Watch, read, and learn! Put some prep in your step before Destinations International

The travel and tourism industry is on the move — and fast. Artificial intelligence (AI) is reshaping how travelers discover destinations, budgets are tighter than ever, and communities are asking destination marketing organizations (DMOs) to prove their value in new ways. We recently had the opportunity to sit down with experts from Destinations International during their Trends Week for a candid conversation about where the industry is headed and how we're evolving to meet it. 

Watch the full session below or read on for the highlights. 
 

Watch the webinar 
 

A stronger foundation for DMOs 

This webinar reinforced the idea that now more than ever, DMOs need a strategic partner that combines destination-specific expertise with the scale and innovation required to stay ahead. At Granicus Destinations, we're bringing together industry-leading destination solutions, advanced AI capabilities, expanded data resources, and a broader technology ecosystem to help DMOs navigate change with confidence.  

Our goal is to help destinations better measure impact, engage stakeholders, attract visitors, and drive sustainable growth — all through solutions designed specifically for the destination industry. 

That vision comes to life through four strategic priorities that are shaping how we support organizations today and into the future: 

1. Demonstrating and measuring impact. By combining Simpleview's DMO-specific data with Granicus' broader datasets — including short-term rental activity, network data for meetings, and resident sentiment — destinations can build a much stronger, evidence-backed case for their economic and community impact. 
2. Adapting to AI's effect on visitor discovery. Rather than treating AI-driven search as a threat, the team framed it as an opportunity. Destinations that show up with accurate, well-structured information can become trusted sources inside tools like ChatGPT and Gemini, driving higher-intent traffic to their sites. 
3. Keeping pace with accelerating technology change. As AI speeds up software development across the industry, the panel emphasized that their role is to help customers adopt new capabilities without disrupting existing workflows, reporting, and data structures. 
4. Driving organizational efficiency. With budgets and funding models still unsettled since the pandemic, the panel positioned customer relationship management (CRM) tools as a force multiplier, letting smaller teams do more with the resources they have. 
    

Data trust and the Community Vitality Wheel 

A recurring question from the audience's perspective was that as DMOs, local government, and economic development partners align more closely, how is data being shared and protected?  

The panel was clear that customer data ownership hasn't changed; destinations own their own data, and that principle predates the acquisition by many years. What has changed is the addition of enterprise-grade security infrastructure, including a dedicated information security officer and FedRAMP-level standards drawn from Granicus' work with government agencies. 

Rather than pooling all data together, the approach centers on Destinations International’s community vitality wheel — finding specific, intentional opportunities where destinations, economic development, and local government can collaborate without collapsing data boundaries, citing examples such as: 

• Short-term rental data 
• Resident sentiment surveys 
• Cross-agency campaigns  
   

What "future-ready" looks like  

Looking ahead, the panel described a new packaging framework, Destination Experience Cloud (DXC), built around three pillars they see defining the future of destination management: 

• Meetings and event sales. 
• Leisure demand generation. 
• Community and stakeholder accountability. 

The goal is to shift from being a tool provider that reacts to requests into a partner that proactively guides destinations through a maturity curve, using a best-practices playbook built from work with over a thousand global destinations. 

On the product side, the Granicus Destinations team pointed to a broader shift across software-as-a-service (SaaS) toward embedded tools with better connections. CRM sits at the center of that ecosystem; the panel shared that roughly 10,000 users logging into their CRM annually across 650+ destinations, plus 1.7 million active member businesses using their extranet. 

A concrete example lies in the rise in sports tourism which, accelerated by events like the World Cup, prompted the creation of the new CRM Sports Sales User Group. Paired with deeper integrations with Playeasy, Momentus, and Cvent — these advancements aimed at reducing manual work and keeping data flowing cleanly between systems. 

Perhaps the most tactical section of the webinar focused on how AI is changing the way travelers find destinations. Key ideas included: 

• SEO and AI optimization are both growing. Traditional search and AI-driven discovery are increasing in parallel, so destinations need content built for both. 
• Structured data (schema) matters more than ever. It's what allows AI tools to accurately parse listings, events, and details on a destination's website. 
• Video is an underrated AI visibility signal. Citing a study of 75,000 brands, YouTube mentions showed the strongest correlation with AI visibility — meaning a destination's presence across creator content and video platforms matters as much as its own website. 
• Visibility needs to be measurable. A new AI visibility dashboard, rolling out later this year, will show destinations which pages are actually being surfaced in AI answers, data that's meaningfully different from what Google Analytics reports. 

The panel also introduced Destination Canvas. This new era of Simpleview CMS is built to help destinations show up where travelers are searching, deliver better experiences, and get more value from the work their teams are already doing. 
 

A quick look at meetings data 

Rounding out the session, the team shared early data on meetings trends.  

While leads are up, room nights and bookings (particularly on the convention center side) were down through Q1, a trend the team is still digging into. Three shifts stood out:  

1. Destinations increasingly compete against a broader set of sourced locations. 
2. Planner time is becoming more precious, making smart deployment of sales staff more important. 
3. Planner discovery is being shaped by the same AI-driven search changes affecting leisure travel. 

Destinations that pair the right data with the right expertise are positioned to come out ahead, not behind, in these shifts.  

For a deeper dive into any of these topics, we invite you to watch the full webinar recording above or reach out to the Granicus Destinations team directly.