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Sixty-one percent of destination marketing organizations (DMOs) say budget is their biggest challenge this year, up from 51% in 2025, according to our State of Destination Marketing 2026 research. At the same time, 49% say tracking and attribution is their top barrier to running a full-funnel strategy, a sharp jump from 37% the year before.
That's the tension every DMO is living in right now. Budgets are tighter. Stakeholders want proof, not impressions. The tools DMOs use to measure success weren't built for how travelers actually move through a fragmented, AI-influenced research journey.
The DMOs closing that gap aren't spending more. They're spending smarter, starting with the right funnel model, real attribution, a channel budget matched to funnel stage, and co-op and AI visibility tactics that stretch what they already have. Here's where to start.
Destination marketing is the practice of promoting a city, region, or country to attract visitors, drive overnight stays, and support the local economy that depends on tourism. Unlike a single hotel or attraction marketing itself, a DMO markets an entire place on behalf of dozens or hundreds of local stakeholders, including hotels, attractions, restaurants, and event venues.
That structure is what makes destination marketing distinct. A DMO's success isn't measured by its own bookings. It's measured by whether the destination as a whole sees more visitation, longer stays, and stronger economic impact. As Richmond Region Tourism, puts it: “You know what hotel owners want? They don't care about impressions or vanity metrics. They want hotel room nights and hotel revenue.”
That single quote captures where destination marketing has landed in 2026. Awareness still matters. But the pressure to connect that awareness to bookings, tax revenue, and stakeholder trust has never been higher.
Three forces are reshaping how DMOs plan and spend: consumer behavior, destination development, and economic volatility. Eighty percent of DMOs name consumer behavior as a top strategic influence this year, followed by destination development at 65% and economic volatility at 59%.
Those pressures don't hit every region the same way. In North America, more than half of DMOs (52%) point to local economic conditions as a key driver of strategy, compared to just 15% in Europe. North American DMOs also tend to work closely with hotel tax stakeholders and tourism improvement districts, which means marketing dollars are tied directly to visible, defensible outcomes.
Funding stability varies just as widely. Seventy-five percent of North American DMOs describe their budgets as stable over the next one to two years, compared to 56% of European DMOs. Nearly a third of European DMOs (31%) expect funding cuts, largely because public funding is more exposed to shifts in government priorities than tourism-tax-based models.
The result is a global destination marketing landscape where every dollar has to work harder, and every campaign has to answer a harder question: not just did this reach people, but did this move the destination forward.
DMOs are nearly split on how they structure campaigns. Forty-seven percent focus on stage-specific efforts targeting a single point in the traveler journey, while another 47% run full-funnel campaigns that guide travelers from first awareness through booking.
Regional differences explain a lot of that split. North American DMOs lean toward stage-specific, performance-focused campaigns, with 51% focusing on mid- or lower-funnel goals like conversions. European DMOs have moved the opposite direction, with 46% now running full-funnel campaigns that combine brand building and performance in one strategy. In the Middle East, Asia, and Africa, 56% invest in full-funnel efforts, reflecting how much brand recognition still matters in growing markets.
There's no universal right answer here. A destination in a mature, high-awareness market can often afford to run stage-specific, lower-funnel campaigns. A destination still building recognition needs a multichannel strategy that reaches travelers earlier and carries them through, not a single channel doing one job in isolation.
Cody Chomiak, VP of Marketing at Travel Manitoba, frames the shift this way: the goal isn't choosing brand over performance. It's getting better at moving between the two as traveler behavior demands it.
Here's the complication most DMOs run into once they commit to a full-funnel strategy: they can't actually see which channel did the work. Jamari Douglas, VP of Marketing at Bermuda Tourism Authority, put it bluntly: “Yes, you drove impressions, but we also had a PR article, ran our own social ad, and held a competition. We don't know which had the biggest influence.”
That's not a measurement gap DMOs can fix with more dashboards. It's a structural problem. A traveler might see a display ad, click a metasearch listing three weeks later, and book a hotel through a completely different channel two months after that. Traditional last-click reporting credits whichever touchpoint happened last, which usually isn't the one that actually moved the traveler to act.
This is why attribution jumped so sharply as a stated barrier, from 37% to 49% year over year. Budget allocation across the funnel became a bigger concern too, climbing from 15% to 47%, because DMOs can't fund what they can't prove is working.
This is the gap the Sojern Traveler Ecosystem™ is built to close. Instead of relying on last-click credit, it tracks pseudonymized traveler signals across the full journey, from early destination research through booking, so a DMO can see which combination of channels actually influenced a stay rather than guessing at which one happened to be last. That shifts the conversation with stakeholders from “here's our impression count” to “here's what actually drove room nights.”
DMOs consistently rate a handful of channels as essential to reaching travelers at different points in their journey.
Social media and search. Social advertising and search engine marketing dominate paid media for destinations, with DMOs rating both at high or average importance by nearly universal margins. These channels offer the targeting precision needed to reach travelers by interest, not just geography.
Display. Display advertising still carries the awareness load for destinations building recognition in new or underdeveloped markets, particularly when paired with retargeting that keeps a destination visible as a traveler researches over weeks or months.
Native. Native advertising places your destination's content inside the articles and feeds travelers already read, so it lands as inspiration instead of interruption. It works especially well for itineraries, neighborhood guides, and other stories that need more room than a banner allows.
Connected TV (CTV). CTV brings the reach of television to streaming audiences, with the targeting of digital. Many DMOs see it as a valuable part of the mix, even if it isn't their primary channel. For destinations with strong video assets, it extends content that travelers might otherwise only see in a social feed.
Video and content. Content demands have grown faster than most DMO teams can staff for. VISIT FLORIDA described producing 124 unique videos with 513 versions and photography across 322 locations in a single year, a scale most DMOs can't match. For smaller teams, the lesson isn't to produce more. It's to build content that performs across multiple channels instead of building once per channel.
No single channel carries a destination marketing strategy on its own. The DMOs seeing the strongest results are the ones connecting these channels on a multichannel strategy so each one reinforces the next, not running them as separate, disconnected line items.
The right channel mix follows the funnel stage a destination is actually trying to win, not a fixed formula borrowed from another industry. Three profiles show up repeatedly among DMOs, and each calls for a different split.
Emerging destinations building awareness. If travelers don't know your destination exists yet, display and video need the largest share of budget. SEM only works once a traveler already has your destination in consideration, so leading with search here spends against demand that hasn't been created yet.
Established destinations focused on performance. This is where most North American DMOs sit, with 51% running stage-specific campaigns aimed at mid- or lower-funnel goals. For these destinations, SEM should carry the largest share, since the audience already recognizes the destination and the job is turning research into a trip.
Full-funnel destinations blending both. Forty-six percent of European DMOs and 56% of DMOs in the Middle East, Asia, and Africa now run full-funnel campaigns. For this group, the split matters less than the connection between channels. Awareness spend should feed the same audience that performance channels later retarget, rather than treating each channel as its own isolated budget line.
Whichever profile fits, the split should get revisited at least twice a year. A destination that shifts from building awareness to converting demand needs its budget to move with it, not stay fixed to last year's plan.
Budget constraints have pushed co-op marketing from a nice-to-have into a core strategy for many DMOs. Eliza Ferguson, Head of Consumer Marketing at London & Partners, describes their Gateway campaign as bringing “multiple partners under a central campaign with shared KPIs,” giving the group more reach than any single partner could achieve alone.
That kind of pooled model works when three things are true from the start: shared goals and KPIs, clear role definition across every stakeholder, and a long-term commitment rather than a one-off partnership. Liz Bittner, President and CEO of Travel South USA, built an entire organization around that principle, coordinating 12 state tourism offices around shared investment and shared reach.
For DMOs managing dozens of local hotel, attraction, and event partners, co-op marketing gives every partner a way to contribute budget toward a shared campaign while still seeing their own return. It's a practical answer to the budget pressure 61% of DMOs are naming as their top challenge this year, without asking any single stakeholder to fund the whole effort alone.
The most successful co-op programs are built in the best interest of all involved. Identifying the biggest opportunities and needs is the first, and most important, step. Four steps to building co-ops that best set you for success:
Destination marketing's newest complication has nothing to do with budget. It's that the destination of a traveler's research isn't always a website anymore. It's an AI-generated answer.
Skift's 2026 reporting frames it directly: the next competitive battleground for destinations is influencing how AI models recommend a place, not just how effectively a destination buys ads. Our research backs that up. Sixty-four percent of DMOs say creating content that answers common traveler questions is their top tactic for AI-era visibility, and another 64% are focused on writing content in a clear, structured format that AI tools can summarize easily. Only 43% are actively monitoring how often their content appears in AI-generated responses, which means most destinations are producing AI-friendly content without any way to confirm it's working.
Cody Chomiak sums up the mindset shift required: “Your next guest isn't just a visitor, it's an algorithm. You have to be open to your content being sliced, diced, and served up by large language models. If we're still measuring success solely by website traffic, we're heading toward a cliff dive of irrelevance.”
That doesn't mean abandoning the destination website. It means structuring content, FAQs, and partner listings so they're just as legible to an AI model as they are to a human traveler, and treating that as a distinct workstream rather than an afterthought bolted onto existing SEO efforts.
Clicks, impressions, and engagement metrics still dominate DMO reporting. Click-through rate and cost per click remain the most-used KPIs globally, even as stakeholders increasingly ask for outcomes instead of activity.
That's starting to shift. Among DMOs working with more advanced digital tools, hotel bookings have become the top-tracked KPI, a signal that the industry is moving from measuring reach to measuring results. Website engagement, return on ad spend, and website visits still rank highly too, reflecting a blend of performance and awareness goals. AI search visibility and database acquisition remain far down the list, which points to real headroom for DMOs willing to build measurement around where the industry is heading rather than where it's been.
The practical takeaway: if your reporting to stakeholders still leads with impressions, that's worth revisiting. A destination that can show room nights, even directionally, earns more trust and more budget than one that can only show reach.
None of this requires a DMO to solve every problem at once. It requires picking the right starting point for where the strategy is weakest.
If budget is the constraint, co-op marketing extends what a limited budget can cover without diluting any single partner's return. If attribution is the gap, connecting full-funnel data instead of relying on last-click reporting changes what a DMO can credibly tell its stakeholders. If AI visibility is untested, structuring existing content for AI legibility is a faster fix than most teams assume.
The DMOs pulling ahead in 2026 aren't the ones with the biggest budgets. They're the ones that can draw a straight line from a specific channel investment to a specific outcome, and that can prove it to the hotel owners, tax boards, and city councils asking harder questions than they used to.
If your team is still piecing that picture together from disconnected platform reports, that's usually the sign to look at how the funnel connects, not just how each channel performs on its own. Sojern works with destination marketers on exactly that problem, and the full data behind this guide is available in the State of Destination Marketing 2026 report.
If you want to talk through what full-funnel attribution could look like for your destination, let's talk.
Destination marketing is the practice of promoting a city, region, or country to attract visitors and drive economic impact for the local tourism industry. Unlike a single hotel or attraction, a destination marketing organization (DMO) markets an entire place on behalf of many local stakeholders, including hotels, attractions, and event venues, and its success is measured by visitation and room nights for the destination as a whole.
DMOs can prove ROI by tracking traveler signals across the full journey instead of relying on last-click attribution, which often credits the wrong channel. Forty-nine percent of DMOs cite attribution as their top barrier to full-funnel marketing, largely because a traveler's path from awareness to booking spans multiple channels over weeks or months. Connecting that full path, rather than isolating each channel, shows stakeholders which investments actually drove bookings.
Co-op marketing is a shared-budget model where a DMO and its local partners, such as hotels, attractions, and event venues, pool funding behind a single coordinated campaign. It gives destinations more reach and budget efficiency than any one partner could achieve alone, provided the group agrees on shared KPIs and roles from the outset. It's become a core strategy as DMO budgets face growing pressure, with 61% of DMOs naming budget their top challenge in 2026.
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