention and Exhibition Center in Beijing. At the opening ceremony, Joseph Lema, an expert from the World Tourism Cities Federation and a tenured professor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, released the detailed scoring guidelines for the international standard "Brand Evaluation of Tourism Cities" (ISO 11778), providing operational and quantifiable practical guidance for global tourism cities to conduct brand evaluations.

Initiated and developed by the World Tourism Cities Federation, this standard is the world's first international standard specifically for evaluating the brand of tourism cities, and a pioneering achievement in the field of international standardization of tourism destinations.

The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) officially approved and released ISO 11778, "Brand evaluation of tourist cities," in early 2025.

The standard stipulates the basic framework, evaluation indicators and evaluation process for evaluating tourism city brands. It includes 8 primary indicators and 53 secondary indicators, covering aspects such as tourism resources, tourism infrastructure, convenience of tourism services, environmental sustainability, safety, stakeholder evaluation, number of tourists, and financial performance.

Industry insiders say that the release of the standard enhances the Federation's ability to guide and serve tourist cities, provides standardized and scientific guidance for the construction of global tourist city brands, and is also a substantial contribution by the Federation and its member cities to the formulation of international rules in the tourism sector.

Under the standard of 53 secondary indicators, 121 tertiary indicators are further refined, with a total score of 1,000 points. The evaluation adopts three methods: benchmark comparison, grade scoring, and expert evaluation. The scores, scoring rules, and data sources of each type of indicator are clearly defined, which focuses on solving the core problem of "how to evaluate". It provides an operable guide for cities to conduct self-evaluation, analyze their development advantages and shortcomings, and help cities find the right direction for brand enhancement.

The release of these detailed scoring rules establishes a quantifiable, comparable, and sustainably optimized unified standard for evaluating global tourism city brands. It provides a replicable and scalable practical model for city brand building in various countries and contributes Chinese wisdom to global tourism governance. (Source: China.com, Author: Wu Ce, Yuan Yue)

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