I recently left the tourism world after spending several years working, and there are few things I’d add to the analysis before lumping all tourism bureaus together.

First, most tourism boards are charged not only with driving leisure visitors, but also with booking convention business. Convention business is more predictable, measurable and lucrative for most locations.

The vast majority of budgets, staff and marketing goes into that market – something that may not be obvious to an individual planning a vacation.

Second, most Bureaus are funded by some sort of lodging tax – meaning the budget is tied directly to occupancy (FL is the notable exception, and they’re having a lot of problems right now).

Every prediction is that destinations are going to see a HUGE drop this budget cycle, worldwide, in revenue and occupancy.

So a lot of Bureaus are being cautious this early in the year, cutting back on spending in anticipation of budget shortfalls. And lastly – most (not all) Bureaus have gotten smarter over the last decade, and do more targeted campaigns in key flight markets; IE, you may not see it, but don’t assume they aren’t marketing.

They just aren’t shotgunning.

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Tourist Boards are government departments. Nuff Said!

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Bonjour Darren,

It’s a WorldWide problem

I am convice only 30 % of DMO’s or Tourism Board are in the game.

To much politic stuff, no team inside who understand internet lanscape, dministrativ process, to heavy to decide quickly, bad website, no interaction with customer online, no understading of Internet business model, only one way communication, territorial maketing who is often out of the consumers needs, etc and etc

We can write a book about that

Suggest : focus only on the 30 % because with the others you lose your time and money to deal with.

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It’s about money. Who funds the work of tourist boards? Usually Governments or States. It’s amazing how small their budgets are much of the time…

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I think Tourism Queensland is doing a rather smashing job at promoting Queensland and using social media with this whole ‘Best Job in the World’ campaign. I know for a fact that you didn’t miss it because you rated my video (thank you!). Maybe you forgot because it’s not a traditional ad campaign, or you didn’t realise it was a tourist board that put it together?

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On the last day I walked around WTM at about 3.00 PM, two hours before closing time….Almost all Tourist Board stands empty no peep to see. … And they are not only funded by tax Euros/Dollars/Pounds, but also by hefty travel industry membership fees and what all….

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Agree with all of the above. Most tourist boards are essentially government departments with fairly big remits and comparatively low budgets. In terms of customer interaction, this is normally pretty low on their priorities. Generally their focus is more on the bigger picture and communicating with the customer will be lost in that. Despite reduced budgets, expect most of them to have fancy stands at the itb and wtm, but don’t expect much of it to be invested in online media.

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There are a few destination marketing organizations (DMOs) that are doing a job (like Tourism BC for example) but most, as has already been described, are doing a less than stellar job. My feeling is that many are focused too heavily on trying to do everything themselves versus using technology partners. Many, for example, invest millions of dollars, euros, pounds in building sophisticated technological infrastructures that combine CRM, supplier management, bookings, call centre management, analytics, and more instead of investing in their most important mandate… marketing their destination and inspiring travelers. There are hundreds of technologies, APIs, and companies that would love to partner with destinations in order to provide a more complete experience for a potential visitor, the problem is that many would never bother to complete a cumbersome RFP or jump through the myriad of hoops. I can only hope that as budgets tighten, DMOs will become more innovative and more partnership focused.

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@Darren. I don’t agree. Absolutely everyone I’ve spoken to (in the real world, not just online) has heard of the Tourism Queensland ‘best job’ already. The trick is that they probably didn’t see an ad – they saw it on the BBC News, or an article in the newspaper, or a mate told them about it down the pub. This applies to my friends in North America as well as over here. They had a million visitors to their website on day one of the campaign, enough to temporarily crash the website. It’s been a highly effective campaign at getting the word out to ordinary people – the real test will be if it actually boosts tourism numbers, but that’s true for any ad campaign and the cash outlay for this is smaller than traditional ad campaigns.

Tourism Australia has also been promoting this year. I didn’t mention it because they’ve tied the ad campaign to the Baz Luhrmann movie, which is a bit of a disaster at the box office so I hear. I’m pretty sure I saw a cinema ad a few weeks ago though I believe they’re mainly focusing on the US market. (Australia gets lots of British backpackers already and the Yanks tend to spend more money). I

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In general they want return on investment and the high-profile, visible TV ad campaigns don’t always deliver that because of the expense.

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@Darren
I’m not saying that interacting with customers should be low on their priorities, I just think it is. If you ask most tourist boards what their main priorities are, I would expect most would say marketing and promoting the country. To them this means advertising, organising press trips, PR and setting up fancy stands and acting all important at trade fairs.

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Are you trying to get me going today?
I work with hundreds of tourism businesses each year and a handful of dmo’s, regional tourism associations and the like.
There are too numerous gaps to mention in comment form, but I have been encouraging regional associations to take on projects that help individual operators by providing value-added for their clients – the operators!

Too may boards think their clients are only the travelers, but indeed the traveler needs to have thier needs met too.

Each of these questions is a raging stream. How can you build a bridge to help your operators and travelers make the most of a visit to your region?
A few questions for consideration by regional associations:
What do your members need from you?
Can your members process online payments?
How do you handle inquiries? Are you spamming people by passing inquires on to all operators at once?
How are you leveraging e-news to get exposure for your members?
How well are your members representing themselves with multimedia – audio, video, photos?
How ready are you and your operators for the handheld – always connected cellphone / web enabled traveller?
Does your information / communication plan touch travelers before, during and after they travel? Do you have relevant content for each of these circumstances?
How prepared are you to deliver information to a traveller as they stand in your community wondering – where to eat, what to do, where to stay?
What do your members think your job is?
What percentage of your spend is web-based? Are you proud of the deliverables you have provided?
How do you track the success of your marketing strategy?
How quickly do your members respond to inquiries?
What are you doing for your members that they can’t do for themselves?
What keyword phrases does your community rank well for – that are not place names?
How do locals feel you are representing your community?
Are you engaging local residents to help tell your story? How?

I could go on and on, but my day has just beginning and I tackle issues like this often. If you represent a regional marketing organization, you might appreciate the podcast episode featured here:
http://www.tourismkeys.ca/blog/2009/01/cvbs-tourism-associations-regional-marketing-folk-whos-your-ideal-client/

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DMOs are a very varied group of organizations with different structures, finance models and even overall objectives. It’s hard to judge them with blanket statements of inefficiency or bureaucracy although that quite often applies. It is certainly true that most are not at the forefront of innovation when it comes to all things web related and tend to lag behind the industry leaders. That is not really surprising, looking at their legacy and the same can be said about private sector players in the industry like the traditional tour operators, travel agents, cruise lines etc. who have for far too long not realized the threat posed to them by the web based companies. The true innovators have been, and continue to be, new start-ups, often with leaders from outside the travel industry. Expedia being the poster child for web 1.0 and now we have the new innovators like Uptake, Tripbase, Travelmuse, Triporati, Tripwolf etc. who have entered the travel planning and research field where the web 2.0 battles will be fought using the tools of digital social media. DMOs are largely absent here and this time it will have a much bigger impact on their role.

The first phase of the web was all about bookings, mostly of airline tickets, an area that DMOs really are not concerned with. The next phase will happen right in their playing field where the destination becomes the focus more than just the lowest airfare.

I agree with Stephen that rather than trying to develop complex technology in-house they should enter strategic partnerships with the innovators, use APIs and other forms of integration to convert their content rich but still rather static sites into the interactive trip planning and travel research tools that will be expected by the next wave of online travelers.

If they lag behind this time they will increasingly become irrelevant for the traveling public and their websites might well become ignored, isolated islands on the web with few reasons for potential visitors to use them.

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I thought they did quite a good job, I must say. Australia, Austria, Turkey, Jersey, Israel, Indiahhhhh (who can forget that! … And that great Aussie girl (who was she?? with her “so where the bloody hell are you? – a great Ad!) – and that’s as a punter not as a travel agent …. I can remember their adverts and efforts. Come on Darren, fair’s fair… Just because someone is not on social media doesn’t mean they aren’t making the effort. Tourist Boards don’t get massive budgets and on balance, I think they work quite hard at it!

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@Murray The “where the bloody hell are you?” campaign is a few years old now. While I also liked the ad, it apparently offended a lot of people around the world and did not boost tourism.

@Darren There’s a discrepancy with you saying that tourism boards should be on social media and then discounting the Tourism Queensland campaign because (you say) the average person doesn’t spend their life online. (Although it actually made the TV news and the newspapers, as I said).

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