The 20 Trends Destinations Need to Understand to Compete for Tourists

The 100th annual Destination Marketing Association International (DMAI) conference took place this week at ARIA Resort & Casino Las Vegas, bringing together destination marketing organizations (DMOs) of all sizes from around the world. During the event, DMAI unveiled phase one of its DMAI DestinationNEXT industry report. It was designed to help DMOs understand travel behavioral trends and suggest strategies to capitalize on those trends, while providing new benchmarking tools and best practices to help drive business in today's rapidly changing tourism environment. In March, DMAI sent out a survey to DMOs worldwide to discern what they thought were the biggest issues impacting the travel industry in 2014. The survey included a list of 65 tourism trends and 49 potential strategies in response to those trends, which DMAI asked the DMOs to rank in order of importance in their region. DMAI polled two panels of experts to source the specific trends and strategies included in the survey. One was top tourism industry executives from different travel sectors. The second was senior leaders in non-travel related fields of business, economics, technology and social sciences. A total of 327 DMOs from 36 countries replied to the survey, constituting the highest participation rate of any outreach program ever created by DMAI. During the Las Vegas conference this week, an overview of the report findings was presented by Paul Ouimet, executive VP of InterVISTAS Consulting, one of the primary architects of the report. He first discussed the top 20 trends and 20 strategies culled from all of the DMO supplied data. “The first takeaway, it was really surprising to us how much consensus there was on what the major trends are, and their potential impact on the industry,” said Ouimet. “Out of the top 20 trends, 13 o