The New Way for Tourism Bureaus To Measure Their Effectiveness

Destination Marketing Association International (DMAI) launched phase two of its DestinationNEXT research project this month during its annual convention in Austin, providing what it hopes will be a roadmap for the future of destination marketing organizations (DMOs). As we reported last year following the roll-out of phase one, DMAI collected data from 327 tourism bureaus in 36 countries in early 2014 to collate the most significant travel consumer trends and the top DMO strategies designed to exploit those trends. The trends and strategies were then culled into three “Transformational Opportunities” that DMOs could embrace to elevate their effectiveness, according to DMAI. Those three actions include: A shift toward two-way digital communications and social media execution; better destination-specific branding strategy and product development for both leisure and meetings markets; and more strategic collaboration with economic development organizations to pool intelligence and resources. In an over-simplified nutshell, those three transformational opportunities revolve around social selling, experiential marketing, and a more sophisticated business model. They form the DNA for DestinationNEXT and the framework for DMAI messaging moving forward. For example, DMAI used them to delineate the three educational tracks in Austin. Phase one was all about research, based on the large volume and international variety of DMO data. Phase one also included a DMO "Scenario Model" with four quadrants detailing different levels of destination marketing effectiveness. It was designed to help DMOs see where they plot within the model, and where they can improve their value to their communities by evaluating how their operational and business models align with the three transformational opportunities. Phase two is actionable, centered around an online diagnostic self-assessment tool for individual DMOs and destination stakeholders to discern how well their destination is leveraging all of the elements that go into attracting leisure and business travelers. The tool is not meant to grade the individual DMO against other bureaus, because there are too many variables based on the breadth of international bureaus. Instead, it measures the effectiveness of the destination as a whole