The AI Vendor Flood Is Real — Here's How DMOs Should Navigate It
- Jason Swick
- 2 minutes ago
- 7 min read
A DMO leader I spoke with recently described her inbox as feeling like "a fire hose pointed directly at my face."
Every week there's a new company, a new pitch, the same basic promise: we built this for tourism and think it could work really well for your destination.
She's not complaining about AI. She's actually interested in it.
What she's struggling with is the volume, and the fact that almost none of these vendors seem to understand what her team actually does.
I've spent a long time working inside this industry, and I think that gap (between what vendors think DMOs do and what DMOs actually do) is the most important thing to understand right now if you're trying to figure out where to put your attention.
Here's some context on why the volume feels so intense right now.
AI investment in travel and tourism went from roughly 10% of all travel-tech funding in 2023 to 45% by mid-2025.Â
When that much money pours into a space, companies have to go find customers. And "destination marketing" sounds like a logical market.
The problem is that the companies chasing that opportunity mostly come from a world defined by bookings, revenue per transaction, and conversion rates. That's the travel industry they know: hotels, OTAs, airlines, platforms where you can draw a pretty clear line between the tool and the dollar.
Your world is different.
Yes, you care about bookings. Bed tax revenue is probably how you're funded, so visitation absolutely matters. But for most of your team, you don't own the transaction. The leisure and marketing side of the house is inspirational and informational. You're the reason someone chooses your destination, not the platform that closes the booking.
The one exception is your meeting and convention sales team, who do close the loop more directly, working with local hoteliers on room blocks and helping meeting planners land. But even then, the dynamic is nothing like an OTA.
Your job is to report to a board or city council, prove the value of work that's hard to tie directly to a booking, and do all of that with a team that's probably half the size it should be relative to what you're expected to produce.
That context is not in most vendor pitch decks. And when it's not there, you end up evaluating tools using the wrong criteria, either passing on something useful or buying something that doesn't actually fit.
The question I'd encourage you to bring into every vendor conversation isn't "what does this do?" It's whether they can demonstrate they actually understand why DMOs are different from the rest of the travel industry. Not just say it. Show it, in how their product is built and who their clients are.
That sounds simple. In my experience, it's actually pretty rare for a vendor to pass that test.
What does that actually look like in a conversation?
It means they can talk specifically about your workflows, not "content" or "visitor engagement" in the abstract but the actual work your team does. It means they understand why you measure success differently than a hotel or an OTA. It means the problems they're solving for map to things your team genuinely deals with, not just things that sound plausible. A vendor with deep knowledge of how DMOs operate is worth more than one with a long client list who built something general. At this stage of the market, genuine understanding of the space is actually pretty rare, and it's a better signal than logos.
I'd also be honest with yourself about what stage a vendor is at. The market is early. Some of the most thoughtful tools being built right now don't have a long client roster yet, and that's not automatically a reason to walk away. What matters more is whether the people building it actually understand your world, and whether you can see a clear path to it being useful for your team specifically.
Most vendors aren't there yet. A lot of them are building for the broader travel market and hoping DMOs will figure out how to apply it. Some of those tools are still worth using, but you should know that going in, because it means your team will probably do more of the setup and customization work than the vendor will.
I've been following Ruben Hassid for a while. He's spent over 10,000 hours testing AI tools and built an amazing newsletter around one idea: filter the noise so you can focus on what actually changes how you work. I think about that framing a lot in the context of DMOs right now. The goal isn't to evaluate every tool that lands in your inbox. It's to get good at quickly recognizing which ones are worth ten more minutes of your time and which ones aren't.
Here's what I'd actually do if I were in your seat.
Before your next vendor demo, spend ten minutes writing down the three or four things your team spends the most time on that feel repetitive, draining, or disconnected from the work that actually matters. Not strategically, just operationally. The things that eat afternoons.
For most DMO teams I've talked with, that list ends up including some version of: writing and updating content at scale, answering the same visitor and partner questions over and over, pulling together reports and presentations for board meetings or funding conversations, and building out meeting sales and group proposals that take forever and feel like starting from scratch most of the time.
Those four areas are where AI can realistically give you time back right now, not in theory, but this quarter. Not every tool in each area is going to be the right fit, but the category is where the opportunity actually lives for most teams.
A piece published on the Destinations International blog suggests that DMOs using AI for repetitive tasks can reclaim 10 to 40 percent of their team's time within the first year.
That's a wide range, and I'd honestly be cautious about the 40% end. That probably represents ideal conditions. But even if you cut it in half, reclaiming 15-20% of your team's capacity is genuinely significant when you're running lean.
Think about it this way.
If you have a team of 10 people and you reclaim 15-20% of their time through AI, that's roughly the equivalent of adding 1.5 to 2 people to your team by the end of the year. Not through hiring, not through budget approval, just through working smarter. For most DMOs that are perpetually understaffed and struggle to get headcount approved, that's probably a more useful way to think about what AI actually offers you.
The tools most worth your time right now are the ones that map to that specific list. Not the ones with the best demo. Not the ones that raised the most money.
The ones that reduce friction in work your team already does every day.
There's a test I'd encourage you to run on any tool before you move past a demo.
After the call, ask yourself: can I picture a specific person on my team using this on a normal, busy Tuesday? Not during a pilot, not when they're motivated to try something new, but when they have three meetings and a presentation due?
If you can picture it clearly, that's a signal worth following. If you have to squint, that's also useful information.
This isn't a perfect filter. Some tools take a few weeks, or even a few months, of regular use before they become the thing you reach for automatically. Speaking from experience, the ones that require sustained motivation to use, the ones where you have to remind your team to try it, those rarely stick in organizations that are already stretched thin.
One thing I'd add that doesn't get talked about much.
A lot of DMO leaders I've spoken with are also navigating this from above, not just from their inbox. Boards and city councils are asking what you're doing with AI. And there's a real tension between looking like you're falling behind if you wait, and looking reckless if you move on something that fails visibly. That's a genuinely uncomfortable place to operate from, and I think it quietly influences a lot of the "we're exploring it" answers you hear at conferences.
I get it. But I'd gently push back on the idea that waiting is the safe option. The risk of moving too slowly is just less visible than the risk of moving too fast. It doesn't mean it isn't real. Crawl, walk, then run is the right approach. But DMOs can't risk staying on crawl forever. Action is how real change happens.
Here's something worth saying plainly.
Most of the AI tools targeting the travel industry right now aren't purpose-built for how DMOs operate. Some of them are genuinely useful despite that. But there's a real gap between picking up a general AI tool and figuring it out yourself, versus something designed around your specific workflows from the ground up.
That gap is real, and I don't think it's fully closed yet. Ruben Dominguez Ibar, who tracks AI agent use cases across 19 industries including tourism, has mapped over 110 use cases and most of the tourism applications are still framed around booking, conversion, and hospitality operations.
The DMO use cases are there, but they're not the center of gravity yet.
In the meantime, there's something you can do right now with almost any general AI tool, even the ones not created specifically for DMOs.
The reason most AI tools produce generic output for destination marketers isn't because they can't do better. It's because nobody told them what makes your situation specific. The more context you give upfront, your destination's voice, your audience, your stakeholders, the fact that you measure success in visitor nights and economic impact rather than just bookings, the more useful the output becomes. Think of it less like using software and more like onboarding a very fast new team member who knows nothing about your destination yet.
Build a simple context document for your DMO, two or three paragraphs about who you are, who you serve, what your team actually does day-to-day, and how you talk about your destination. Drop that into any AI tool before you start a task. It takes ten minutes to write once and meaningfully changes the quality of everything you get back.
Most teams I speak with haven't done it yet.
The flood isn't going away.
If anything, I'd expect it to pick up before it slows down, there's too much money chasing this space right now for it to do otherwise. But staying anchored to what your team actually needs, rather than what's loudest in your inbox, is probably the most useful thing you can do right now.
The noise doesn't get quieter. Your filter just gets better.
I write about AI and destination marketing for DMO professionals. If you want pieces like this a few days before they go public, you can join the early access list at https://www.swix.ai/#insider