At some point during my early weeks at Travel Portland, I was introduced to our visitor journey cycle: a virtuous circle that begins with someone dreaming about taking a vacation, and ends with them sharing their travel experiences with others, prompting future trips. Our cycle had six phases; others had eight. A couple of years later, Google published its own version with five.
Like a lot of business abstractions, it has a certain merit and makes intuitive sense, but starts to break down as soon as you begin to think about it more closely.
In this case, it’s because most of these processes run concurrently. You don’t stop planning after you arrive in destination. Booking isn’t monolithic, it’s sporadic and aligned with planning, from booking a flight five months out to booking a restaurant for that evening. Sharing is now synchronous with experiencing; for some it seems to have replaced it altogether. Finally, Americans don’t stop dreaming. So it’s more like this:
This discrepancy is important to recognize, because the models we use influence our practice. In particular, the idea that planning stops at booking undermines the DMO’s structural advantage, specifically, the opportunity to leverage local expertise to enhance the visitor experience.
The visitor journey cycle is not the only culprit in this regard… traditional B2B “pipelines”, familiar to CVBs focused on Convention Sales, frame marketing as a lead-generation activity. Even on the leisure side, DMO spending leans heavily toward “top of funnel” ad campaigns for a number of structural reasons, not least of which is the stakeholder perception that that’s what marketing amounts to.
The problem with framing travel planning as a purchase decision is in the quiet abandonment of the part of the journey that matters most, which, of course, is the lived experience of the journey itself. Especially because this is where the DMO is best placed to improve matters, since our competitive advantage is not scale or media spend, but local expertise. No platform or ad network can replicate the kind of deep, place-based knowledge that has the capacity to turn a mediocre trip into a great one.
The linear thinking codified into funnels and stages obscures this opportunity. A more useful model recognizes that both dreaming and planning – or ambient discovery and research as they are more conventionally framed in consumer theory – continue well beyond the point of destination selection, across an unfolding set of events shaped by anticipation, uncertainty, context, and a thousand decisions made with varying levels of spontaneity all the way through to the point at which we’re heading home again.
For the purposes of our model, visitor research includes the questions people ask (or clearly signal) throughout the travel journey — needs that can be observed, measured, and addressed. Ambient discovery refers to the more passive ways people come across ideas without actively seeking them, such as browsing a newspaper, scrolling social media, or hearing about a place in conversation.
Funnel thinkers may be tempted to associate ambient discovery with awareness and research with interest, but I would invite you instead to see these as twin modes of information gathering that run in parallel across the visitor journey, a fact implicitly acknowledged in a variety of existing DMO tactics…
| Phase | DMO tactics that enable ambient discovery | DMO tactics that support visitor research |
|---|---|---|
| Prior to destination selection | • Advertising • Long-term brand building • Influencer collaborations • PR designed to elicit editorial coverage • B2B work with tour operators to encourage placement in tour guides and itineraries [ • Word of mouth from positive visitor experiences – see notes below] | • Search engine optimized web content for broad, exploratory queries • Visitor guides and brochures • Subscription-based email marketing |
| Prior to arrival in destination | • Retargeting | All of the above, plus… • Regularly refreshed, search engine optimized web content for high-intent queries • Email drip campaigns tailored to arrival date and declared preferences • Destination social media channels • Trip planning tools |
| While in destination | • Signage and placemaking • Real-time content (“what’s on today”) surfaced through public displays • Geofenced advertising • Brochures and flyers in hotel lobbies | All of the above, plus… • Visitor center interactions (physical or digital) for highly individualized recommendations and troubleshooting • Search engine optimized web content for immediate recommendations and logistical support • Customer service training • In-destination discovery apps • Push notifications from subscribed channels |
Organizing our tactics like this provides us with a framework for a strategic analysis…
To begin with, all things being equal, it’s more efficient on a per conversion basis to service expressed demand than to seed ambient demand. This would suggest it makes sense to lean towards the former…
Secondly, a DMO’s local expertise is its primary structural advantage ; it has an unmatched capacity to address the highly specific informational needs of its audience while they plan and experience their trip. This would favor an emphasis on tactics post destination selection…
Put these together and you might conclude that DMOs would prioritize tactics in these sections:
Despite this, DMOs tend to focus their energies on attracting tourists to their destination, and lean heavily on advertising, a pattern that looks more like this:
Leading to the conclusion that there might be something to be gained by diverting funds from pre-selection discovery tactics to in-destination discovery and support tactics.
Explaining the discrepancy, outlining the opportunity
For DMOs not wrestling with overtourism – which is still most of them – advertising is the easiest tactic to pursue – it’s outsourced, it absorbs budget easily, and it produces visible outputs that look like marketing to key stakeholders. Further, the standard measure of performance is impressions, which is almost guaranteed to be a really big, if practically meaningless, number.
By contrast, DMOs are rarely evaluated on visitor confidence and satisfaction, the ease with which they find their way around, their delight with the support they’ve received, or the number of times they were directed or diverted to a more valuable experience.
Focusing on the visitor experience represents a significant opportunity for most destinations… it operates on high intent revealed demand, it presents the opportunity to shape spending according to community needs and, crucially, it improves visitor satisfaction, which – through word of mouth – seeds future discovery in much the same way as advertising, except more convincingly, because no-one trusts ads.
If the hotels are half-empty, it may be easy to appear to address this concern with advertising. But the corollary of the hotels being half-empty is that they are half-full – half-full of visitors who will become tomorrow’s ambassadors if you succeed in showing them a good time.
Sidebar: the visitor journey and the DMO Venn diagram
In the DMO Venn diagram, visitor research gets it’s own circle, and is serviced by the inform and recommend actions of the DMO. Ambient discovery, meanwhile, is seeded through the scattering of revelatory, lovable breadcrumbs wherever our target audiences are likely to roam. Our analysis of the visitor journey reminds us that these activities are not phase specific.
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