Five Market Truths from the Destinations International Annual Conference 2026
Every year, the Destinations International Annual Convention pulls the destination marketing industry into one room, CVBs and DMOs of every size, the platforms they run on, and the agencies and partners orbiting around them. This year in Portland, we spent three days doing more listening than talking. Across dozens of conversations with destination marketers, one thing became clear: the industry isn’t debating whether to modernize anymore. It’s figuring out how.
Here are the five market truths we walked away with, the patterns that showed up again and again, no matter the size of the destination or the maturity of its technology practices.
1. The Modernization Gap Is About Leverage, Not Interest
There’s a familiar story about destination marketing organizations being slow to change. What we heard on the floor tells a different one. Nearly every team we spoke with is behind on digital, manual bid books, workflows that haven’t meaningfully changed since before the pandemic, and lean staffs stretched across more work than they can reasonably carry. But they aren’t skeptics. They know where the industry is going. What they lack is a clear path to do more with what they already have.
That distinction matters. The barrier isn’t buy-in; it’s bandwidth. The teams that pull ahead over the next few years won’t be the ones that adopt the most tools, they’ll be the ones that get time back and turn it into better work. Modernization, in other words, is a leverage problem, not an interest problem.
2. The Static PDF Is Quietly Costing Revenue Teams
If there was a single most-repeated frustration at the convention, it was this one. The bid book, the core artifact of the convention sales process, is still, for most teams, a flat PDF. And that format is quietly working against them.
The complaint we heard independently, from multiple destinations, was almost identical: a bid book runs fifteen slides when a buyer only needs three specific ones in hand. Interactive elements and maps don’t survive the export. The document that’s supposed to make it easy to say yes instead asks the buyer to do the sorting.
The bid book isn’t going away, and neither is the PDF, leaders and boardroom buyers still circulate and discuss a static copy, and that copy often drives the decision. But the expectation is shifting toward presentations and bids that are interactive, trackable, on-brand, and flexible enough to give each buyer exactly the slides that matter to them. The bid book is evolving from a document you send into an “always-on” experience you deliver.
3. AI Is On Everyone's Radar; Almost No One Is Using it Well
AI was everywhere at the convention, in the session programming, in the keynotes, and in nearly every hallway conversation. Curiosity is universal. Practical, day-to-day usage is rare.
A handful of teams are experimenting, and a few leaders are leaning in hard. But the gap between “we’re interested in AI” and “here’s how AI saves our team hours every week” is wide, and most destinations are standing on the near side of it.
The AI use cases that landed weren’t the abstract ones. They were concrete and unglamorous: using AI to highlight and describe event spaces, and to kill the redundant, rinse-and-repeat work that eats a lean team’s week.
4. The Buyer Experience Wins The Bid
Here’s a truth that’s easy to underrate: in a competitive bid, the destination that’s easiest to say yes to often wins, not necessarily the one with the objectively best product. The experience of evaluating a destination is part of the product.
Marketing leaders feel this acutely, which is why brand governance kept coming up as a standout concern. When bids go out into the world (built by different people, for different buyers, across different departments) leaders worry about them drifting off-brand.
DMOs winning right now: they’re treating buyer experience as a competitive edge, because it is one.
5. Integration Is The Price Of Admission
For all the talk about features, the thing that most often decides whether a destination will even consider a new tool was a quieter question: does it work with what we already run on?
Destination teams live inside their CRM (oftentimes Simpleview or IDSS), their CMS, and their data and booking platforms. A tool that asks them to abandon that system of record isn’t a productivity gain; it’s a second job.
Interoperability isn’t a technical checkbox buried in a procurement doc. For lean teams, it’s the difference between a tool that gets adopted and one that quietly dies on the vine.
The lesson for anyone building for this market is clear: meet destinations where their data already lives. The platforms that integrate cleanly, pulling in what a team already maintains, removing the double-entry, and fitting into the workflow instead of replacing it, are the ones that clear the only bar that actually matters before a buyer will give the rest of the pitch a fair hearing.
See how DIGIDECK can integrate with Simpleview and IDSS here!
Sample IDSS + DIGIDECK Integration Workflow
In Closing
Put these five truths together and a clear picture emerges. The destination industry isn’t resistant to modernizing, it’s under-resourced to. The appetite for interactive, story-driven, on-brand buyer experiences is real and growing. AI is a lane no one has fully claimed yet. And the biggest opportunity for most destinations isn’t buying something new; it’s getting full value from what they already have.
Nobody in that room needed convincing that digital is the future. They know. The teams that figure out how to do more with the tools and people they already have (and make the buyer experience the thing that wins the bid) are the ones that will pull away from the pack.
We left Portland more convinced than ever that DMOs are ready for what’s next. See you next year!