The Dark Side Of Destination Marketing: How Tourism Boards Squander Millions And Dodge Accountability

The Dark Side Of Destination Marketing: How Tourism Boards Squander Millions And Dodge Accountability

by Gary Leff on May 7, 2024

Tourism boards are often highly questionable. They’re big pots of money where politicians appoint friends to cush, well-paying jobs where there are very few metrics of actual success and leaders attend conferences and treat themselves and others to a good time.

In the history of destination marketing there have been some good and effective slogans (“What Happens In Vegas Stays In Vegas”). Australia’s Northern Territory got outsized attention when a slogan they promoted was ruled obscene.

There’s also plenty of missing money and unsuccessful campaigns. And at the end of the day some places sell themselves, and others just aren’t gong to attract a lot of visitor business no matter how much they invest. Ithaca, New York once gave up and said, yeah, you really should just go to Florida instead.

In Austin, the Hilton at the convention center is owned by the city. When a member of the City Council lost re-election, they were given a six figure no show job as the city’s ownership representative to Hilton, which had a long-term management contract to run the hotel. The job was described as intensive: having to send emails to set up board meetings with the city council.

But I had no idea that the heads of these boondoggles made so much? Skift pulled the data since it’s mostly public.

• The head of Visit California takes in over $1.5 million
• The head of Visit Indianapolis earns $921,470 and is under 12-year contract. Firing them would require paying out that contract.
• Nashville pays them $1.4 million
• The San Francisco Travel Association pays nearly $1 million per year and they’ve been losing business.

Speaking To A Convention Center Audience In February

The head of Discover Puerto Rico says they’re measured on “between 15 and 50 KPIs” which means there’s no accountability and they don’t even know what their metrics are. Visit Austin has a 32-member board, which is another sign that there’s no accountability. Worse than no accountability, I knew a convention bureau leader who went from St. Louis to Loudoun County, Virginia who moonlit as a leader of a white supremacist group and baked Hitler cookies.

These organizations track visitor numbers. If those are growing, the convention bureau must be doing a great job! More often, of course, it’s because the destination is increasingly desirable along with broader macro trends like the economy, availability of scheduled air service, and other cost and hassle factors. They look at hotel occupancy rates, but local short-term rental rules and factors influencing hotel construction matter a lot here. And then they look at visitor satisfaction and community satisfaction from surveys, which don’t add much to the discussion of whether this public spending is useful.

Does Visit Orlando really need to pay over half a million a year? They have Disney, Universal Studios and SeaWorld. Disney has a huge marketing budget. What good are public dollars here, anyway?

There are more than 551 visitor and convention bureaus in this country spending over $2 billion annually and holding that much in assets as well.

And you’re paying for it. In many jurisdictions there are hotel taxes funding these efforts. Local governments raise hotel taxes in order to promote tourism, which basically gets the economics backward.

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