Author: Micaela Pacheco

DMO Website Development: Sedona Verde Valley

Developing a Website for a DMO

Written by Micaela Pacheco on . Posted in Uncategorized.

As the Internet grows in popularity and usage around the world, so has its impact on destination marketing and on tourism as an industry. The web has changed how tourists search for information about destinations and plan trips and has paved the way for the business development of online travel agencies (OTAs) such as Expedia, Hotwire and Priceline. Other world-renowned companies like TripAdvisor, AirBNB, and Google Maps have also been major benefactors of the growth of internet marketing in tourism.

For DMOs, the Internet has become the major information dissemination and marketing tool. A DMOs website not only helps the organization market its destination, but it is also an important tool that provides benefits to its members. 

Best Practices of DMO Website Development

In building and promoting a website, DMOs must remain fluid and continuously adapt to ever-changing tourism (and technological) trends. Remaining cognizant of this adaptivity will allow websites to remain up-to-date. 

When updating your website, DMOs should follow these steps:

  1. Make an impression – To get the attention of a client, DMOs need to capture their potential client’s eye with a memorable experience. This may be anything from a well-formatted design to scenic pictures.
  2. Reinforce your tourism brand – DMO marketing experts need to showcase their brand essence. Consider what image the DMO puts forth and how you want to be perceived by potential visitors.
  3. Use your home page as a launch pad – The home page is the first thing that visitors see. Be sure to keep it updated and have relevant content.
  4. Use clear and easy navigation – Make sure that the site is organized in way that makes it easy for potential clients to navigate to the conversion page (which in this case would be the Book a Trip page). Content can be organized in many different ways (ie: places to visit, things to do, where to stay, etc). Test different ideas and find the best categorization for your destination.
  5. Highlight your seasons – Visitors want to travel to a region during its best and most beautiful seasons. When organizing your website, be sure to consider the different sites and activities in your destination for each season. For example, Breckenridge, Colorado is a ski destination but does a fine job highlighting its summer attractions in the middle of the year.
  6. Make sure you are speaking the language of your target markets – To attract more people, add more languages to your website.
  7. Geo-reference your content – Many people may not familiar with your destination, so make sure to utilize maps when promoting attractions and sites. This will allow the visitor to understand where they are and nearby points of interest around the area, creating an easier travel plan.
  8. Use blogging to create travel inspiration and increase web traffic – This is a great way to be the storyteller of your destination and provide visitors with inspiration and anecdotal stories.
  9. Let travelers provide social proof and real photos – User-generated content — real photos from real travelers — shows the uniqueness of destination through the eyes of its most important asset, it’s visitors.

Breckenridge Summer Offering

How to Prepare and Plan for your Website Design/Development Project

Before building a website, DMO’s should first meet with its governing board to obtain buy-in and sign off on the site as the decision makers. After funding is established, a website team should be formed with a small group of leaders, each with different roles within the community’s tourism industry. From there, wireframes, a content model, and editorial calendars are to be developed to better outline the project. Use the tips stated above to organize all data before bringing the outline to a website developer.

It is important to identify any specific functionality that will be required by the DMOs website, such as forms, languages, user login, e-commerce, etc. Finally, it is imperative that a DMO request proposals from various web agencies to find the one that will best fit their needs and time restraints.

Our expert interview on this topic welcomed Wes Rhea, the CEO of Stockton CVB. Wes offered valuable insight into why it is essential for DMOs to design and operate their own website, and his words help to summarize this sometimes overwhelming topic. “DMOs need to position [themselves] as the expert of the destination and not give that power to anybody else.” Wes said. “You need to be able to tell your story in your own way”

Tourism Information Center

Visitor Services: Providing Online and Offline Customer Service

Written by Micaela Pacheco on . Posted in Projects, Services, Uncategorized.

Visitor services centers, or welcome centers, are designed to provide information and aid to any current or potential tourists within a destination and its surrounding areas. The center acts as the main point of contact for tourists’ travel planning inquiries, as well as a place where local businesses and travel agencies can go to promote their products and services. Week 7 of Solimar’s DMO Development Course with the Republic of Georgia provided a platform for participants to learn best practices in building a tourism information center.

Best Practices and Service from a Visitor Center

There are questions aplenty that tourism leaders must consider when envisioning how a visitor center should operate, and many of the answers are dependent on the destination’s offerings. Considerations include opening hours, number of staff onsite, kinds of local merchandise sold, size of the center itself, and availability of parking and bathrooms. While this is not an exhaustive list, a DMO is guaranteed to make many more decisions when creating and designing an outstanding visitor center.

The types of services that a DMO can provide in a visitor center include: 

  • Creating and printing collaterals and maps, 
  • Providing key information (where to go, what to do, where to stay, events, planning your trip, etc.), 
  • Answering phone, email and social media inquiries, 
  • Public services (parking, bathrooms, wifi, etc), 
  • Complaints and mediation with the tourism industry, and
  • Social customer service 

Tourism Information Centers: Where To Go & What To Do

A locale’s tourism information center can play a variety of roles, and it should automatically be considered a key player in the development and marketing of a destination. Although a center could do all of or more than the aforementioned services, it may also play a role in expanding the number or variety of places visited within a destination. For example, someone visiting Philadelphia is likely to visit popular destinations like the Liberty Bell or Independence Hall. An information center is an ideal resource for a visitor to learn about lesser known attractions in Philadelphia (or any area), such as Penn’s Landing or Once Upon a Nation. DMOs should use its visitor center as a tool to create a demand and get people visiting less popular areas – therefore increasing visitor spending.

Ideally, a visitor center should take some time to research the needs of possible guests. How can the center be most useful? What are the visitors’ greatest needs? What is missing? In some cases, a visitor center may be as simple as a short rest area with restrooms, air conditioning, and wifi. Others may function as an information hub with hard copies of guides and maps and ticket sales. Some may even further contribute to revenue by the sale of merchandise. Taking the time to measure potential impact will likely support the information center in the end.

Visitor Services

Expert Interview with Norbert Käthler 

As part of Solimar’s DMO Development Program with DMOs in Georgia and Armenia, our remote learning course features a weekly interview with an industry expert. This week, we interviewed Norbert Kathler, the Managing Director of Trier Tourism and Marketing in Trier, Germany. His overarching advice is to be authentic with your destination. You have just one brand – what does this brand mean, and what does it mean to say to the world? Although you may have different messaging focused on various market segments, like foreign or domestic tourists, authenticity with your destination brand is most important. Work to develop one strong brand that helps you market to a variety of visitors. 

On the same wavelength, Kathler also advises destinations to integrate into local networks. Integrating the part of the community that benefits from tourism with the part that lacks a relationship with tourism is critical to fostering open dialogue and mutual benefits among different divisions of an area. The role of a DMO is to act as a moderator and find a way to tie the community’s relationship with tourism together.

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While there are a wide variety of benefits within a visitor or tourist center, the greatest may be its potential. Just as not every destination functions the same as the next, these information centers come with a variety of options for how it will serve and assist guests, all while benefiting the destination and its community. Being malleable in a destination’s goals is more important than ever with the unique travel circumstances brought on by the Covid-19 pandemic. Guests rely more than ever on an informed and developed information center as a core asset to any outstanding destination.

 

Destination Planning – Leading your Destination’s Development and Stewardship

Written by Micaela Pacheco on . Posted in Uncategorized.

Creating a long-term plan for a destination is critical to ensuring that a Destination Management Organization (DMO) is actively and continuously serving the needs and dealing with the challenges in a community. Creating a Destination Management Plan (DMP) helps a DMO to establish goals, measure against targets, and recruit people who are interested in a project or business, all of which encourage active involvement from people and businesses outside of government. 

Stakeholder Participation 

A stakeholder is a person with an interest or concern in something, especially a business. When working with businesses that are members of a DMO, highlighting services is key to maintaining their interest. If stakeholders feel they aren’t receiving benefits from their membership, they are unlikely to want to stay on as members year after year. Participatory planning is crucial to obtaining buy-in and support from stakeholders. Plan to recruit private-sector businesses and other stakeholders for an in-person workshop over the span of several days in order to collaboratively identify priority issues, opportunities, and a shared vision for the future. When workshops aren’t possible, extensive surveying of stakeholders can be used to better understand the opinions and priorities for those in a DMO area. Using this technique, one can correctly analyze the extent of the reach a DMO service provides and adapt to what the community needs.

Stakeholder Participation

Industry guidelines

The UNWTO notes three different types of measurements that are key to monitoring DMO success:

  • Outputs – recording steps taken in a systematic way.
  • Outcomes – checking the results of specific actions, which may relate to specific performance indicators 
  • Impacts – relating back to overall policy objectives and plan targets, which may be encapsulated in general indicators of levels of tourism and development.

Visioning

Workshops are a key part of participatory planning, ensuring that DMO staff and local stakeholders are on the same page about where the destination wants to go and what it should represent. Visioning exercises are excellent ways for tourism leaders to ensure that their ideas align with stakeholders. Here are some visioning guidelines to follow:

  • Visions are always holistic and appeal to the community’s spirit
  • Visions have realistic goals
  • Plans react to data whereas visions react to creativity
  • A vision shows where you want to go and a plan tells you how to get there

Surveys

Key to responsible and sustainable destination planning is surveying DMO members, local residents, and visitors frequently. These groups are your primary stakeholders, and their opinions in turn should drive your own organization’s decisions about what is important and where the value lies in your model. 

Take the pulse of your stakeholders
DMO Development requires community engagement

Conclusion

Ultimately, destination planning is all about participation. How can a DMO ensure that the opinions and experiences of local stakeholders– visitors, businesses, and residents — are taken into consideration when planning for destination development? 

As part of Solimar’s DMO Development Program in the Republic of Georgia and Armenia, our team has had the chance to interview tourism experts from around the world on weekly topics. This week, we interviewed Kristin Dahl, Vice President of Destination Development for Travel Oregon, and discussed the many aspects of destination planning. Dahl mentioned that Travel Oregon is “not just promoting heads and beds, but we’re really concerned about the economic well-being of everyone in our communities and how tourism can be a driving force for that sustainable economic development.”

Why is it important for destinations to have a plan? Dahl had an insightful response, saying that “Without a plan, it’s really easy to chase the shiny object. Pretty soon you don’t have an end goal. You’re creating space for community stakeholders to come together and talk about what they do and don’t want with respect to visitation and the tourism economy.” 

Dahl provided some general advice for DMOs, both new and established, after her many years working in the industry. She recommended that if “you are new in your role, don’t worry about what to do right away. Take some time in the beginning to really listen. Taking the time to really listen to those less expected stakeholders and learn about what they are concerned about and what they are excited about. Take that time to talk to your local public landowners, or gas stations. People you might not think of as a traditional stakeholder.” 

Thank you to Kristin Dahl for your helpful insight to destination planning. Click here to read more in this DMO Development Series and learn how destination planning involves managing a budget 

 

What Defines a Destination

What Defines a Destination?

Written by Micaela Pacheco on . Posted in Tourism Development.

Destinations and the journeys that accompany them are continually adapting and diversifying for the coming trends in travel. Destination management has become increasingly important as tourism leaders coordinate the management of all elements that make up a destination, including the attractions, amenities, access, marketing, and pricing. But what actually defines a particular place from a tourism perspective? The following aspects factor into the many ways we explore and adventure through a destination to ultimately shape its identity.

1. Location 

Where a destination is located is the most obvious factor. Geographically, destinations can be defined as individual towns, cities, regions (such as states), countries or routes comprised of multiple locations often linked together through a particular theme.  Destinations that are part of a larger route will often partner with other businesses and vendors to create a more streamlined and accessible experience for travelers.  To learn more about the creation of a route where businesses are partnering together, read more about Solimar’s work along the Lewis and Clark National Historic Trail.

2. Attractions 

Destinations are also often defined by the area’s attractions. If your location is famous for its national parks, for example, consider centering management efforts around carrying capacity to protect biodiversity while reducing overcrowding to ensure an enjoyable visitor experience. The key attractions of a place is also vital for establishing a brand identity and marketing to potential customers. 

For example, the owner of a hotel in Armenia may recognize that their clientele is mainly travelers with an appreciation for the country’s local culture and gastronomy. This hotel might partner with local businesses that offer master classes in local handicrafts or wineries that offer tastings, and create a package with these stakeholders. This strategy creates a more attractive experience for visitors while encouraging them to stay longer and increase their spending. 

 3. Target Market 

It is crucial to remain cognizant of the buyer persona when creating, marketing and defining a tourism destination. Are people coming to your destination to relax, to learn, or to explore? Emerging destinations may choose to analyze their suppliers by conducting data analytics online or by doing market research collection through the use of customer surveys. This research will provide excellent insight into partnership opportunities, pricing structures and target markets. 

Over the years, Solimar International has consulted with hundreds of tourism destinations and destination management organizations to help them in their journey towards developing and operating in a sustainable way. Read more about some of our projects here. 

 

“We rely confidently on Solimar's deep technical experience and professionalism as tourism consultants. You always are exceeding our expectations.”
Leila Calnan, Senior Manager, Tourism Services Cardno Emerging Markets
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