Toward vulnerability-friendly destinations: A relational framework for inclusive destination governance

Tourism research has generally located vulnerability in particular travelers and treated inclusion as an extension of accessibility provision. This paper reframes vulnerability as a relational destination-level condition produced, intensified, or reduced through interactions between heterogeneous human capacities and destination-system demands. A structured integrative conceptual synthesis connects public health equity, human factors engineering, and tourism management. The resulting framework explains how unequal exposure creates person-system mismatch, how destination arrangements produce vulnerability through recurring interfaces, and how inclusive-governance capability operates both preventively by shaping system properties and responsively by coordinating intervention. Risk redistribution is specified as a distinct mechanism that follows risk reduction and the allocation of responsibility, workload, and cost, and concerns the pooling, transfer, or absorption of residual risk by actors with greater capacity. Five recurring exposure interfaces and four intervention dimensions are organized in an analytical matrix. The framework distinguishes proximal outcomes (participation, safety, dignity, trust, and wellbeing) from conditional destination outcomes such as legitimacy, loyalty, and competitiveness. The paper extends relational vulnerability logic to the destination-system level and provides a research agenda for inclusive destination governance.