Skift Take
Take a look at what these cities have pulled together with limited resources under the weight of this pandemic. It's a true testament to resiliency and creativity.
Like many of you, I’ve been overwhelmed at the impact Covid-19 has had on the travel industry, and how each day has brought an unpleasant serving of new closures, new layoffs, new news that suggests that this beloved industry is changed forever.
And yet in and amongst the devastation that the pandemic has unquestionably wrought, I’ve also started to see bright spots, glimmers of hope and possibility from colleagues at destination marketing organizations across the country. I see them in the DMO social media feeds, in Google alerts, and I see them posted from friends and family members in those various destinations.
What I’m seeing is a reminder to me that Charles Darwin is famously misquoted — he never said that the strongest species survive. He said the most adaptable survive. And in the last several weeks, as airlines and hotels have shut down, as attractions and restaurants have been shuttered, and as our normal way of life has been restricted to the four walls of our respective living areas, DMOs have done a remarkable job of adapting to survive.
I reached out recently to 23 DMOs in a variety of U.S. cities to ask them more about what they’re doing, find out what they’re most proud of, and discover how they’re thinking about both “the now” and “the next.”
The heartbreak was apparent in many of the responses I received, and although much of it was about losing colleagues to layoffs, the pain was also acute in how they talked about the devastating loss to the industry, including the hotels, restaurants, attractions, and retail outlets that define their destination.
None of them know what things will look like when we pull out of this, but all of them remain optimistic, and remain fully committed to doing whatever is necessary to get their local economies growing again. And despite the significantly reduced resources many of them have access to, every single one of them is adjusting their goals, strategies, plans, and tactics to the dramatically different environment in which they’re all living and working.
In what follows, I’ve tried to cull the extensive lists of initiatives that many of the DMOs have undertaken over the last two months into bite-sized nuggets, both to demonstrate the creativity and resilience they have in order to hopefully remind and inspire others of the role — and the responsibility — the organizations play within their destination.
Some Key Themes
Before I get into the specifics of what each DMO
