Today's DMO leaders have it impossibly hard.
You're running an organization, driving growth, innovating on a shoestring budget, serving increasingly demanding travelers, and trying to stay ahead of a curve that seems to shift daily. All while recovering from a once-in-a-lifetime pandemic, navigating economic uncertainty, and operating in a political climate that can make your head spin.
What keeps you up at night aren't just the challenges you're facing. It's knowing you don't have the resources to fix them. The playbook you've relied on for years? It's not just outdated; it's actively failing you. But the workload remains crushing, so overwhelming that you haven't had time to come up for air, let alone develop a new game plan with your team.
I know this feeling intimately.
Twenty years ago, I was building my first company just as the digital world exploded around us. We were among the first in our sector to figure out what this mysterious thing called "social media" actually was. We started a blog with zero clue about the rules, how to craft our stories, or whether anyone would even read them.
We joined micro-communities online because conversations about our industry were suddenly happening in rooms we'd never been in, but desperately needed to be part of. We received our first online reviews from complete strangers (and sometimes our best customers) and realized how this would fundamentally reshape our reputation. How powerful it could be. How damaging it could become.
All of this happened while we were quietly busy running our company, serving customers, and trying to keep the lights on.
Then something seismic shifted. Customer service, once the cornerstone of any good business, built on personal relationships and face-to-face interactions suddenly became optional?
A new generation of digital-native travelers emerged who didn't want to talk to anyone. They wanted to research independently, diving deep into websites, blogs, reviews, press coverage, ratings, and any digital breadcrumb they could find before making decisions.
We learned this the hard way, watching our carefully trained customer service team field fewer calls while our website traffic exploded. The buyers were still there—they were just shopping differently.
Meanwhile, we felt the constant pressure to keep up with the relentless pace of change. New tools, software, automation platforms, and whatever was being whispered about at innovation conferences because we knew it was all right around the corner, and today's breakthrough would be tomorrow's baseline expectation.
We had to move swiftly or risk falling behind competitors who embraced the "test and learn" mentality, who weren't afraid to fail fast and iterate faster. They were building teams of what we now call knowledge workers: people ready and waiting for the next curveball.
It was exhausting. It was exhilarating. It was absolutely necessary.
After two decades of building companies through multiple waves of disruption, here's what I want every DMO leader to embrace:
Change is your competitive advantage, but only if you're strategic about it.
Don't change for the sake of change. Change, evolve, and innovate when resources are lean, money is tight, and disruption is knocking at your door.
Because if you don't listen and adapt, you might become irrelevant.
That's exactly where we are with AI and content. Content has always served destinations as a means to demonstrate their knowledge, expertise, and unique experiences. Whether they work with teams to author narratives that describe their culture, history, and natural wonders, or they produce engaging videos and photos that capture the essence of a place, the goal is to build a compelling story for travelers. The more unique the content or story is, the more authoritative your destination will be on the topic.
Now think about this at the intersection of AI. AI-generated answers prefer those that are most relevant and helpful to answer a person's query. Gone are the days of keyword stuffing. AI prefers information that responds directly to what a potential visitor is searching for and will surface the highest quality answer over others.
The destinations creating the most authentic, helpful content today will own the search results tomorrow.
Right now, content is standing at AI's doorstep, and it must meet AI in the middle. You (yes, you) are the knowledge expert. You hold valuable stories, insights, and authentic experiences that should be shared, differentiated, and amplified further than ever before. But the way DMOs are telling their stories today often misses the mark. They follow a formula, creating content that is generic, predictable, and fails to capture the unique spirit of a destination.
It’s not uncommon for DMOs to highlight their most popular offerings. That’s often what’s helped them thrive. Yet, many of those offerings are in competition with similar destinations. And with a cluttered digital marketplace, those stories just won’t cut it for the new generation of travelers looking for authentic experiences.
This is the beauty of our current moment: AI will soon become your very best assistant, your most powerful channel, your digital interface into who you are as an organization. It's a window into what makes your destination unique with data-driven insights that remove the guesswork.
This isn't just another marketing trend. This is a gold rush that will far exceed what traditional advertising could ever accomplish alone. It's dynamic and responsive to what people are actually searching for, in the moment they're searching for it.
I'm genuinely excited about what this means for marketing professionals in the tourism space. Agentic AI offers DMOs the ability to scale beyond their wildest dreams. That’s why they call it “Agentic”. This means AI will not only become a powerful assistant to execute your creative vision, but also serve as a real-time window into what visitors are searching for, helping you tell stories that genuinely resonate. But success requires rolling up your sleeves, leaning into change for the sake of thriving, and getting comfortable with being uncomfortable.
Don't hesitate to crawl before you walk, and eventually run. The best lesson I ever learned working in technology is that even the most brilliant software engineers are just figuring it out as they go, working in sprints, iterating continuously, never stopping their quest to improve the end user experience.
We should do the same. And we have the power to do it with AI as our amplifier.
This is your opportunity to shape the future of destination marketing. Our AI-powered future depends on experts like you who will shape the narrative in the most authentic and creative ways, drawing from real expertise, lived experiences, and information that will strengthen our communities and beyond.
The old playbook may be broken, but that's not a crisis. It's an opportunity.
