The hardest job a DMO CEO will do in 2026 is not running a campaign. It is protecting the funding base that makes the campaign possible. And most DMOs are not built for it.

Look at the pattern across the last 90 days. Chicago’s City Council unanimously approved a new Tourism Improvement District this spring that will route roughly $40 million a year to Choose Chicago via a hotel-occupancy tax increase — a years-long advocacy win that Mayor Brandon Johnson rolled out alongside major hotel and labor partners. A few states over, the Missouri House has proposed cutting $10 million from the state’s Division of Tourism budget, a move that would gut the cooperative-marketing grants most Missouri DMOs rely on. At the federal level, Congress is still trying to reverse an 80% cut to Brand USA through the bipartisan VISIT USA Act.

Every one of those stories is a policy fight, not a marketing campaign. And every one of them will do more to determine the next three years of a destination’s marketing budget than any ad buy, influencer program, or rebrand.

Most DMOs were hired for the wrong job

The median DMO CEO in the United States was promoted into the role through marketing — not through finance, public affairs, or legislative advocacy. Their skill set is creative, narrative, and operator-facing. The board that hired them asked them to build awareness, win group business, and manage agency relationships. No one put “keep the funding mechanism alive” at the top of the job description.

The funding environment has changed faster than the role has. The State Tourism Office Budget Dashboard shows that state-level tourism funding has been under sustained pressure since the pandemic-era ARPA dollars wound down, and cities that rely on TID or TMD revenue are increasingly running into legal challenges, renewal fights, and stakeholder skepticism. Funding is no longer something a DMO receives. It is something a DMO has to defend, renew, and in many cases re-win every budget cycle.

CEOs who understand this early are retooling their calendars. The ones who don’t are still treating funding like a once-a-year board meeting and a spreadsheet exercise.

What the advocacy job actually looks like

Fighting for DMO funding is a distinct professional discipline. It is not the same job as marketing, and it can’t be done by the same playbook.

It’s built on relationships, not campaigns. Chicago’s TID didn’t pass because someone published a great video about the need for tourism investment. It passed because Choose Chicago, the Illinois Hotel & Lodging Association, city-side economic development staff, and labor partners built a multi-year coalition and showed up at the same city council hearings. That coalition existed before the ordinance was drafted. It will exist after the ink dries. The campaigning was downstream.

It’s conducted in-district, not just in the state capital. State and federal cuts rarely get reversed by lobbying from the trade association alone. They get reversed when individual legislators hear from the restaurants, hoteliers, and local employers inside their own districts about what the cut means for payroll. That means the DMO has to know, by name, the specific operators and economic development partners in each senate district who will call their state senators, testify at budget hearings, and stand next to the DMO CEO at a press conference. A stakeholder map that is mostly board members and restaurant owners is missing roughly half of the people who actually swing a vote.

It runs on a different calendar. Legislative sessions, TID renewals, and federal appropriation fights don’t align with the marketing calendar. They start earlier, they move slower, and they punish organizations that engage reactively. By the time the budget cut is public, the window to shape the outcome is mostly closed.

The org chart has to change with the job

The practical move is to stop treating advocacy as a side-of-desk assignment for the CEO and the VP of communications. Two shifts compound quickly.

Put a government-affairs or public-affairs lead on the org chart — either as a dedicated hire, a contracted firm with clear deliverables, or a formalized staff function housed inside the existing team. Assign the role an actual calendar, a quarterly legislative briefing to the board, and a stakeholder-mapping deliverable that the CEO is accountable for.

Second, train the board. A board that only sees marketing metrics will not understand why the CEO needs to spend two weeks at the state capital during session. A board that sees an advocacy dashboard — bills tracked, meetings taken, coalition members engaged, renewal milestones — will have the context to back the CEO when the hard trade-offs come.

The Destinations International community is increasingly explicit about this: the skills that get a DMO executive hired are not the skills that keep the organization funded. The CEOs who are quietly building advocacy muscle now are the ones whose destinations will still have a budget to work with when the next political cycle turns.

Marketing isn’t going away. It’s just no longer the hardest part of the job.

Photo by Josh Austin on Unsplash