Walk into almost any DMO budget meeting in 2026 and the conversation will be the same. How do we win the international visitor back. How do we prove ROI to the hotel community. How do we keep up with AI. The line item that almost never makes it into that meeting is the one that will quietly determine whether your destination delivers on any of its marketing in the next five years: who is going to do the work.

The U.S. tourism workforce has not recovered the way the demand side has. U.S. Travel has been tracking a structural gap between visitor demand and the labor available to serve it for years now, and the destination economy has compensated by stretching existing teams thinner, raising prices, and quietly cutting service. The World Economic Forum estimates the global travel and tourism sector will need tens of millions of new workers by the end of the decade just to keep up. The number for the U.S. specifically is bad enough that several state tourism offices have started reframing workforce as an economic-development priority rather than a hospitality industry concern.

And almost no DMO is doing anything about it.

Tourism is the only category where we market the product but not the producers

Think about what destination marketing actually does. It tells a story to a traveler about a place. It does not tell a story to a 17-year-old in that place about why working in the visitor economy is a real career. We market the museum but not the museum job. We market the resort but not the resort general manager track. We market the convention center but not the meetings career path that runs through it.

That is not a small oversight. The visitor economy is one of the largest employers in most U.S. metros, often the largest single source of entry-level jobs, and one of the few industries where you can move from a frontline role to a leadership role without a four-year degree. None of that is communicated to the people who live in your destination. We spend tens of millions every year telling outsiders why your city is worth visiting. We spend almost nothing telling insiders why your city is worth working in.

This is a brand problem, not just a labor problem

The reflex inside most DMOs is to treat workforce as someone else’s problem — the hotel association’s, the state workforce board’s, the community college’s. That is wrong, and it is wrong for the same reason that resident sentiment is wrong to outsource: the destination’s ability to deliver on its marketing depends on whether the people inside the destination believe in it.

Right now, the people most likely to push back on tourism in your community are the same people you would need to recruit into the workforce if visitation grows. They have heard for years that tourism creates “low-wage” jobs and that the visitor economy benefits hotels and OTAs more than it benefits residents. Whether that critique is fair is almost beside the point. What matters is that no one is telling a counter-story, because the institution best positioned to tell it — the DMO — has decided that workforce marketing is outside the scope.

It is not. Destinations International has been quietly elevating workforce as one of the strategic priorities its CEOs talk about, and a handful of state tourism offices have begun running pilot campaigns aimed at residents and high-school students about careers in the visitor economy. Those are signals. Most DMOs are still ignoring them.

What a workforce-aware DMO actually does differently

This does not mean turning your bureau into a recruiting agency. It means doing four specific things that very few DMOs do today.

One. Add an internal-audience track to your brand strategy. Treat residents and the future workforce as a primary audience, not as a stakeholder you placate after the fact. The same insight that makes a destination story land with travelers — what does this place feel like, who lives here, what gets made here — is what makes a career story land with a 17-year-old.

Two. Translate the economic-impact number into a workforce number. Most DMOs report visitor spending and tax generation. Almost none report jobs created, career pathways supported, or wage progression inside the visitor economy. Your impact dashboard should have a row for that.

Three. Use your media buying power. You are already the largest tourism media buyer in your market. Carve a fraction of that budget for in-market workforce campaigns — community college partnerships, high-school programs, career pages on the destination website. The cost is trivial relative to the lift in talent pipeline.

Four. Co-own the talent pipeline with your hotel community. The people who keep saying tourism is hard to fund in your market are the same people who cannot find dishwashers and front desk agents. There is a deal there, and the DMO is the only entity in the room positioned to broker it.

The destinations that win the next decade will not be the ones with the cleverest brand campaigns. They will be the ones that can actually staff the experience the brand promises. That is not a hospitality association problem. That is the central destination management challenge of the next ten years, and DMOs that keep treating it as someone else’s job will spend the rest of the decade marketing destinations that cannot deliver.

Photo by Louis Hansel on Unsplash