From Baltimore to Belize: How one agency markets destinations

Behind almost every vacation is an advertising agency.

Okay, maybe not. But they don’t hurt—even the world’s biggest cities and nicest beaches rely on marketing from time to time. Development Counsellors International (DCI) is an agency that almost exclusively markets *jazz hands* destinations, working with destination marketing organizations (DMOs) to get people to visit for recreation, relocation, or business.

Its past clients include tourism orgs representing places ranging from Arizona and Abu Dhabi, to Baton Rouge and Berlin, to Seattle and Scotland. You get the idea.

The type of work it does varies. Last year, it worked with Belize’s tourism board “to position the destination as the best choice for travelers considering Latin America.” A different campaign focused on highlighting Scotland as a place ripe for business meetings and conferences.

Presumably, it’s all a bit different than advertising shampoo, so we chatted with Sumiti Gupta, director of media performance and SEM at DCI, about what goes into tourism marketing.

This interview has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.

Can you explain exactly what a DMO is to me, like I’m nine years old?

Basically, a DMO takes a destination’s marketing efforts into their hands…For Belize, for example, they’re a client. People who are in Canada, we let them know that there is this destination that has private beaches, is a World Heritage Site, has outdoor adventures. We tell them that this destination exists.

If the entire goal is to get Canadians to Belize, how do you measure something like that?

It’s more of a holistic approach. We have digital marketing; we also have PR and trade. We measure when people are engaging with ads on social media or on Google and visit the website. Our main goal as a place marketer, from a digital perspective, is to get people to the website and book their trips.

There are different CTAs where they can click on the website and book a flight, they can click on a hotel and see what hotels are there—private resorts, beachfront resorts, boutique hotels. There are different itineraries. So we measure every action that a person takes after they visit the ad on the website, and we track the journey from the first time they saw the ad, what they did on the website, what they did after 30 days. We then collaborate with the destination and seek data from them, because they can track when someone is entering their airport for a travel purpose. We get that report, and that’s how we basically measure the impact of our advertising and other efforts that we do as DCI, and how overnight visits are increasing quarterly or year by year.

Can you give me an example of a campaign that had a very specific audience in mind?

Buena Park; it’s near Disneyland. They wanted to give everyone who was visiting Disneyland a cheap option to stay nearby, which is like a 20-minute drive from Disneyland.

Our target audience was anyone who is showing interest in visiting Disneyland or has made bookings to visit Disneyland, to give them hotel options in Buena Park…Once they’d [made] their booking, we also wanted to, at the same time, make them aware about things they could do in Buena Park as well.

Obviously the travel industry was greatly impacted by the pandemic. In terms of DMO budgets today, are clients spending like they were pre-pandemic? Informally, what is the vibe?

It depends from destination to destination. For Belize, their budget has been progressively increasing. It hasn’t reached pre-pandemic levels because they’re still building and recovering their economy, but it has been progressive after the pandemic. In 2021, the budget was very low, but in 2022, it increased and almost doubled, and now it’s increasing more every year as they are seeing the results of our marketing efforts.

What about the travel category as a whole, or other clients?

If they do not have budgets for tourism, because the competition is so high, and there are lots of options, how destinations are approaching it is to attract talent to boost the economy. Ultimately, a destination is attracting tourists to boost the economy and create jobs. Earlier, destinations only used to focus on tourism attractions, but now they’re tapping into this opportunity: people who are looking to relocate. Now, they’re dividing their budgets into different areas.