Destination Marketing Organizations – Research opportunities in an era of uncertainty

Destination marketing organisations (DMO) will soon no longer exist in their current form, and so now is an opportune time for tourism academics to engage in innovative thinking about the future of these entities. While the general structure and core activities of DMOs have remained uniformly constant around the world for several decades, powerful forces are converging in a manner that is stimulating debate about the future relevance of the traditional DMO. The travel industry operates in a macro environment, over which the DMO has no control, featuring continuous discontinuous change; where change is increasingly in the form of forced disruption rather than incremental improvements, and DMOs are not immune to the effects of this phenomenon. It is timely therefore, for researchers to consider how innovation will shape DMOs in an increasingly uncertain future. In particular, three intertwined areas of research gaps related to DMOs stand out: politics, performance, and paradigm