Most DMO marketing budgets in 2026 are tilted heavily toward paid media: programmatic display, paid social, search, sometimes a meaningful TV or streaming spend in priority feeder markets. Earned media — the press hits, podcast features, byline placements, broadcast features, and trade-publication coverage — usually sits in a single PR retainer line item, often handled by the same one or two staff members or by a small outside agency. The result is asymmetric. Paid is treated as the engine. Earned is treated as a nice-to-have.

That equation is changing fast. CPMs in the categories DMOs care about — leisure, family, group meeting planners — have climbed steadily. AI overviews and zero-click search are eating into the SEO traffic that historically supported organic discovery. Sojern’s 2026 State of Destination Marketing report ranks measuring economic impact as the top DMO priority right now, and earned media is the only channel that consistently delivers third-party validation at scale. The DMOs winning the next budget cycle will be the ones treating earned media like a system, not a side project.

Stop measuring earned media in volume. Start measuring it in placements that move pipelines.

Most DMO PR reports lead with story counts and AVE (advertising value equivalent). Both are weak signals. A 600-word feature on a tier-one travel publication’s homepage is worth more than 30 syndicated wire reprints, and a planner-targeted story in a meetings trade pub is worth more than either for group business.

Build a tiered media list scored on three dimensions: audience fit (does the publication’s reader actually book this kind of trip?), decision proximity (how close is the reader to a booking decision?), and amplification potential (will this story get picked up downstream by other publications, social, or AI search results?). Score the publications you pursue. Stop chasing every blogger who emails the press inbox.

Build a story bank that the newsroom would actually want

The single biggest reason DMOs underperform on earned media is that they pitch announcements that nobody outside the destination cares about. New executive hire. New campaign tagline. New trail opening. These are press release fodder, not feature stories.

What journalists need: angles tied to broader trends, with proprietary data and named human characters. Build a quarterly story bank that includes:

Trend-anchored narratives — your destination as a case study of a national trend (e.g., remote work migration, post-COVID convention recovery, sustainable tourism funding)
Original data drops — visitor sentiment, booking patterns, search behavior, partner survey insights — packaged as quarterly research releases
Behind-the-scenes access — let a journalist embed with a sales team during a major bid, follow a creator partnership end-to-end, or sit in on a stewardship meeting
Provocative thought leadership from the CEO — willing to take a position on TID funding, AI policy, workforce, board governance — that gives reporters a quotable expert

Most newsroom contacts say the same thing: they get five generic destination pitches a week, and one good angle quarterly. Be the one good angle.

Run pitching like a sales motion

Treat your top 50 target reporters and producers like enterprise sales prospects. Track every interaction in a CRM. Build a relationship over months, not days. Tools like Muck Rack, Cision, and Prowly handle the contact data; the discipline of consistent, personalized outreach is the part most DMOs skip.

Cadence to copy: a personalized check-in with each target reporter once per quarter, a value-first piece of content (a data point, a destination invite, a story angle that fits their beat) every 6–8 weeks, and an exclusive offer when you have something genuinely newsworthy. Reporters reciprocate when they feel known, not when they feel sprayed.

Use earned media to feed every other channel

The wasted opportunity in most DMO programs: a great press hit lives on the original publication and dies. The DMOs running this well treat every earned placement as raw material:

Sales and convention pitches — third-party press becomes credibility evidence in RFP responses
Paid amplification — boost reputable third-party coverage on social rather than always boosting your own content
Stakeholder communications — turn press hits into a quarterly board update that quantifies organic media share-of-voice
Search and AI surface area — third-party press is now central to how AI search engines determine destination authority. The more credible publications mention your destination, the more your destination shows up in AI-generated travel answers

Set the budget honestly

An earned media program that beats paid will run between 8% and 15% of the total marketing budget. That covers a senior PR lead, a junior support role, monitoring tools, story production, occasional press trips, and a flexible spend bucket for syndicated content distribution and contributed opinion pieces. It is not free. It is dramatically cheaper than the equivalent paid lift and produces a different kind of trust.

The DMOs that get this right in 2026 are not the ones with the loudest campaign launches. They are the ones whose destinations show up in five travel publications, three trade pubs, two podcasts, and a wave of AI search overviews — every quarter — without buying a single placement. That is what compounding earned media looks like. And it is the one channel where the scale advantages still belong to the well-run mid-size DMO, not just the giants with nine-figure budgets.

Photo by Thiago Zanutigh on Unsplash