ChatGPT Making the Case For/Against DMOs // Brand Revolt Blog

At Brand Revolt, we work with a lot of Destination Marketing Organizations (DMOs) and Convention and Visitor Bureaus (CVBs). There are things I love about tourism marketing, and some things that I personally struggle with, due to the unique position these organizations find themselves in.

One day, a while back, I was considering the utility of the DMO/CVB as concept— considering the strengths and weaknesses of the model in the way it allows such organizations to accomplish the things they set out to do. I was curious what ChatGPT would have to say on the matter.

I asked…

Make the most comprehensive, convincing case that you can AGAINST the concept of Destination Marketing Organizations (DMOs) or CVBsCVB's.

It gave me a list of 7 reasons that these organizations aren’t worthwhile. Destination marketing pros, don’t freak out yet! I invite you to consider these with an open mind (You don’t have to agree). We’ll get to the case FOR your job to remain in existence a little later.

The Case AGAINST The DMO/CVB

Outdated Model in a Disrupted Landscape

DMOs and CVBs were created in an era when centralized marketing bodies were necessary to put destinations “on the map.” But today’s travel planning is no longer top-down — it's decentralized, digital, and peer-driven.

The Power Shift to Consumers: Travelers now rely on platforms like TripAdvisor, Google, YouTube, Instagram, Reddit, and influencer content. These decentralized, user-generated platforms outperform traditional DMO marketing in terms of reach, trust, and conversion.

No Longer the Gatekeepers: In a digital world, the DMO has lost its monopoly on storytelling and access. Communities, creators, and local businesses often do a better job at telling authentic, compelling stories than a government-funded bureaucracy.

Questionable ROI and Accountability

DMOs frequently receive public funding (often from hotel taxes), yet they operate without clear accountability or market-driven performance benchmarks.

Vague Metrics: "Impressions," "reach," or "visitor inquiries" are soft metrics that don't tie directly to economic impact. Unlike private enterprises, DMOs are rarely required to show clear ROI.

Inefficient Spending: Many DMOs spend millions on flashy campaigns, trade shows, and executive salaries — with minimal transparency or provable impact on actual visitor spending.

Lack of Attribution: How do you know someone visited because of the DMO’s efforts, versus organic word-of-mouth, travel influencers, or global platforms like Google Travel?

Favoring Tourism Over Community Well-Being

DMOs often promote growth at any cost, prioritizing tourist dollars over resident quality of life.

Overtourism: By incentivizing more visitation, DMOs contribute to issues like congestion, rising rents, environmental degradation, and cultural commodification.

Unbalanced Narratives: DMO campaigns often gloss over complex issues like housing crises, low-wage tourism jobs, and gentrification — presenting destinations as picture-perfect playgrounds rather than lived-in communities.

Residents as an Afterthought: Locals are rarely consulted on tourism strategy, even though they bear the costs and consequences of DMO-driven growth.

Duplication and Bureaucracy

There are thousands of DMOs and CVBs across the U.S. alone — many doing the same work, for the same audiences, in overlapping ways.

Too Many Cooks: County, city, state, and regional tourism boards often compete or duplicate efforts, leading to inefficiency, brand confusion, and bloated costs.

Bureaucratic Bloat: As publicly funded entities, DMOs often operate more like bureaucracies than nimble marketers. Innovation is slow, and risk-taking is rare.

"Check-the-box" Marketing: With guaranteed funding, there’s little incentive to experiment, adapt quickly, or optimize for performance.

Misaligned Incentives

The stakeholders DMOs aim to please (hotels, event venues, airlines) may not align with the broader needs of the local economy or residents.

Events Over Impact: DMOs are incentivized to chase large conventions or visitor volume, regardless of whether those visitors shop local, support sustainable businesses, or come in the off-season.

Flash Over Fit: Glitzy ad campaigns might look good on paper but don’t necessarily attract the right kind of visitor — someone who respects the destination, contributes to the economy, and connects with the culture.

Vendor-Driven Decisions: Decisions about campaigns are often influenced by agency relationships, politics, and stakeholder appeasement — not audience insight or strategic thinking.

They Disempower Local Businesses

Instead of empowering small businesses to tell their own story and grow their own audience, DMOs act as centralized gatekeepers of promotion.

One Voice, Many Missed Stories: A DMO’s brand campaign can never fully represent the range and richness of a place. They promote what’s safe, sanitized, and lowest-common-denominator.

Invisible Businesses: Many small or offbeat local businesses are left out of DMO promotion unless they pay-to-play or fit within predetermined brand pillars.

Wasted Potential: A more decentralized model — where local creators, entrepreneurs, and cultural voices are equipped to market themselves — would result in more diverse, authentic, and dynamic promotion.

Better Alternatives Exist

The DMO model isn’t just flawed — it's obsolete. Better alternatives are emerging.

Community-Led Tourism Models: These emphasize local ownership, equitable distribution of tourism dollars, and resident input on strategy and storytelling.

Decentralized Content Ecosystems: Rather than centralized messaging, communities can empower micro-influencers, content creators, and passionate locals to tell the story of their place.

Open Data Platforms: Rather than hoarding insights, forward-thinking destinations are making tourism data public, allowing entrepreneurs, event organizers, and community groups to act on it in real time.

ChatGPT then gave me a summary paragraph, consolidating the points it made:

DMOs and CVBs may have once played an important role, but today they represent an outdated, inefficient, and sometimes harmful approach to destination marketing.

They lack accountability, promote overtourism, overlook local voices, duplicate efforts, and fail to keep pace with the realities of modern travel behavior. In their place, more agile, decentralized, and community-first models are emerging — ones that prioritize authenticity over advertising, sustainability over visitor volume, and local empowerment over centralized control.

Rather than investing millions in top-down marketing, it’s time to invest in bottom-up storytelling, resident-led strategy, and smarter tourism systems that truly serve the places we love.

It also asked me if I wanted that made into a “persuasive op-ed or presentation deck.”

So, are you riled up by the misguided audacity? Struck by its cutting accuracy? Not sure yet? 

I was intrigued.

So, I then asked it to switch sides, and make an equally convincing argument FOR the DMO/CVB. I got another list, this time 8 points.

The Case FOR The DMO/CVB

They Are Stewards of Place-Based Economic Development

At their core, DMOs are economic development engines that use tourism as a tool to stimulate local economies, diversify income streams, and support small businesses.

High-Impact Returns: Tourism dollars flow directly to hotels, restaurants, retail shops, cultural attractions, and service providers. In many regions, tourism is one of the only viable forms of economic growth without requiring heavy infrastructure or resource extraction.

Support for Main Street: Local businesses rely on DMOs to bring awareness and foot traffic. For mom-and-pop shops, a visitor is often worth more than a local customer because they spend more, stay longer, and return often.

Tax Revenue Without Taxing Locals: Hotel taxes and visitor spending fund critical public services — from infrastructure to parks — easing the tax burden on residents.

Coordinated Strategy Requires a Central Hub

Tourism isn’t just marketing — it’s logistics, partnerships, data, and brand coherence. DMOs provide centralized coordination that no single business or creator could achieve alone.

Unified Messaging: A strong destination brand builds trust and recognition over time. Without a central voice, a place becomes fragmented, confusing, or invisible in a noisy marketplace.

Cross-Sector Collaboration: DMOs bring together hotels, airlines, attractions, restaurants, municipalities, and nonprofits to align on strategy and create packages, itineraries, and experiences that benefit all.

Managed Crisis Response: During wildfires, pandemics, natural disasters, or PR issues, DMOs provide essential communication infrastructure and rapid-response coordination.

Tourism Promotion is a Public Good

Marketing a destination is not the same as marketing a product. It’s a public service that elevates the entire community.

Rising Tide, Many Boats: No single business can afford a global marketing campaign — but together, through the DMO, the entire region gains exposure and opportunity.

Brand Management as Civic Duty: Without a DMO, tourism narratives can be hijacked by commercial platforms, influencers with no accountability, or incomplete and inaccurate representations.

Destination Stewardship: Modern DMOs are evolving from just “marketing” to “management,” balancing promotion with protection and long-term sustainability.

They Protect the Destination Brand and Visitor Experience

DMOs are brand guardians for destinations — ensuring that how a place is represented is aligned with its values, offerings, and long-term goals.

Cohesive Brand Building: Great places, like great products, need long-term brand investment. DMOs manage the brand positioning, tone, assets, and storytelling that shape public perception.

Visitor Education: They provide the first touchpoint for visitors, setting expectations, encouraging respectful behavior, and distributing traffic to lesser-known areas to avoid overcrowding.

Quality Control: By curating what gets promoted, DMOs help ensure the visitor experience meets a certain standard — vital for repeat visits and reputation.

They Enable Date-Driven Decision Making

One of the most underappreciated functions of DMOs is the collection and analysis of visitor data, used to guide investment, planning, and community development.

Visitor Profiles & Preferences: DMOs gather insights into who is visiting, where they’re coming from, what they value, and how they spend — data that individual businesses could never collect alone.

Forecasting & Planning: This intelligence supports seasonality planning, transportation logistics, infrastructure investment, and even public safety.

Measuring Impact: DMOs help justify tourism budgets and policies with real economic data — a critical tool for mayors, chambers, and community leaders.

They Level the Playing Field for Smaller Destinations

Without a DMO, only major cities or well-funded companies get attention. DMOs help rural, underrepresented, or emerging destinations gain visibility in a highly competitive global tourism landscape.

Marketing Muscle for the Underdog: DMOs give small towns and niche communities access to trade shows, PR networks, international markets, and media exposure they could never achieve independently.

Equity in Promotion: They ensure that diverse, culturally important, or historically overlooked communities are part of the tourism narrative — not just the most “Instagrammable” spots.

Local Story Amplification: While influencers and UGC are valuable, DMOs elevate deeper stories, heritage experiences, and cultural assets that algorithms tend to overlook.

They Foster Pride, Identity, and Cultural Preservation

When done right, DMOs don’t just bring tourists — they foster a sense of place, pride, and purpose among locals.

Celebrating What Makes a Place Unique: DMOs elevate local art, food, history, and natural beauty — helping both visitors and residents rediscover the value of what’s already there.

Cultural Preservation Through Tourism: Visitors interested in heritage tourism help sustain museums, historic sites, festivals, and indigenous communities through ethical visitation and economic support.

Civic Pride and Resident Engagement: Successful DMO campaigns often spark renewed local engagement and pride, contributing to resident satisfaction and community cohesion.

They Manage Growth Responsibly (When Empowered To)

Modern DMOs are not “growth at all costs” machines. The best ones are now focused on destination stewardship, resident-first strategies, and sustainable tourism practices.

Overtourism Mitigation: Many DMOs actively manage tourism dispersion, promote off-season visitation, and use technology to monitor and alleviate overcrowding.

Stakeholder Engagement: Progressive DMOs conduct resident sentiment surveys, host listening sessions, and create tourism master plans that align with community goals.

Sustainable Practices: They champion eco-tourism, green certifications, and visitor education campaigns to promote low-impact travel.

And here was its summary for the pro-DMO/CVB argument:

Destination Marketing Organizations (DMOs) and CVBs are not just marketers — they are place stewards, economic catalysts, and community connectors.

They bring strategic coherence to complex tourism ecosystems, enable equitable access to global markets, and foster long-term growth that can be measured, managed, and shared.

In a fragmented, noisy, and algorithm-dominated travel environment, DMOs play a vital role in defining identity, coordinating strategy, collecting data, and advocating for balance between growth and sustainability.

Rather than replacing them, the path forward is to evolve and empower them — toward more transparency, community engagement, and sustainable tourism management. Because without a DMO, a destination has a brand, — but no one to steer steering it.

Now, some may have stopped there. But we all know that ChatGPT is a glutton for punishment who doesn’t take lunch breaks, so I had to push it further— I asked it to point out the flaws in its own arguments.

Now, consider both of these opposing arguments you have made, imagining the two perspectives debating head to head. Consider the holes/weaknesses in the arguments, the balancing of priorities--- which argument do you consider to be stronger, that wins this debate, and why?

The response: 

This is a great thought experiment—because when you examine both arguments side by side, you realize that the debate isn’t really about whether DMOs should exist, but about what form they should take and who they truly serve.

Let’s weigh the two:

Alright, ChatGPT. Let’s weigh.

Major Weaknesses in the Anti-DMO Argument

It Romanticizes Decentralization

The anti-DMO position champions grassroots storytelling and creator-driven content, but this assumes that organic content is evenly distributed, accurate, and representative.

In practice, user-generated and influencer content often prioritizes popularity over authenticity, reinforces clichés, and ignores important local stories that lack viral appeal.

Lack of Coordination is a Real Risk

Removing DMOs risks a fragmented destination identity, inconsistent visitor experiences, and chaotic messaging.

While decentralization sounds modern and democratic, it can lead to brand confusion, logistical inefficiencies, and a complete lack of crisis response.

Who Picks up the Slack?

The anti-DMO stance offers no clear replacement model that can deliver data collection, strategic coordination, or civic accountability at scale.

Individual businesses can't and won’t do this alone. The tourism ecosystem is too interconnected to go unmanaged.

Then it challenged its own argument in support of DMOs and CVBs.

Major Weaknesses in the Pro-DMO Argument

Assumes DMOs Are Already Evolving (Many Aren’t)

The argument assumes that DMOs are modernizing into “destination stewardship” organizations. That’s true in some progressive cases, but many still chase visitor volume, ignore local voices, and lack transparency.

Saying they should act as stewards is not the same as proving they do.

ROI Remains Murky

Even the strongest DMO defenders struggle to make a direct, causally provable case that a DMO’s efforts are what caused increases in visitation or economic impact.

The reliance on soft metrics (impressions, reach, inquiries) is a vulnerability that undermines confidence, especially from public funders.

Public Accountability Is Still Shaky

DMOs sit in a strange place — funded like public entities, but often operating like private organizations, which leads to governance and equity issues.

Without stronger oversight or public feedback loops, they risk drifting into self-preservation mode rather than true public service.

So, which argument (both of which they provided) is the strongest? The conclusion it came to isn’t what I expected. This is what I think is the most interesting, and the main reason I’m reporting on this.

When both sides are fully considered, the case FOR DMOs is ultimately stronger— but only if they evolve.

Here’s why:

Coordination, strategy, and data infrastructure matter

Modern tourism ecosystems are complex. Without a central nervous system, destinations fall behind or become overwhelmed. The DMO provides a foundational structure that no grassroots alternative has yet matched in scope.

Marketing a place isn’t the same as selling a product

Places are collective experiences with shared reputations, finite capacities, and civic responsibilities. Having a trusted, central voice helps manage the balance between promotion and preservation.

The DMO model is improvable; the alternative is riskier

DMOs have a path to improvement: more transparency, more resident involvement, more sustainable strategy. The anti-DMO argument offers critique, but less of a scalable replacement.

ChatGPT’s final verdict: Reform, Not Removal

The anti-DMO stance raises critical, valid issues: waste, lack of innovation, overtourism, and exclusion of locals. But these are not arguments for abolition — they are arguments for reform.

The winning position, therefore, is a hybrid one:

Keep DMOs, but evolve them into accountable, community-first, data-smart, and sustainability-driven Destination Stewardship Organizations.

They must shift from promoting growth to managing it.
From representing stakeholders to representing residents.
From being marketing machines to being guardians of place.

In short: the DMO argument wins the debate—but only when it admits the anti-DMO critique is the wake-up call it needed.

So, there you have it. I thought it was thought- provoking— something that would be worthwhile for destination marketers to consider, whether or not you end up agreeing with every point ChatGPT makes.

I do believe that DMOs/CVBs ought to acknowledge that, whether accurate or not, these arguments against the existence and funding of their organizations are arguments that real people are making as well. It’s not just AI helpers pointing these things out. What is your organization doing to not only overcome these potential pitfalls, but help communicate how you’re overcoming them to your board and stakeholders?

For those interested in hearing some destination marketing pros discuss this, check out this episode of Destination Discourse— I had Stuart Butler (Visit Myrtle Beach) and Adam Stoker (Brand Revolt) react to my little AI experiment and add their two cents.

Good luck out there!

Camden Bernatz

Creative Director / Strategist - Brand Revolt