Interview: Building the Next Generation Tourism Board for U.S. Cities

Resonance Consultancy unveiled its new Top 50 U.S. Destinations 2014 report at the annual Destination Marketing Association International (DMAI) last month in Las Vegas. Los Angeles, New York, and surprisingly even to them, Dallas, ranked as the top three. Resonance is a paid consultant for destination marketing organizations and visitor bureaus, so its reports, while insightful, are first and foremost a selling tool to reach future clients. The summaries for each city highlight standard metrics such as visitation numbers and infrastructure development that have traditionally been used to evaluate tourism destinations and destination marketing organizations (DMOs) in the past. However, there’s equal focus on the tourism experiences themselves that help differentiate each city to forge their identities in the tourism marketplace. While DMOs have been marketing their cities as “travel experiences” over the last decade, they now have new destination marketing partners in the form of their customers, who are sharing their travel experiences digitally among myriad channels. Meaning, DMOs today have to embrace their new consumer partners and develop experiences that are both shareable and aligned with the destination's identity. We were interested in how this destination placemaking and place branding are impacting destination marketing strategy today, while shifting the discussion about the very role of DMOs in general. Rank City 1 Los Angeles 2 New York City 3 Dallas 4 Chicago 5 San Francisco 6 Las Vegas 7 San Diego 8 Denver 9 Philadelphia 10 Miami Chris Fair, president/CEO of Resonance Consultancy, discussed his company's Top 50 U.S. Destinations 2014 report with us. We also talked about the launch of DMAI’s DestinationNEXT report [click here for our review], which parallels some of the themes in the Resonance Report. Skift: What was your methodology behind this report? Chris Fair: What we wanted to do is create a mo