This presentation was part of the SDT2012 - the 1st international conference on service design and tourism, Innsbruck/Austria, August 23-24, 2012. For more info on the conference and other presentations visit: www.sdt2012.com. All rights reserved by the author(s): Jeroen Bryon, Belgium ArrowMinded Jeroen provides strategic support to Tourism Flanders in Belgium and the European Travel Commission. He is an assistant professor at the Master of Tourism at the University of Leuven (Belgium), where he teaches Urban Tourism. His company ArrowMinded delivers consultant services on the development and execution of innovative tourism strategies. Strategic planning for destinations and service design thinking: a perfect match? Within the field of strategic planning for tourism destinations, there is a lack of easy-to-apply models and methods. The ‘destination development canvas’ is a newly designed blueprint for tourism destination strategists. It is inspired by the business model canvas and by the EFQM model. It consists of ten modules that capture the complexity of tourist destination management and development, ranging from the destination’s identity, tourist attraction system and marketing to the tourists and their impacts. Also less obvious aspects are mapped such as the stakeholders’ capacities, visitor management, worldwide trends and the outbound industry and influentials in the target markets. The power of the ‘destination development canvas’ lies in its simplicity, its holistic approach and its development-orientation. It is entirely conceived by major service design thinking principles: user-centred, co-creation, sequencing, evidencing and holistic. The ‘destination development canvas’ was tested during a one week workshop in the Dong Van Karst Plateau, a Unesco Global Geopark in Vietnam. Methods from service design, such as moodboards, personas and customer journey mapping, were used to develop a strategic tourism action plan for the region. Based on this workshop, reflections on the use of service design thinking for strategic planning for destinations will be presented.