Bartender serves a drink to a customer at bar. — Photo by Holiday Extras on Unsplash

If a visitor lands in your destination after seeing your best campaign work, rides into a short-staffed hotel, hits a front desk with a twenty-minute check-in line, gets a rushed recommendation from a tired concierge, and drives past three restaurants with reduced hours and no servers — what exactly did the marketing buy?

The campaign did its job. The destination did not.

Tourism workforce is a marketing problem, whether or not most DMOs are resourced to treat it as one. And it is the underinvested problem in the industry. We spend tens of millions on demand generation while the supply side of the experience quietly erodes.

The case for DMOs taking ownership

The common objection is that workforce is not the DMO’s job. Workforce is an operator problem. It belongs to the hotels, the restaurants, the attractions, the airports. DMOs are marketing organizations.

That position is easier to defend in a board memo than in the real economy. In the vast majority of mid-sized destinations, the DMO is the single largest coordinating body with a funded mission to represent the visitor experience at a systems level. Nobody else has the convening power to bring workforce development agencies, community colleges, hospitality operators, and city government into the same room. If the DMO does not own this, it falls into a gap — and the destination pays for that gap in service quality, in negative reviews, and in the next sentiment survey that shows up at the board meeting.

The U.S. Travel Association’s research has repeatedly flagged the tourism labor market as the single biggest constraint on recovery and growth. That is not a demand problem. That is a supply problem wearing a marketing disguise.

What meaningful investment actually looks like

Writing a check to the local community college’s hospitality program is a start, but it is not a strategy. Real workforce investment from a DMO looks different from one-off grants or a single job fair.

It looks like a multi-year partnership with a regional workforce development board to co-design curriculum that maps to the specific service roles a destination actually needs. It looks like ambassador and front-line training programs that give every taxi driver, hotel bellhop, and front desk agent genuine knowledge of the destination’s positioning — so the brand does not collapse the moment a visitor walks out of the airport. It looks like retention-focused programs, not just recruitment. Most tourism workforce pain is not about hiring. It is about keeping.

Leading examples are already running. Choose Chicago has invested in front-line hospitality training through partner programs. Visit Philadelphia and others have invested in industry workforce coalitions. At a federal level, the National Travel and Tourism Office has begun elevating workforce as a measurable component of competitiveness.

The measurement problem, again

The reason workforce gets cut when budgets tighten is because DMOs measure it poorly. Marketing spend gets defended with attribution models, sentiment tracking, and visitation data. Workforce spend usually gets defended with a program description and a feel-good photo.

That is a solvable gap. Pair workforce investments with measurable outcomes: front-line NPS scores, mystery-shopper evaluations tied to program participants, retention rates at partner properties, service quality indexes in post-stay surveys. If you can show that the destinations with stronger front-line training outperform on TripAdvisor sentiment, visitor return rates, and convention repeat business, the budget line defends itself.

What gets in the way

The biggest barrier is not money. It is organizational identity. Many DMOs still define themselves as marketing shops, and any non-marketing activity feels like scope creep. But the category of organization leading destinations over the next decade looks different from the one that led them over the last two. The DMOs gaining policy influence, expanding funding models, and winning the TID conversations are the ones operating as destination stewardship organizations — with marketing as one function inside a larger mandate.

Workforce is where that shift becomes most tangible. If your DMO treats tourism talent as part of its product, not someone else’s problem, everything downstream — the visitor experience, the reviews, the repeat visitation, the convention renewals — gets easier.

The ask

For DMO leaders building 2026 and 2027 strategic plans: one line item for workforce development, tied to a measurable outcome, defended in the next board meeting. Not as a favor to hospitality partners. As a direct investment in the quality of the product the destination sells.

The demand is coming. An 85-million-visitor year is coming. The destinations that invested in the people delivering the experience will be the ones that convert that demand into returning guests, growing spend, and defensible budgets. The ones that did not will spend the next three years explaining why the numbers did not move.