If you handed a DMO CEO an open hire tomorrow and told them they couldn’t fill it with another marketer, most would stall. That pause is the diagnosis.

For three decades, destination marketing organizations have been built almost entirely with marketing talent. Director of marketing. Director of digital. Director of communications. PR manager. Social manager. Content manager. The org chart expresses a belief about what a DMO is for — reach people, tell the destination’s story, fill the funnel. And when the funnel filled, the org worked.

The funnel no longer fills the way it used to, and the people staring at the missing demand inside the org are not the marketers. They’re the finance people, the research people, the economists. Most DMOs don’t have those people. That’s the problem.

The math has shifted under the org chart

Three forces have changed what a DMO actually needs in-house.

The first is that the questions DMOs are being asked by boards, mayors, legislatures, and TID partners have moved from “did you build awareness?” to “what did we get for the money?” The 2026 State of Destination Marketing report found that the largest share of DMOs now cite economic impact and ROI as their most important stakeholder proof points. Awareness is no longer the top-line metric. Economic impact is.

The second is that the data a DMO needs to answer those questions has gotten substantially more complex. Visitor intelligence platforms like Zartico, mobility data like Arrivalist, short-term rental feeds from AirDNA, and card-panel data from various vendors give a modern DMO more raw signal than most research firms had in 2010. But raw signal does not automatically become economic narrative. Someone has to structure it.

The third is that the public-facing funding conversation is getting more technical. Tourism Improvement Districts, lodging-tax renewals, and state co-op grant programs all involve economic models that do not forgive being wrong. A DMO that cannot independently reproduce the math behind its own TID renewal is at the mercy of whichever consultant built the original case.

What an in-house economist actually does

Almost every DMO already outsources this function — to U.S. Travel, to Destinations International, to Tourism Economics, to a Rockport or a Longwoods engagement. Those are excellent vendors. But relying on them exclusively means the DMO owns the question and the decision while outsourcing the analysis. That gap is where strategy erodes.

A DMO economist — or visitor-economy analyst, or whatever the title becomes locally — does four things the marketing team cannot:

They translate between data and dollars in real time. When the board asks “is the spring group campaign paying back?” a marketer answers in attributed room nights. An economist answers in incremental visitor spending per dollar of media. The second answer is the one that renews the budget.

They own the economic-impact methodology. Most DMOs publish an annual economic-impact number without internal ownership of how it was calculated. When that number is challenged — and it will be, eventually, by a skeptical council member or a local journalist — the DMO is in a weaker position than if the analyst defending the number was an employee, not a vendor invoice.

They build the advocacy case. State and federal tourism policy — from Brand USA funding to TID enabling legislation — increasingly requires in-district economic data presented by credible local voices. An in-house analyst can produce and defend district-level numbers that the state association simply can’t, because the state association doesn’t work in the district.

They pressure-test the marketing team’s assumptions. The healthiest DMOs are the ones where the marketing leader and the analyst disagree in public, in front of the CEO, and the argument produces a better decision. A marketing-only org never has that argument.

The practical move

Most DMOs cannot add an FTE tomorrow. But most can do two things within the next budget cycle.

Rename one existing role. If the research or insights position is currently staffed as a marketing analyst who builds dashboards, reframe it as a visitor-economy analyst whose output is economic narrative — and hire for that skill set the next time the role turns over. The title signals the expectation.

Second, bring one externally-sourced economic analysis in-house per year. The next time the DMO commissions an impact study, negotiate for methodology transfer as part of the scope, so the internal team can reproduce and defend the numbers after the consulting engagement ends. Over three or four years, this compounds into real in-house capability.

The DMOs that will be hardest to defund over the next decade are the ones whose economic case for themselves is built, maintained, and defended by someone whose name is on the org chart. Right now, that person is almost never a marketer.

Photo by Jakub Żerdzicki on Unsplash