What Role does DMO Play in the Future of Tourism

The destination marketing organization as we know it is facing an existential reckoning. For more than a century, DMOs have served as the primary institutional bridge between destinations and travelers — first through brochures and visitor centers, then through websites and social media campaigns, and now through an increasingly complex digital ecosystem. But the rise of AI-powered travel planning is fundamentally reshaping the value chain that DMOs have traditionally occupied.

The question is no longer whether DMOs will change. It's whether they'll lead the transformation or be displaced by it.

A 2025 study found that AI referral traffic to travel websites has increased 123% in six months, with travel receiving the highest proportion of AI-driven referrals of any industry. Meanwhile, platforms like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google's AI Overviews are consolidating the travel research process into single conversations — bypassing the multi-site browsing behavior that drove traffic to DMO websites for two decades. For destination marketing organizations, this represents both the greatest threat and the greatest opportunity in the industry's history.

A Brief History of the DMO: From Brochure Distributors to Digital Marketers

Understanding where DMOs are heading requires understanding where they've been. The evolution of destination marketing organizations tracks closely with the evolution of media and technology.

The Visitor Bureau Era (1900s–1990s). The earliest DMOs were essentially tourism promotion offices — city-funded entities that operated visitor centers, distributed brochures, and organized travel trade shows. Their primary function was awareness: letting potential travelers know that a destination existed and what it offered. Success was measured in brochure distribution numbers, convention bookings, and bed tax revenue. The DMO was the authoritative voice of the destination because there was no alternative source of comprehensive destination information.

The Digital Marketing Era (2000s–2020s). The internet transformed DMOs into digital publishers and performance marketers. Websites became the primary vehicle for destination content. SEO, paid search, social media marketing, and email campaigns became core competencies. DMOs invested heavily in content creation — blog posts, video series, influencer partnerships — to capture organic search traffic and drive website visits. Success was measured in web traffic, social engagement, email subscribers, and increasingly, economic impact attribution. This era also saw the rise of DMO technology platforms like Simpleview, which standardized the digital infrastructure of destination marketing.

The Data and Attribution Era (2015–present). As digital marketing matured, DMOs faced increasing pressure to demonstrate ROI. This drove investment in visitor analytics, economic impact studies, and attribution modeling. Tools like Arrivalist, Zartico, and Near provided geolocation-based insights into visitor behavior. DMOs began positioning themselves not just as marketers but as data stewards — organizations that could provide stakeholders with actionable intelligence about tourism patterns and economic impact.

Each of these eras built on the previous one, expanding the DMO's role while preserving its core function: serving as the institutional connector between destination stakeholders (hotels, restaurants, attractions, government) and potential visitors. Now, AI is challenging that fundamental role.

It's worth noting that not all DMOs evolved at the same pace. Many smaller convention and visitors bureaus are still operating primarily in the digital marketing era, investing in SEO and social media while the landscape shifts beneath them. The AI disruption doesn't wait for everyone to catch up — it rewards organizations that recognize and adapt to structural changes early, and it penalizes those that cling to comfortable but increasingly irrelevant strategies.

The AI Disruption: What's Actually Changing

The AI disruption isn't just another channel shift like the move from print to digital. It's a structural change in how information flows between destinations and travelers. Here's what's different this time:

• AI disintermediates the destination website. When a traveler asks an AI assistant to plan their weekend trip, the AI synthesizes information from hundreds of sources and delivers a complete itinerary — often without the traveler ever visiting a DMO website. The traditional funnel of awareness → interest → website visit → trip planning collapses into a single AI interaction.

• Content authority shifts from publishers to data sources. In the SEO era, the organization that published the best content on its own domain captured traffic and attention. In the AI era, the organization that provides the best structured data — regardless of where that data surfaces — captures AI citations and recommendations. The distinction between publishing content and providing data becomes critical.

• The competitive landscape expands dramatically. DMOs used to compete primarily with other destinations for search rankings and traveler attention. Now they also compete with AI platforms themselves for the role of trusted travel advisor. When ChatGPT recommends restaurants in your city, it's performing a function that was once exclusively the DMO's domain.

• Personalization expectations escalate. AI platforms deliver personalized recommendations tailored to individual preferences, budgets, travel styles, and constraints. Travelers who experience this level of personalization from AI come to expect it from every touchpoint — including destination websites and visitor services. Static, one-size-fits-all destination content feels increasingly inadequate.

The DMO as Data Infrastructure: A New Operating Model

If the previous era positioned DMOs as digital marketers, the AI era positions them as destination data infrastructure. This is a fundamental shift in organizational identity and operational focus.

The logic is straightforward: AI engines can only recommend what they know about. The completeness, accuracy, and structure of the data available about your destination directly determines your visibility in AI-generated travel recommendations. The organization best positioned to ensure comprehensive, accurate, structured destination data is the DMO — because it already has relationships with local businesses, access to event information, knowledge of seasonal patterns, and institutional authority.

In practice, this means DMOs need to invest in several new capabilities:

• Centralized destination data management. Building and maintaining a comprehensive, structured database of everything in the destination — businesses, attractions, events, trails, restaurants, accommodations, transportation options, accessibility information, seasonal availability. This data must be machine-readable, constantly updated, and available for distribution across platforms.

• API-first content distribution. Rather than publishing content exclusively on their own website, DMOs should expose destination data through APIs that can be consumed by AI platforms, travel apps, mapping services, and partner websites. The goal is to make your destination data available wherever travelers and AI systems are looking for it.

• Real-time data freshness. AI engines prioritize fresh, accurate information. DMOs need systems that capture real-time updates — event cancellations, business hour changes, seasonal closures, new openings — and propagate those updates across all distribution channels immediately.

• Schema markup and structured data standards. Implementing comprehensive schema markup across all destination content ensures that AI engines can parse and understand your information. This includes Event, LocalBusiness, TouristAttraction, and FAQ schema types at minimum.

• Stakeholder data onboarding. Helping local businesses and attractions maintain accurate, structured digital presences. When a restaurant in your destination has inconsistent hours across Google, Yelp, and TripAdvisor, it degrades the entire destination's data quality — and AI engines notice.

The Content Strategy Shift: From Publishing to Answering

The content strategy that served DMOs in the SEO era — blog posts optimized for keywords, aspirational photo galleries, influencer-generated social content — remains valuable but is no longer sufficient. AI engines require a different kind of content.

Comprehensive, question-answering content is the new standard. Instead of writing a 500-word blog post about "Top 10 Restaurants," DMOs need to create deep resources that address the full complexity of how travelers actually ask about dining: cuisine types, price ranges, dietary accommodations, atmosphere, reservation requirements, proximity to hotels, kid-friendliness, and seasonal availability.

The content strategy shift involves several key changes:

• From keyword targeting to question answering. Identify the actual questions travelers ask about your destination — in forums, social media, AI platforms, and visitor centers — and create content that comprehensively answers them.

• From aspirational to informational. Beautiful photography and inspiring copy still matter for brand building, but AI engines primarily value factual, comprehensive, well-structured information. The balance needs to shift toward utility.

• From siloed content to connected resources. Individual pages about attractions, restaurants, and activities should be interconnected with structured data relationships. AI engines understand context better when they can see the connections between entities in your destination.

• From periodic publishing to continuous updating. The blog cadence of two posts per week is less important than ensuring all existing content is current, accurate, and comprehensive. A DMO with 200 accurate, well-structured pages outperforms one with 2,000 outdated pages in the AI economy.

New KPIs for the AI Era

The metrics that defined DMO success in the digital marketing era — website traffic, social media followers, email open rates — are becoming less meaningful as indicators of actual destination performance. New KPIs are emerging:

• Answer Share. The percentage of AI-generated responses to relevant travel queries that cite, mention, or recommend your destination. This is the AI-era equivalent of search engine market share. Tools like Drifter Currents are specifically designed to help DMOs measure and improve this metric.

• AI referral traffic. The volume and quality of website visits originating from AI platforms (ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews). Track this in GA4 by filtering for AI-related sources.

• Data completeness score. What percentage of your destination's businesses, attractions, and events are represented in your structured data systems? What percentage have complete, accurate information?

• Cross-platform consistency. How consistent is your destination's information across all digital platforms? Inconsistencies degrade AI confidence in your data.

• Content freshness index. What percentage of your content has been reviewed and updated within the last 90 days? AI engines deprioritize stale content.

• Stakeholder digital health. How many of your destination's businesses have claimed and optimized their Google Business Profiles, maintain accurate listings across platforms, and implement schema markup?

What Forward-Thinking DMOs Are Doing Now

Across the industry, a small but growing number of DMOs are already adapting to the AI reality. Their approaches share several common elements:

Destination BC launched a beta test of its HelloBC AI Concierge in late 2024, becoming one of the first DMOs to deploy a conversational AI tool directly on its destination website. The initiative acknowledges that visitors increasingly expect AI-powered assistance and positions the DMO as the trusted provider of that experience — rather than ceding the role to third-party platforms.

Singapore Tourism Board developed the Singapore Tourism Analytics Network (STAN), a data analytics platform that collects and analyzes tourist behavior data including spending patterns, hotel preferences, and movement patterns. STB uses this data to provide actionable intelligence to local businesses — helping retailers target marketing to high-value visitor segments and enabling hoteliers to optimize pricing and promotion strategies.

These examples point to a common theme: the DMOs that will thrive in the AI era are those that evolve from marketing organizations into data-and-intelligence organizations. Marketing remains a function, but it's no longer the primary value proposition.

Other DMOs are making smaller but significant moves: implementing comprehensive schema markup across their websites, building structured data feeds for partner businesses, deploying AI-powered chatbots on their sites, and retraining staff to think about content as data rather than just storytelling. The common thread is a recognition that the rules of the game have changed, and the organizations that adapt fastest will define the new standard.

A Manifesto for the Next Era of Destination Marketing

The future DMO is not just a marketing organization. It's the data backbone of the destination's digital ecosystem. It's the organization that ensures every business, attraction, event, and experience in the destination is accurately represented in the digital universe that AI engines draw from.

This requires DMOs to:

• Invest in data infrastructure before marketing campaigns. The foundation of AI visibility is comprehensive, accurate, structured data. Without it, no amount of marketing spend will improve your Answer Share.

• Build API-first content systems. Stop thinking of your website as the destination for content. Think of it as one of many distribution endpoints. Your content management system should be a data platform that feeds your website, AI engines, partner apps, and any future distribution channel.

• Hire for data competency. The next critical hire for most DMOs is not another social media manager — it's a data strategist who understands structured data, schema markup, API architecture, and AI content distribution.

• Reframe the value proposition to stakeholders. The pitch to hotels, restaurants, and attractions should evolve from "we'll market your business" to "we'll ensure your business is accurately represented in the AI systems that increasingly influence traveler decisions."

• Embrace AI tools, don't fear them. DMOs should be deploying AI on their own websites through tools like Drifter Dock — providing AI-powered trip planning directly to visitors rather than losing them to ChatGPT.

• Measure what matters. Shift KPI frameworks from vanity metrics to Answer Share, data completeness, and AI visibility metrics that actually correlate with destination performance in the AI era.

The DMO that embraces this transformation won't just survive the AI disruption — it will emerge as more essential than ever. Because while AI can synthesize and deliver information, it can't create the underlying data infrastructure that makes accurate recommendations possible. That's the DMO's new superpower.

The destinations that figure this out first will have a compounding advantage. In the AI economy, data quality begets AI visibility, AI visibility begets traveler awareness, and traveler awareness begets economic impact. The flywheel starts with the DMO deciding to become the data backbone of its destination.

The question is not whether your DMO will need to evolve. It's whether you'll lead the evolution or be left behind by it.

Practical Steps: What to Do This Quarter

Theory is valuable, but DMO leaders need concrete next steps. Here's what you can do in the next 90 days to begin the transformation:

• Conduct a data completeness audit. How many of your destination's businesses, attractions, and events are represented in your digital systems? What percentage have complete, accurate, structured information? This audit reveals the gap between where you are and where you need to be. Most DMOs discover that less than 40% of their destination's offerings are comprehensively represented in structured formats.

• Pilot an AI concierge. Deploy an AI-powered planning tool on your website — even as a beta. Tools like Drifter Dock make this achievable without engineering resources. The pilot serves two purposes: it immediately improves visitor experience, and the interaction data reveals what travelers are actually looking for.

• Establish Answer Share baselines. Systematically query AI platforms with destination-relevant questions and document your citation frequency. This becomes the baseline against which you measure all future optimization efforts.

• Brief your board on the AI shift. Prepare a presentation for your board and key stakeholders that frames the AI transformation not as a threat but as an opportunity for DMOs to become more essential. Use the data points in this article to build urgency without creating panic.

• Identify your first data hire. Begin recruiting or training for data competency. This might be a full-time data strategist, a contract consultant, or upskilling an existing team member — but the capability needs to exist in your organization.

• Join the conversation. Connect with other DMOs navigating this transition. The industry's collective intelligence on AI adaptation is growing rapidly, and the organizations sharing learnings openly are accelerating everyone's progress.

The future of the DMO is not diminished — it's elevated. In a world where AI mediates the relationship between travelers and destinations, the organization that ensures accurate, comprehensive, structured destination data becomes more critical than ever. That organization is the DMO. The only question is whether your DMO will claim that role or cede it to platforms that don't share your commitment to the destination's long-term prosperity.