What IMEX America 2026 Revealed About How Destinations Build Proposals
Attendees at IMEX America kept calling it the Super Bowl of the meetings industry, and three days in Las Vegas this October made the case. More than 20 destinations that already present with DIGIDECK had booths on the floor, from Meet Boston and Visit Seattle to Discover Los Angeles and Visit Fort Worth. Dozens more were pouring coffee, handing out hats and pitching meeting planners from morning to close.
Underneath the activations, though, a quieter story was playing out at almost every booth. Ask a destination sales team how they build a bid for a citywide convention, a sports championship or a corporate incentive program, and the answer is still a mix of PowerPoint, static PDFs, Canva and whatever e-proposal module came with the CRM. The information gets rebuilt, duplicated and hand-keyed for every opportunity. Nobody loves it. Most teams have simply stopped noticing it.
That gap between how polished the industry looks on the show floor and how manual it still is behind the scenes was the real takeaway from IMEX 2026. This post covers what the DIGIDECK team heard in more than two dozen conversations with destination marketing organizations, convention centers, hotel brands and meetings companies, why the proposal workflow is overdue for a rethink, and what buyers actually said they want.
The problem is bigger than better-looking presentations
It is tempting to frame the destination proposal problem as a design problem. The decks could be prettier, the PDFs could be lighter, the brand could be more consistent. All true, and all beside the point.
The conversations at IMEX pointed somewhere else. One special events team described a roughly 93-slide master deck in Canva that gets re-customized for every sports and collegiate bid. Another destination runs a Canva library alongside Simpleview e-proposals and manually reconciles the two. Several teams described the same loop: pull dates and rates out of the CRM, paste them into a template, swap the hero images, export, discover a change, and start again. The output looks fine. The process behind it eats hours that lean sales teams do not have.
What makes this hard to fix is that the pain is rarely articulated. Teams have worked this way for so long that the rebuild feels like the job rather than a flaw in the tooling. In many conversations the frustration only surfaced once someone saw a proposal assembled from a questionnaire in a few minutes, with approved content pulled from a central library and the final version ready to send or print. The reaction was less “that looks nice” and more “wait, it already knows our room block?”
That is the shift worth paying attention to. The destination industry is not shopping for a nicer template. It is slowly realizing that the proposal is a workflow, and that the workflow is where the waste lives.
The CRM is the system of record. The proposal is the presentation layer.
If there was one sentence that came up in some form at nearly every DMO booth, it was this: nobody wants to replace their CRM. Simpleview is still the default across much of the industry. A noticeable number of destinations are evaluating or actively moving to iDSS Tempest. Momentus came up repeatedly on the convention center side, Cvent on the hotel side, HubSpot among the newer entrants, and a few organizations run proprietary systems that predate all of them.
That is exactly as it should be. The CRM holds the leads, the room blocks, the space holds, the rates and the history. It is the infrastructure. The mistake many teams make is assuming the e-proposal module bolted onto that CRM is the whole answer. Teams often work through a new CRM rollout, get the e-proposal tool live, and only then notice how much manual assembly still remains between “the data is in the system” and “the buyer has a bid they want to open.”
What buyers asked for at IMEX was not another system. It was a presentation layer that sits on top of the CRM and pulls from it: dates, rates, available space and approved content flowing into a proposal automatically, so the sales team edits a few details rather than rebuilding the document. The deeper that connection runs, the stronger the time-saving story gets. A few forward-thinking teams went further and asked whether approved imagery and video could flow from their content repositories the same way structured fields do. That is the right question, and it signals where the category is heading.
For destinations in the middle of a CRM migration, this framing matters. A move to Tempest or Momentus is an infrastructure decision. How the sales team presents what lives in that infrastructure is a separate one, and it does not have to wait.
The print button is not going away
Here is the finding that will surprise anyone who has spent the last five years declaring the PDF dead: the single strongest product reaction on the IMEX floor was to PDF export.
Not because destinations want to go back to static documents. They want the opposite. But the reality of selling into meetings and events is that the interactive proposal is only one stop in the buyer’s journey. A planner opens it, shares it with a committee, attaches it to an internal approval process, and hands a copy to a board or an executive who still wants something they can flip through on a plane. Convention center teams need bid materials they can print. Sports commissions need a version that fits a rights holder’s submission portal. Leadership wants a clean file for the file.
The teams that lit up, Visit Salt Lake and Visit Austin among them, were reacting to the idea that they no longer have to choose. The dynamic version and the polished PDF come from the same source, so the printable copy is never a stale fork of the real proposal. One attendee pushed further and asked whether a downloaded PDF could carry tracking so the sender knows when it is opened. That is a fair ask, and it shows how far expectations have moved: the destination industry now wants visibility into the static document, not just the interactive one.
The lesson for any team evaluating proposal tools is simple. “Interactive” and “printable” are not competing strategies. The buyer decides which one they need in the moment, and the seller’s job is to make both versions accurate, on-brand and current without doing the work twice.
AI landed when it lived inside the workflow
Every vendor at IMEX had AI on the booth graphics. Very few destination teams had a formal AI program behind theirs, and leading with “AI” as a concept produced polite nods. What held attention was AI doing a specific, recognizable job inside the proposal: rewriting a cover letter for a new planner in seconds, in the destination’s voice, or uploading the RFP itself and checking the response against every requirement before it goes out. Those two use cases map to real moments in a seller’s week, the part everyone rewrites by hand and the part everyone worries about the night before a deadline. AI in destination sales will not arrive as a platform decision. It will arrive as features that remove specific chores, embedded in tools teams already use and governed by the same brand and content rules as everything else.
Return on relationship: when customers do the talking
“Return on Relationship” was the phrase of the week at IMEX, and it was more than a hashtag. The destination-booth format is built for walking up, asking for the right person and having a real conversation. No appointment required, no theater. For a company selling to this industry, the most valuable thing that happened on the floor was not a demo. It was customers telling other destinations how they work.
Visit Atlantic City’s team has reached the point where the organization’s president presents the platform in the governor’s office and refers to any presentation as “my DIGIDECK.” When the product name becomes the category name inside a customer’s building, that is adoption. Discover Atlanta had a team member four months into the role who built a dedicated deck specifically for IMEX and spoke about it unprompted. Visit San José’s sales team volunteered to be a referral source. Visit Milwaukee’s Chief Sales Officer offered direct introductions and suggested a hosted evening for partners and prospects at next year’s show. Visit Fort Worth, a relationship that began over a single coffee at Destinations International in July, showed up as a four-person group that now includes the sports commission.
The pattern is obvious once you see it. The destinations furthest along in modernizing their proposals are the ones most eager to talk about it, because the before and after is so stark. In an industry where peer recommendation carries more weight than any vendor pitch, that advocacy is the real signal that the category is moving.
Lean teams need a fast path to live
The most honest objection heard at IMEX had nothing to do with features. It was fatigue. Destination sales teams are small, constantly traveling and perpetually responding to bids. Many have just lived through, or are about to live through, a CRM migration. The question behind every evaluation is the same: will this become another internal project?
The other thing IMEX made plain is that this problem is not confined to destinations. Hotel sales teams pitching groups, meetings and weddings described the same static-proposal loop, and resort partners like Hotel del Coronado, Grand Wailea and Sunseeker have already moved past it. Corporate travel management companies presenting to enterprise clients, venues presenting options to planners, and meetings and events agencies pitching their own services all described a version of the same thing: a polished document, rebuilt by hand, sent into the void with no idea whether anyone opened it.
The meetings industry gathers at IMEX precisely because every part of it sells to the same planners. It turns out every part of it also builds proposals the same tired way.
Where this goes next
IMEX 2026 confirmed something that has been building for a couple of years. The destination and hospitality industry is modernizing its proposal workflow, but unevenly. A growing group of destinations now builds bids from a central, governed content library, pulls live data from the CRM, delivers an interactive experience to the planner, tracks what gets opened and still produces a clean PDF when someone asks for one. A much larger group knows that is possible and has not gotten there yet. The gap between the two is no longer about budget or technology. It is about recognizing that the rebuild was never the job.
For teams heading into 2027 planning season, a few things are worth carrying forward from the show floor. Audit how many times the same information gets re-entered between the CRM and the finished proposal. Ask whether the printable version and the interactive version come from one source or two. Look at whether anyone on the team can see what happens after a bid is sent. And when evaluating a change, weigh the implementation path as heavily as the feature list, because a lean team’s time is the scarcest resource in the building.
DIGIDECK was built for exactly this workflow, which is why so many of the destinations on the IMEX floor already use it to build, send and track their bids. The team will be back in Las Vegas in 2027, with more people on the floor and, if Visit Milwaukee gets its way, an evening where partners and prospects can compare notes directly. Until then, the conversations from this year are a good reminder that the best argument for a modern proposal is a destination that already has one.
Frequently Asked Questions
IMEX America is the largest trade show in the United States for the meetings, incentives, conferences and events industry. Held each fall in Las Vegas, it brings together destination marketing organizations, convention and visitors bureaus, hotels, venues and travel suppliers with the meeting planners who buy from them. IMEX America 2026 ran October 13 to 15.
Most DMOs still assemble bids and proposals using a combination of PowerPoint, static PDFs, design tools like Canva or Visme, and the e-proposal module included with their CRM. Content is typically copied and re-entered by hand for each opportunity, which creates duplicated effort and version control issues across sales teams.
Simpleview remains the most common CRM among destination marketing organizations, with a growing number migrating to iDSS Tempest. Convention centers frequently use Momentus, hotels often rely on Cvent, and some organizations run proprietary systems. Modern proposal platforms connect to these systems so dates, rates, space availability and approved content flow into the proposal automatically.
No. Buyers in the meetings industry still need printable and internally shareable versions of a bid for committees, leadership and formal submission processes. The best approach generates both the interactive proposal and a polished PDF from the same source, so the printed copy is always current and on-brand.
The most useful applications are embedded inside the proposal workflow rather than offered as standalone tools: rewriting cover letters for a specific planner, checking a response against the original RFP requirements, and tailoring messaging to what the buyer said they care about. Few destinations have formal enterprise AI programs, so practical, governed features inside existing tools are gaining traction first.
A clear implementation path, including how the existing master deck gets converted and how quickly the team can send real proposals. Integration with the CRM already in place. A single source for both interactive and PDF output. Brand governance so multiple markets or departments stay consistent. Engagement tracking so the team knows what happens after a bid is sent.