A Destination Marketing Organization (or DMO for short) is an organization that promotes a specific geographical area as a travel destination. The area which an individual DMO may promote ranges in scale from an individual neighborhood to an entire country.
DMOs exist to support a locality’s tourism and travel industries, generating economic development through increased visitor spending.
Succinctly, DMOs produce “heads in beds” – specifically, hotel beds.
DMO synonyms
For the purposes of this blog, and because it is the most commonly used term to describe organizations with such a mission within the United States, I’ll be using DMO as umbrella term for this kind of business. However, DMOs are complex, heterogenous organizations whose focus varies a great deal based on context. Because of this, and also because of regional differences, specific DMOs may be better known as visitor associations, tourist boards or tourism authorities. They may also describe themselves as…
Convention and Visitors’ Bureaus (CVBs)
While we tend to think primarily of visitors as tourists, a great deal of visitation is business-related. For many destinations, the meetings industry is a significant source of business, with conferences, conventions, exhibitions, trade shows and corporate meetings drawing large numbers of visitors to town. The DMO’s role in such situations is to act as a sales force for the location’s convention facilities and a broker, local liaison and facilitator for the meeting planner as they wrestle with the complex logistics of organizing a large-scale event in unfamiliar territory.
Where an individual DMO leans heavily into meetings industry support, it is more likely to be known as a Convention and Visitors’ Bureau or CVB.
Destination Management Organizations
In certain markets, tourism doesn’t need any marketing support. Overtouristed destinations instead wrestle to manage the impact of tourism in sustainable ways that maximize the economic benefits while minimizing the negative side effects for locals, the destination and indeed the visitor experience itself.
Such businesses are more likely to identify themselves as Destination Management Organizations, which handily share the same initialism (and should not be confused with Destination Management Companies – or DMCs – which are for-profit businesses that act as local on-the-ground coordinators for event planners or tour operators).
Other destinations, who perhaps look forward to the day when they’ll have to concern themselves with overtourism, may refer to themselves in the hybrid form as a Destination Marketing and Management Organization or DMMO.
DMO Size and Scale
Given the heterogeneity of the locations they represent, the variety of funding models and variations in focus, it will not surprise you that DMOs vary enormously in terms of the number of personnel they employ. Many jurisdictions lack a DMO entirely, while others might devote a proportion of a single government official’s time to the task. By contrast, large, tourism-focused destinations might employ over a hundred full-time staff and manage annual budgets in excess of $50M.
Even the largest DMOs are nonetheless minnows in a global tourism industry dominated by airlines, cruise operators, hotel chains and the largest OTAs.
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