The importance of stakeholder collaboration within a tourism destination is widelyrecognized in the literature. However, this process seems to be very complex and challengingdue to multiple actors with interest in tourism development and fragmented nature ofdestinations. Both, influental and competent stakeholders need to be considered in tourismplanning and decision-making, in order to avoid conflicts and provide integral tourist product.This paper explores the case in which the process of collaboration was very complex,followed by many discrepancies and limitations. It is dealing with the formation andevolution of a destination collaboration and controversial promotional idea. By usingqualitative method of interviews, the paper seeks to reveal the main reasons which influencedthe failure of a major collaborative initiative supported by number of destinationstakeholders. This will be done by exploring the case of disagreement over a joint marketingidea between the official government-led DMO and industry-led cluster. For the empiricalanalysis, the case of destination Valjevo in Serbia was choosen. It is a destination that isfacing a number of problems typical for many tourist places in Serbia. The area is verydiverse, with a large number of potential tourist products, narratives, events, and alreadyexisting associations. The idea of using a figure of a vampire to promote Valjevo as a touristdestination was triggering a series of problems and criticism. In-depth interviews with a totalof seven respondents were carried out in order to collect the primary data for the research.The results have shed light on six main groups of factors that synergistically contribute to thedestination collaboration failure, namely: public pressure, lack of support and understanding,interpersonal relations and personalities, membership structure and internal factors, includingthe inactivity of the members themselves. Competitive relations among official DMO andmembers of the collaborative initiative seem to be particularly important and limiting for thesuccess of destination collaboration in this case. It shows that disagreement about the ways ofpromotion can be an important constraint and a factor of instability, which can infect thewhole collaborative process and question its further existence. The results confirm thecomplexity of relations and perspectives within a single tourism destination, made up of alarge number of stakeholders with their own system of thinking and acting.