Destination Marketers Face Reopening Challenge With Decimated Budgets and Staff

As a tourism marketer, it's truly a novel challenge: How do you convince people to visit your destination after a period where the prevailing public mood has been fear of the outside world? But that's precisely the challenge that most tourism boards face as travel begins its slow reopening. On top of that, most destination marketing organizations are doing it with decimated budgets and staff counts that are much lower than the start of the year. Just how much DMOs are hurting depends on their funding model, of course. In the U.S., the overwhelming majority of DMOs get their funding from accommodation taxes, which have plummeted in recent months — and won't recover to pre-crisis lev