America’s Best-Paid Tourism Marketers
Photo Credit: A view of the Golden Gate Bridge in 2020 in San Francisco, California. Flickr / Creative Commons / David Yu
Skift Take
Many tourism board CEOs command high compensation. Here's Skift's first major look at the pay packages of U.S. destination marketing executives.
Many American tourism marketers are well-paid. Visit California CEO Caroline Beteta recently collected more than $1.5 million in compensation. Brand USA CEO Chris Thompson recently took home over $700,000.
These were some of the findings when Skift reviewed the the pay for U.S. tourism marketers at city, state, and national levels. Here's how we approached it:
We used the 2022 fiscal year because those records were the most comprehensively up-to-date. We focused on the top 20 cities, based on those with the highest inbound visitation from overseas. Many are non-profits, and we were able to review their Form 990s filed with the IRS. In some cases, we got pay data from government agencies. At the state level, we were interested in heavily touristed states with large, non-profit destination marketing organizations (DMOs), such as California, Hawaii, and Florida. We left out states like New York that didn't have them. At the national level, we added&
