There's no way around it: your destination needs a visitor engagement strategy. So, where do you start? And how does visitor engagement tie into your marketing efforts? From the basics of destination marketing to finding the right destination marketing software, this guide has you covered.  

Tourism marketing has entered a new era. For years, the goal was simple: drive awareness, fill hotel rooms, and measure success through sheer visitor numbers. And while those goals haven’t necessarily changed, they’re no longer the primary focus of forward-looking destinations. 

Why? For one, visitor expectations have changed. Simply creating a proverbial giant “Go Here!” sign towards your destination isn’t enough. Technologically “plugged in” and discerning visitors expect personalized guidance and meaningful connections with a destination before they even arrive. The most forward-thinking DMOs now define success not by impressions or likes, but by engagement: how deeply a visitor interacts with the stories, content, and experiences a destination shares (and, by extension, how extensive visitors engage and explore any given destination). 

So, what does that all of this mean for your destination marketing organization? From strategies to recommendations for destination marketing software and platforms that can take your destination to the next level, here’s everything you need to know. 

Destination marketing is the practice of promoting a place — a city, region, or country — to attract visitors. The goal isn’t just to increase arrivals; it’s to shape how a destination is perceived, guide the visitor journey, and deliver experiences that drive loyalty and repeat visits.

Traditionally, destination marketing focused on three phases:

 — putting the destination on the traveler’s radar.

 — providing resources and inspiration to help visitors plan.

 — encouraging trip bookings and in-market spending.


That’s the classic trifecta of destination marketing (and marketing more generally). 

But now there’s a fourth critical (and too often overlooked) phase specific to destination marketing: 

In destination marketing, visitor engagement is the process of connecting with travelers during their trip and after their return. It’s about meeting travellers where they’re at, and creating a relationship before, during, and after their experience with your destination. 

The Key Elements of Destination Marketing

Effective destination marketing touches nearly every aspect of a traveler’s decision-making process. Destination marketers often describe the building blocks as the 

 — Hotels, rentals, or lodging options where visitors stay.

 — Cultural sites, outdoor experiences, events, or landmarks that define the destination.

 — Dining, shopping, and local services that enhance the visitor experience.

 — Transportation infrastructure, way-finding, and digital accessibility.

These elements are well-known in the tourism industry for extremely good reason — they remain important and critical for 

 Visitors expect more than a list of hotels or landmarks. Instead, they want to see how these elements fit into a coherent, authentic story about the destination.

Telling Your Destination’s Story with Visitor Engagement

DMOs have long measured success in impressions, clicks, or visitor counts. But those numbers only capture part of the picture. 

Consider this example. A visitor might see your ad and even arrive at your destination. On one hand, there are two success metrics to track there: impressions, clicks, and a conversion. 

But if what we’re tracking about that visitor ends there, we’re missing a huge part of their experience (and potential impact on your destination).  If you aren’t actively 

 with visitors once they arrive (let alone before or after), your visitors are less likely to explore your region, generate revenue, or recommend and return to your destination after visit’s end. 

Visitor engagement goes beyond promotion to answer questions like:

How do we help visitors personalize their trip?

How do we provide real-time updates or recommendations?

How do we capture insights about what visitors value most?

. It transforms a DMO from a promoter of experiences into a 

Go-To Visitor Engagement Strategies and Tactics for DMOs

Visitor engagement might sound like a pipedream for any DMO — but what does visitor engagement 

 look like? The reality is that there are hundreds of potential engagement strategies out there. But based on our own expertise and feedback from real destination marketing organizations, these are proven strategies that work. 

Themed trails are one of the most effective ways to blend storytelling with place. They connect visitors to local businesses, attractions, and cultural assets through curated journeys that highlight a destination’s unique character.

These trails can be built around food and drink, history, outdoor adventure, family activities, or seasonal experiences. By guiding travelers from stop to stop, DMOs can increase visitor dispersion, spread economic impact, and bring community stories to life. 

 are also an excellent way to attract niche travelers (more on that later). Let’s look at an example. 

The BC Ale Trail is a celebrated example of this strategy in action. The program combines digital itineraries, gamified passports, and storytelling content to guide visitors through British Columbia’s breweries, pubs, and surrounding communities. Each trail features not only beer but also local dining, attractions, and outdoor activities — making the experience richer than a simple directory. 

The result has been a measurable boost in brewery visits, stronger community pride, and increased collaboration between businesses across the province.

The more you know about your happiest and most excited travellers, the more you can narrow your focus to speak directly to that audiences. That’s where survey contests can play a huge role. 

 can invite visitors to share their perspectives while giving the DMO valuable data on traveler interests

For example, a DMO might run a seasonal survey asking visitors about their favorite activities, dining spots, or hidden gems in the community. Participants are entered into a prize draw — often for local experiences like a weekend getaway, event tickets, or gift cards.

The beauty of a survey contact is that it nails two goals at once:

: The survey provides actionable data for marketing strategy.

: The prize element drives participation and builds excitement.

Fast to implement with a tapestry of benefits, survey contests are an excellent “first step” towards visitor engagement that any destination can ideate and launch surprisingly quickly to great effect. 


Travel “passports” have become a powerful way to encourage exploration. Visitors collect digital (or physical) stamps as they visit partner locations, unlocking rewards when they complete a trail or reach a milestone.

, a DMO launches a passport around a theme — breweries, historic sites, outdoor adventures, or holiday markets. As visitors check in at participating locations, they collect stamps toward a prize.

This makes passport campaigns an effective strategy to: 

Disperse visitors across multiple neighborhoods or towns.

Drive measurable foot traffic to local businesses.

Create a playful sense of achievement and discovery.

Designed to encourage visitors to explore shops, restaurants, and cultural venues, passport campaigns are an excellent strategy for increasing visitor exploration while tracking engagement for any DMO.  


Contests remain a tried-and-true tactic for building excitement and expanding reach. Unlike surveys or passports, travel contests often emphasize shareability and amplifying your destination through social sharing or user generated content (UGC).

For example, DMOs can invite visitors (or potential visitors) to enter by sharing photos, submitting stories, or engaging on social media. The prize is usually an immersive travel package — such as a “weekend getaway” that bundles local lodging, dining, and experiences (but, really, that part is up to you!). 

This not only engages participants but also introduces them to partners and offerings they might not otherwise discover — all while ensuring your destination “shows up” on social in a big way via your visits (and not expensive paid campaigns). 

Quizzes are a simple but powerful way to drive engagement — especially when combined with events and key collaborators (IE: businesses) across your destination. Social, interactive, and appealing to visitors and locals alike, quizzes can make a big impact on constituents across your destination consistently and quickly. 
For example, The BC Ale Trail engaged audiences with weekly quiz nights held at breweries across the trail. By offering incentive and a “locals friendly” appeal, weekly quiz nights helped visitors discover breweries while positioning the trail as approachable and fun. These quizzes doubled as itinerary builders, pointing travelers to trails they might not have considered. Read more 

Interactive events work in a similar way, blending education with participation. For example, a DMO hosting a food festival might run a trivia contest where attendees unlock prizes by answering questions tied to local history or cuisine.

Sometimes the most engaging experiences are the ones visitors 

 Hidden content campaigns add an element of discovery to digital marketing by rewarding those who dig deeper. 

By nudging visitors to explore your destination in pursuit of “hidden content,” you can encourage visitors to engage with your destination in a way that’s rewarding for travelers and business owners alike. 
Take for example the Dino Trail in Drumheller, Alberta. Travel Drumheller leveraged an existing series of concrete dinosaur statues to create a dinosaur-themed trail that incorporated “hidden content” into its digital platform. By offering physical rewards for travellers who “unlocked” every bit of hidden content, Travel Drumheller transformed the trail from a static itinerary into an 

As you can imagine, the possibilities for “hidden content” campaigns are endless: heritage trails, cultural tours, or even seasonal experiences are all excellent candidates for this engagement approach. 

Why These Visitor Engagement Strategies Work

All of these tactics share three key qualities:

 — Visitors don’t just consume marketing; they participate.

 — Local businesses and residents become part of the storytelling.

 — Whether through passport scans, survey responses, or quiz completions, engagement can be tracked and analyzed.

For DMOs, these strategies represent a way to do more than promote — they provide a structure to 

facilitate exploration, create memories, and capture data

Choosing the Right Visitor Engagement Platform

There are multiple destination marketing software platforms designed to help DMOs manage engagement, from asset management systems to itinerary planning tools. 

Most platforms (like Crowdriff or Bandwango) focus on a specific element of destination marketing (in the case of Crowdriff, managing UGC; in the case of Bandwango, building passport campaigns). 

— Does building visitor engagement campaigns require developer support and excessive coding? 

— Does the platform offer direct support when building visitor engagement campaigns? 

 — Can your team quickly build, find, repurpose, and share assets (articles, photos, etc) when building and promoting visitor engagement campaigns? 

 — Does it allow for dynamic itineraries and targeted recommendations?

 — Can it connect with visitors in real time during their trip?

 — Does it provide actionable insights on engagement, not just impressions?

 — Can local businesses and stakeholders easily contribute content?

Obviously we’re a bit biased, but for the best “all-in-one” visitor engagement platform that tackles all of the above, we recommend Tourismo. 

Tourismo is an all-in-one visitor engagement platform built specifically for DMOs of any size, combining the above capabilities into a single system. 

While other platforms may specialize in content storage or itinerary planning, Tourismo connects the dots across the entire visitor lifecycle — from pre-trip discovery to post-trip re-engagement.

The Takeaway? Visitor Engagement is No Longer a "Nice to Have" for Growing DMOs

 Travellers don’t just want to be told where to go; they want to interact with destinations, personalize their journeys, and stay connected long after their visit.

For DMOs, the shift toward engagement-first strategies is both a challenge and an opportunity. By focusing on smarter content management, personalized journeys, real-time visitor engagement, and data-driven insights, destinations can create marketing strategies that resonate far beyond the first impression.

The right visitor engagement platform will make this possible — and ensure your destination isn’t just visited, but truly experienced.

Destination Marketing 101: A Practical Guide to Visitor Engagement

Drive traffic and revenue for your destination marketing organization smart travel marketing strategies. The best part? They're all faster and easier to implement than you'd expect. 

Marketing for travel and tourism is a fickle beast. Sure, there are principles from other industries that can work, but impactful travel marketing in 2025 requires a tricky balance of digital engagement, interactivity, and “real life” experiences to keep travellers hooked (or, to quote our founder, “to put heads in beds and butts in seats”).

It’s one thing to get visitors “in the door,” but keeping them engaged before, during, and after their trip is where the magic and the long-term ROI happens.

The good news? Building the right mix of tactics is far easier than it was five or ten years ago. The even better news? With summer still in full swing in North America, there’s plenty of time to brainstorm and launch tourism marketing strategies that can drive traffic and revenue before (and during) shoulder season. 

Here are four travel marketing strategies you can steal for 2025, complete with real-world inspiration to show exactly how they work.

Attract Niche Audiences with Themed Trails and Experiences

Themed trails turn a scattered set of attractions into a cohesive, story-driven journey. By linking unique businesses, landscapes, and cultural highlights under a unifying theme, you can:

Build an currated and connected experience for any interest, taste, or experience

 has mastered this approach with its “Unearthed” trail. Rather than just mapping out where to eat, sleep, and explore, it curates a journey that stitches together culture, cuisine, and jaw-dropping landscapes.

Day one might see travellers sipping lattes in tiny prairie cafés before stepping into a UNESCO World Heritage Site where dinosaur fossils whisper stories from 75 million years ago. Day two blends high art with small-town charm: theatre performances in Rosebud, vintage treasure hunts, and live music under the Badlands sky.

For destination marketing organizations, this approach does more than create buzz and drive foot traffic. It connects otherwise isolated attractions into a cohesive, marketable experience and transforms a collection of businesses and points of interest into something far more valuable than the sum of its parts.

The takeaway: A well-crafted trail is more than a guide or other one-dimensional travel marketing initiative. It’s a conversion tool that turns casual interest into booked itineraries, and booked itineraries into lifelong advocates. 

 want to connect across your destination, and build and launch your first trail in less time than you think thanks to a handful of 

Drive Engagement with Challenges and Survey Contests 

Survey contests and challenges transform simple promotions into interactive experiences that visitors will actually want to engage with. As a bonus, they capture actionable data your organization can use. 

By blending exploration with incentives, you can:

is a prime example of a survey contest done right. It guides participants through Surrey’s top birding spots with playful challenges like bingo and trivia, all tied to a prize package. As travellers explore together and the UGC content and social shares roll in, important detailed insights emerge about your most engaged visitors and which strategies resonate the most. 

 survey contests keep visitors exploring, spending, and telling you exactly what will bring them back.

Build Post-Trip Loyalty with a Reward Program

Rewards programs turn one-time visits into ongoing relationships. By offering perks tied to exploration, reward programs promote engagement mid and post-trip by offering digital or physical rewards (think t-shirts, digital badges, stickers, etc).

Especially when integrated with an app or mobile experience, reward programs can: 

Drive traffic to owned channels and stores

Improve advocacy and emotional connections post-trip

. Through its app, travellers earn points for checking in at breweries, completing challenges, and conquering curated itineraries. Those points can be redeemed online for 

, turning every pint into a step toward their next favourite hoodie or cap.

Importantly, reward programs can also extend the visitor experience well beyond the trip itself. It strengthens brand connection, builds loyalty, and keeps your destination in the conversation long after the last check-in.

Building a rewards program with online redemption

 doesn’t just hand out swag. It transforms visitors into advocates who keep coming back. 

Culinary trails transform a region’s food culture into a ready-made itinerary that’s as marketable as it is mouthwatering. A specific kind of themed trail, culinary trails weave together a selection of standout eateries under a focused theme. 

Endlessly flexible, with a culinary trail you can: 

Showcase local flavors and cultural heritage

Encourage exploration across multiple neighborhoods

Extend visitor stays with multi-day tasting opportunities

Attract niche culinary interests by highlighting specific cuisines and hidden gems 

 is likely the prime example of this. Home to one of the highest concentrations of Asian restaurants in North America, Richmond has distilled its culinary diversity into a curated list of 17 eateries serving everything from delicate har gow to Afghan mantu. Visitors can follow themed itineraries, like “Hidden Gems” or “Best Dim Sum”, or create their own route with an interactive map.

The experience is more than just a meal. It’s a deep dive into Richmond’s cultural history, shaped by generations of immigrants who brought their culinary traditions with them. Along the way, travellers discover bustling dim sum halls, hidden gems, and overlooked food courts that locals swear by. Featured on CNN Travel’s “12 of the world’s most enticing food and drink trails,” the Dumpling Trail turns an everyday craving into a destination-worthy adventure.

can do more than feed visitors — it can define your destination, encourage repeat visits, and create a foodie reputation that travels faster than any ad campaign.

If there’s a thread here, it’s this: the best tourism and travel marketing in 2025 doesn’t feel like marketing. It feels like discovery, like an invitation to take part in something that matters to the place you’re in.

Whether that’s chasing dumplings, earning a pint-fueled hoodie, hunting for birds, or tracing the bones of prehistoric giants, the goal isn’t just to get visitors in the door. It’s to give them a reason to linger, explore, and carry your story home with them.

Smart Travel Marketing Strategies for 2025 (with Examples)

This summer, we’ve rolled out some of the most powerful tools yet to help you manage destination campaigns, curate immersive regional content, and supercharge visitor engagement through the app and admin. Here’s your full rundown of what’s new—and what it unlocks for your team.

🚀 Tourismo Feature Release: June & July 2025

This summer, we’ve rolled out some of the most powerful tools yet to help you 

 through the app and admin. Here’s your full rundown of what’s new—and what it unlocks for your team.

🎯 Campaigns Is Now Live — Manage Everything in One Place

We’re thrilled to announce the full release of 

—your new command center for destination marketing campaigns.

Now live in production, Campaigns bring project management directly into the Tourismo platform with:

Whether you're launching a walking tour series, an arts campaign, or a regional push, 

 streamlines planning, coordination, and performance tracking—without needing third-party tools.

🧠 Magic Regions: Bulk-Add Listings to Curated Areas

 using smart tag and keyword search from within the Region editor. Select a region, search listings, and instantly add all relevant businesses or events. Magic Regions make it easy to build compelling, content-rich areas with just a few clicks.

📝 Interactive Content Pickers for Newsletters, Blogs & Pushes

 in your newsletters, blog posts, and platform pushes is easier—and way more powerful.

: Add Listings, Itineraries, Events, or Challenges directly into your content

: Use tag, featured status, or custom filters to curate exactly what shows up

: Spotlight a specific event, itinerary, or listing with one click

: Control layout and styling to match your tone and goals

 in the block editor. 🙌
No more redoing blocks or losing your layout—just seamless editing and faster workflows.

These tools give you a flexible storytelling engine, perfect for seasonal campaigns, onboarding emails, and community engagement updates.

🧭 Themed & Filtered Regions: Tell Local Stories with Tags

 using tag-based filters. Organize listings and events into curated collections—like “Vintage Stores”, “Indigenous Artists”, or “Local Makers”—within geographic boundaries.

Create virtual regions based on a theme, and filter what shows by tags AND boundaries

Turn filtering on/off per region in your app or WordPress integration

Perfect for destinations looking to tell deeper, more personal stories of place.

 to help drive real-time discovery, boost engagement, and simplify configuration:

 display time-based promotions on listing cards

 gives visitors context for what's nearby

 directly in the Admin panel—without needing to resubmit to app stores. Update layouts, toggles, and style options on the fly.

🏷 Tag Grouping & Collapsing Accordions

Long lists of tags? No problem. Tags can now be 

grouped by category and collapsed into intuitive accordions

, adding polish and clarity to your gamified experiences.

📊 Improved Reporting & Behavior Insights

Get smarter with your data. We’ve made several upgrades to reporting and behavioral tracking:

 between homepage summary and report pages

Deep linking from listings to user profiles

 is now included in listing and platform APIs—ensuring accurate hours across regions

Need precise control over DMO reporting zones? You can now define which municipal districts a DMO covers under 

Admin → Organizations → Edit → Areas

. This ensures that listing and event traffic reports accurately reflect real-world partnerships and jurisdictions.

Build segments and cohorts based on real behavior.

Challenge logic now behaves more intuitively:

“Earned Badge” modals give instant visual feedback

These improvements give you cleaner metrics and a more predictable user experience.

🛠 Bulk Edit System: Faster Admin Workflows

 tool for Listings, Challenges, Events, Regions, and more. Instantly:

This new system dramatically improves efficiency and reduces manual work across all your admin tools.

🧭 Custom Website Navigation (Standard Web)

Links to custom content types or filtered collections

Tailored user journeys for your destination

🛑 Cleaner WordPress API: Hidden Tags Now Stay Hidden

If you're using the WordPress API, we've improved how tags are delivered:

Hidden tags (used for internal ops or filtering) are excluded automatically
✅ This keeps your public content clean and free from backend clutter.

Feature Release: June/July 2025

Authentic, well-structured storytelling is now essential for DMOs to ensure their destination content is recognized, trusted, and promoted by AI-powered search tools and travel assistants. We put together a few tips and tricks for optimizing your blog posts for AI

🤖 AIO for DMOs: Why Authentic Storytelling Is the Key to Winning Over the Robots (and Your Visitors)

In the past, your blog posts and destination stories were written for two audiences: real people planning a trip, and search engines indexing your content.

Search results are increasingly powered by artificial intelligence—whether it's Google’s Search Generative Experience (SGE), ChatGPT plugins, Perplexity, Bing’s Copilot, or travel planning bots that summarize the internet in a blink. That means your destination’s story might be interpreted, remixed, and recommended by a robot before a human even sees your blog post.

. It's a growing content strategy that ensures your articles, blog posts, and landing pages are 

understood and surfaced effectively by large language models (LLMs)

Where SEO is about keywords and rankings, AIO is about 

training the AI to know what your destination is known for

, who you are as a community, and what content is credible, trustworthy, and useful enough to include in a travel planning response.

TL;DR: If your content isn’t clear, helpful, and human, the robots might skip it entirely.

📍 Why This Matters for DMOs and Tourism Content Creators

“Where should I go in BC in October?”

“Is there a wine trail near Penticton?”

“Best Indigenous cultural experiences on Vancouver Island?”

These aren’t typed into Google anymore. They’re asked to AI assistants. And the answers they return? They’re based on blogs, websites, and online content 

If your destination doesn’t have fresh, well-structured, human-driven content online, 

you’re invisible in this new digital landscape

Good news: You already have the secret weapon AI is looking for: 

LLMs are trained to surface content that is:

: Not a copy-paste or shallow roundup (good riddance, listicles!) 

Blog

Destination Marketing 101: A Practical Guide to Visitor Engagement

Smart Travel Marketing Strategies for 2025 (with Examples)

Feature Release: June/July 2025

AI Optimization for Destination Marketing Organizations

Introducing Tourismo Campaigns

Collaboration Against the Machine

Tourismo Wins Emerging Startup of the Year

Meet Tourismo: Making Tourism a Force for Good

Blog

.css-nzdyzb{position:static;}.css-nzdyzb::before{content:'';cursor:inherit;display:block;position:absolute;top:0;left:0;z-index:0;width:100%;height:100%;}Destination Marketing 101: A Practical Guide to Visitor Engagement

Smart Travel Marketing Strategies for 2025 (with Examples)

Feature Release: June/July 2025

AI Optimization for Destination Marketing Organizations

Introducing Tourismo Campaigns

Collaboration Against the Machine

Tourismo Wins Emerging Startup of the Year

Meet Tourismo: Making Tourism a Force for Good

Destination Marketing 101: A Practical Guide to Visitor Engagement