It’s fairly straightforward to track a Destination Marketing Organization’s impact on its region’s meetings, events and tournament sales. A DMO identifies and qualifies a lead, works the contact (understanding the size and duration of the group) and wins the business. It can then report that, through its efforts, the destination will welcome X number of room nights and a corresponding economic impact.



Except, what happens when the economy is running hot and our hotel community declines to offer up room blocks for the DMO’s bid, preferring to reap the higher priced low-hanging fruit of transient business travel? What happens in an economy that looks more like today’s when meeting planners are canceling meetings right and left?

In both cases, the destination fails to land the event. In neither case is it the DMO’s fault. So...how does one track that?



I was talking to my friend Dana Markel (CEO of the Omaha CVB) about the thorny issue of accountability the other day when another tough concept emerged...conversion. Some communities have a level of expectation that its DMO will convert a fixed percentage of its leads to bookings. Over time, DMO CEOs have developed similar expectations of their sales staffs.

But, what happens when meeting planners, thanks to new technologies, are able to shoot RFPs to three times as many DMOs as they did last year? In their critical need to cut costs and shift events to second and third tier cities to avoid public and political criticism, planners are increasingly considering more destinations than ever before, looking for destinations that are as hungry for business as they are for a deal.



And, as these planners may well be unaware of the new destinations they must now consider, some are flooding the destination market with RFPs. Where a destination might have previously been in consideration with two or three other destinations...they could now be up again ten. And, if so, the law of averages holds that conversions will drop.

Again, through no fault of the DMO. Just the vagaries of the marketplace.

Some will call me a DMO apologist...and nothing can be further from the truth. DMOs with whom we have worked that have not previously maintained performance goals know that I’ve been pretty strident that they implement them...and pronto. DMAI’s Performance Measures are a great start for those that haven’t yet gotten the memo.



But, it’s time to add different success measures to the mix. Because being held accountable for something that can’t reasonably be controlled just ain’t right.

Measures like that don’t make us better at what we do. And that should be the true role of any set of performance measure we employ.