Tourism Bureaus Need to Stop Thinking Like Tourism Bureaus
Skift Take
Tourism bureaus are under increasing pressure to validate the business case for their funding, so they're expanding their role and reworking their business model.
The primary role of tourism bureaus is to choreograph the overall destination experience, because with all of the talk about Google, Uber, and TripAdvisor, they aren't going to develop a Restaurant Month promotional campaign during a destination’s slow season.
That’s according to Bill Geist, chief instigator at DMOproz in Madison, Wisconsin, who works with destination marketing organizations (DMOs) to develop new business strategy. Previously, Geist was president of the Greater Madison Convention & Visitors Bureau.
Most DMOs are involved in some type of product and destination development, such as creating restaurant months, acquiring new airline routes, supporting meetings and convention infrastructure expansion, and developing large special events. The original DMO mandate revolved around driving economic development and quality of life for the entire destination, including both the local business community and local residents.
But because the majority of DMOs receive the bulk of their funding from hotel room tax, somewhere along the way the hotels in many destinations hijacked the majority of attention from DMOs. So much so, the success of many bureaus up until the 21st century was measured in terms of room nights, or “heads in beds.”
There is a concerted revolution against that yardstick throughout the global DMO industry. That’s the reason behind the shift in the tourism bureau designation over the last two decades from CVB (Convention & Visitors Bureau) to DMO. The CVB acronym connotes that bureaus are active solely within the field of tourism promotion. The DMO designation opens that up to include things like appealing to outside corporate investment, which may or may not impact a destination's visitor economy.
“We’ve got to stop acting like CVBs because CVBs equal travel and tourism,” said Geist during a presentation at the Destination Marketing Association International (DMAI) annual convention this month in Austin. “Travel and tourism and CVBs means heads in beds. That is a segment of the economy that is limiting, allowing us to be trivialized.... Instead, destination marketing is crucial in our global pursuit of investment, of capital, human resources and quality of life.”
The point here is that if the value proposition for DMOs is measured only by driving room nights, that narrows a bureau’s case for securing funding sources beyond room tax revenue.
Furthermore, while DMOs have always be
