Building on the city’s strong visitor economy—which generated over $9 billion in visitor spending in 2025—the Destination Master Plan represents a comprehensive vision for strengthening Canada's largest city as a world-class urban destination. Developed through extensive research, stakeholder engagement, and community consultation, it addresses the opportunities and challenges facing Toronto's visitor economy over the next decade. It identifies the steps required to grow visitation, increase tourism’s economic benefits and enhance the visitor experience.

The plan is organized around five interconnected tracks, supported by 29 strategies and related actions. Each track addresses a critical dimension of Toronto's destination competitiveness.

The plan provides the tourism and hospitality sectors, City of Toronto departments, provincial and federal agencies and ministries, cultural institutions, and private-sector partners with a shared framework for action.

A plan of this scope only delivers results if people are aligned around it and accountable for moving it forward. As a 10-year roadmap reflecting a shared vision, successful implementation requires sustained partnership among hospitality and tourism businesses, government, private sector investors, and community organizations.

Implementation of the recommendations is addressed within the plan’s Track 5. It calls for a multi-year Implementation Plan to define responsibilities, timelines and performance metrics, supported by an Implementation Steering Group to monitor progress and coordinate decision-making. Destination Toronto will act as lead coordinator for the implementation of the plan’s recommendations.

Toronto is Canada’s largest, most-visited city and an economic powerhouse. Toronto’s tourism and hospitality sector is a major source of prosperity and one of the city’s most resilient service exports—bringing over $9 billion in visitor spending into the city’s economy in 2025. The Destination Master Plan will ensure sustainable growth of the visitor economy and the city’s long-term competitiveness through a shared vision to inform decision-making across the public and private sectors.

Peer cities around the world are investing decisively in the infrastructure, public spaces, and signature attractions needed to capture more of the global tourism market, and Toronto must respond. 

Tourism of all kinds—leisure, meetings, business travel—drives enormous value to our city through visitor spending, business connectivity and added vibrancy. Tourism competitiveness demands continuous investment, bold placemaking, and coordinated action across public and private partners. Investments designed to attract more visitors also improve quality of life for residents.

Facilitated focus groups and visioning workshops included a cross-section of participants from the city’s visitor economy and beyond, including accommodations, attractions, business events, travel trade, restaurants, retail, sports and entertainment, arts and culture, community placemaking, government and policy, transportation and mobility, investment and development (including real estate), and workforce development. Focused discussions on strengthening the tourism potential within Scarborough, North York and Etobicoke were also held.

The State of the Destination Executive Summary was released half way through the development process and provided insights from the research completed and data collected in the first phases of the initiative. It identified key travel visitor trends, visitation data, competitive dynamics and community priorities to inform the Destination Master Plan. 

Highlighting both opportunities and challenges, the State of the Destination Executive Summary shaped discussions in visioning workshops, a subsequent phase of industry consultation in the fall of 2025. These workshops focused on transforming the research findings and stakeholder insights into actionable strategic recommendations.

Destination Toronto's purpose is to ignite the city's visitor economy to enrich and empower its communities. Destination Toronto markets and promotes the city to attract visitors and major meetings and events and supports local businesses to maximize the opportunities of the visitor economy. 

Destination Toronto was uniquely positioned to assemble key players in tourism, hospitality, and beyond for the discussions and research needed to develop the Destination Master Plan, and will act as the lead coordinator for implementation. 

While Destination Toronto is facilitating this initiative, the Destination Master Plan is a shared vision for all Toronto stakeholders, and the implementation plan will include action items for private, public, and non-profit sectors to deliver.

Destination Toronto is a non-profit, member-based organization that operates in partnership with the City of Toronto and the tourism and hospitality community. Destination Toronto promotes the city to attract visitors and major meetings and events, and supports local businesses to maximize the opportunities of the visitor economy. 

The project was jointly funded by Destination Toronto and the Government of Canada through the Federal Economic Development Agency for Southern Ontario (FedDev Ontario).