After early predictions of a banner year for vacation and travel spending in 2025, more recent economic uncertainty and faltering consumer confidence now have the hospitality and tourism industry bracing for a slowdown.
For Destination Marketing Organizations (DMOs), this means added pressure on already tight expectations. Often forced to compete with essential municipal services for budget, DMOs now must work harder to lure the determined traveler.
The good news is digital marketing strategies offer extremely flexible and dynamic opportunities to help DMOs build buzz for peak travel season with measurable ROI and provable impact. But because DMOs often answer to many stakeholders, it can be a struggle to make everyone happy. Many of those who are the most vocal about marketing decisions—whether a board of directors, city department, advertising committee, or otherwise—aren’t always well-versed in modern digital marketing.
Here are some do’s and don’ts DMOs can use to navigate the looming tourism market correction with budget and reputations intact.
Don’t try to target every traveler.
Because they represent such a wide variety of businesses, DMOs often try to hyper-segment and hyper-target every traveling persona: families, luxury-seekers, business travelers, foodies and nature lovers. The problem is, these demographics very often overlap, and DMOs spend a lot of money creating different creative assets and running separate campaigns for each.
Do define your business goals.
Instead of focusing on who you want to target, first define your business objectives and how you’ll assess performance against those KPIs. Identify what it will take to put heads in beds, increase bookings, draw more visitors from a specific market or boost festival attendance. By taking a step back to define the business goal before you start segmenting audiences, you can gain clearer insight on the tactics and media placements you need.
Don’t focus exclusively on known or returning travelers.
It can be tempting to go for the “sure thing” by placing too much attention toward ads on aggregator sites targeting travelers who have already shown intent or in markets they know to be rich with known prospects. This feels like an easy win because it drives up campaign success rates, delivering high KPIs because those travelers have already expressed interest. But those travelers were likely already committed and on the verge of booking. Is that really the best place to spend?
Do feed the funnel with new prospects.
Even in a contraction, every digital plan should have a strategy for identifying new visitors. It can be hard to convince a stakeholders to go out on a limb and budget for tactics without direct ROI, but this top-of-funnel nurturing is where you build buzz and excitement that drive the booking. Higher-funnel tactics like CTV, online video and social media are perfect for discovery and building awareness. For a seasonal summer destination, that might mean investing in YouTube Shorts, TikTok or Instagram during March and April, then putting more budget toward paid search or display as May and June roll around to convert visitors during the active booking window.
Don’t overlook partnerships and co-ops.
Cost-sharing can be a powerful way to extend your digital budget and reach while delivering mutual benefit for your stakeholders. For example, the DMO, a hotelier and third-party ad partner might equally split the cost of a $3,000/month campaign. The hotel essentially gets half-priced ads, the DMO more than doubles its budget and everyone wins when travelers book.
Do set aside a contingency fund.
In any market, new events or unexpected opportunities may arise throughout the year that you’ll want to support—maybe it’s a new music festival or a local restaurant wins national accolades. Having a contingency fund allows you to put some social or display investment behind these events without sacrificing planned campaigns. With the money already set aside, you can launch these campaigns the week of or even day of instead of haggling over which campaign to borrow from.
Don’t expect all marketing decision-makers to understand digital marketing.
Many DMOs struggle with convincing their boards or committees to invest in digital, especially top-of-funnel tactics like TikTok and other paid social media advertising because they don’t understand the value or see it as trite and trendy. Many aren’t using those platforms in their personal lives. For them, performance = bookings, and they may not recognize how top-of-funnel nurturing drives conversions without direct attribution.
Do use data to tell a story.
DMOs need to be able to articulate the travel intender’s journey through data-driven storytelling to demonstrate the purpose and expectations of their digital campaigns. Fortunately, it’s much more affordable these days to work with attribution partners in the space and easier to access first-party arrivals data through large hospitality partners, which cover a large percentage of the U.S. traveling population. This, combined with your known historic data and sources like Smith Travel Research, can help you monitor trends and adjust your strategy when things start to shift. Explaining the traveler’s digital journey in a way decision-makers can understand can help them see how the big-picture strategy drives bookings performance.
Don’t try to go it alone.
Aligning the data to tell that story and inform a savvy strategy can be a lot to wrangle, especially since the metrics come from so many disparate sources. Working with a digital ad partner with deep hospitality and tourism experience can help you aggregate those insights, tell a compelling story to your stakeholders, and invest wisely. A seasoned media services partner provides a more cohesive strategy and simplifies media buying versus working with six different partners. A partner can consolidate performance data into a single dashboard and tie it back to the stated performance goals.
When the market is uncertain, DMOs need flexible strategies and agile capabilities to respond quickly to changing traveler behavior. The beauty of digital is that you can adjust on a dime, experiment with niche markets and conduct A/B testing without sacrificing overall strategy or too much budget.
Even in a tight market, it pays to think ahead: don’t just focus on navigating uncertainty but build a foundation for future growth. The question isn’t whether travel will return, but whether you’ll be top-of-mind when it does.
Elizabeth Brooks
Vice President of Client Services at brkthru_
brkthru_
