A new report from EY in Japan has put the DMO front and center, as the potential key to unlocking direct to consumer distribution for grass roots tourism suppliers in the long tail, as the AI transformation rolls out. Now is a very exciting time to be in the Destination Marketing arena, possibly the most exciting time ever, as it is not often you have the opportunity to completely change the way things work in an industry and find a straight line to achieving your mission.

One of the constants with technological change is that as it advances, it makes things smaller and faster. Early computers like the ENIAC (1946) weighed 30 tons, occupied 1800 square feet, and could perform around 5,000 operations per second. In contrast, modern smartphones pack billions of transistors on a tiny chip and can perform trillions of calculations per second. Early televisions used cathode ray tubes that were several feet deep. Modern flat-panel TVs are just a few inches thick while offering higher resolutions. My first mobile phone was the Nokia brick. You get the point. 

The same can apply to software as well as hardware. Way back in 2001, someone with pretty incredible foresight had the idea in Australia of building a data warehouse for tourism to act as the single source of truth for all tourism suppliers to interact with all the overlapping levels of DMO (National, State, Regional, City), as a way of both simplifying process and expanding distribution of tourism product. Over that time they’ve entered over 50,000 suppliers into the data set, added in images and created an API for developers building new things that in turn capture new demand streams. 

Arguably it has given Australia a huge 2 decade long competitive advantage because when innovators want to build new things, they go there first, because that available feed makes their building process simple.

But it isn’t all beer and skittles. 23 years is a long time. The various State and National tourism boards have spent 10’s of millions of dollars (if not $100’s of millions – no-one really wants to say…) to get to this point. It also continues to take significant budget, when budgets themselves are diminishing. As it is a user generated and coordinator checked model, means the data is not always complete, correct or inspiring for the purposes of tourism marketing. There are lots of duplicates. And operators tend not to be great photographers so the output can also be a bit well, meh. Things also aren’t updated quickly when something closes down. Today it kind of resembles what you might find in a SAP or Oracle product, not what you might find powering Airbnb. 

On top of all that, the consumer has moved onto video, thanks to the rise of social media, but the tool has not…

When people ask how will AI impact things in tourism, this is the type of example my mind goes to. If we look at that laundry list of jobs needed to keep ATDW functional, they are mainly small, repetitive, fiddly and manual things being done by (bored, I’m sure) humans. This is exactly the type of thing that AI is good at and therefore opens the opportunity for destinations everywhere to build a modern day data warehouse that is all of: better, faster and cheaper than what exists today.

But how, exactly, could this happen? 

A new startup out of Spain, Videreo, is showing exactly how:

• A DMO signs up with Videreo and first ingests all their existing videos which are then analyzed and tagged using AI as to their attributes, to set the groundwork for personalization.  
  • these videos are then placed on destination story map which also gives the DMO vertical video display capabilities for their own website & apps. There is instant utility via a UX that consumers now prefer, yet almost no destination websites currently offer
• The DMO is then able to offer to its entire supplier network an invitation to likewise add their best video content to destination map – for FREE. Almost all suppliers now have at least some great video produced for Instagram & TikTok. This provides the DMO with a definitive answer to the perennial question of ”What have you done for me lately?” that is all pervasive in our industry.
• The supplier also gets their own Business Show Reel to display a vertical video feed on their own site – as a gift from their DMO.
  • All these videos are likewise instantaneously tagged also, solving the personalization problem on the supply side at scale
  • The DMO now has a comprehensive supplier map that can be literally consumed in a glance, but also available as a usable database for other purposes.
• The total feed from all destinations creates a Global Story Map which is then available for developers everywhere as an API feed for them to build new consumer products and apps and drive new traffic back to the suppliers. With a greater range of destinations, this becomes the go to tool from which to build new innovations on top of.
• The entire feed can also be used to train LLM’s and connect the personalization wishes of the consumer, directly to the best supplier who can fulfill those wishes and put them directly in touch with one another. The DMO therefore creates a commission free pathway between consumer and supplier, the dream outcome for our suppliers.

The result is a relatively quick pathway to creating the right data connections, utilizing the already existing but otherwise redundant assets of videos created for social to create something both new and incredibly valuable right through the entire ecosystem – and all for pennies in the dollar compared to the Australian experience with ATDW.

You see a lot of posts these days saying something like: “I typed XTZ into ChatGPT and got a terrible answer.” The inference is that AI is useless. Meanwhile businesses like Videreo are looking at the capabilities of what AI can do and matching it to solve entrenched problems, give old assets new life and unlock new & thoroughly transformative possibilities, as spelled out by the EY report.