View all posts: Trends
A New Normal for DMO Website Organic Traffic
Our latest study of 36 DMOs highlights even greater challenges to DMO website traffic – and the importance of partnerships with major platforms like Google.
Learn more about the Google DMO Partnership Program
For the last 3+ years, Miles Partnership has been analyzing, blogging and speaking about the dramatic changes we are seeing to the organic traffic of destination and other tourism websites. Organic traffic makes up more than 50% of the website traffic on average for DMOs* but this critical and free source of traffic is under mounting pressure.
2018 Destinations International Annual Convention Recap
Earlier this summer, members from the Miles team attended the 2018 Destinations International Annual Convention in Anaheim, California. The 104th Annual Convention brought together over 1,600 industry members for a jam-packed event full of insightful sessions and opportunities to learn about the latest topics and trends in the industry. Our team had a great time and we’re already looking ahead to the 2019 Annual Convention in St. Louis next summer!
Read this blog for a recap of Miles’ participation at the convention along with some additional resources you might find helpful including access to session recordings and presentation decks.
Immersive Storytelling Experiences
This blog was co-developed with Ara Parikh, Product Marketing Manager at OmniVirt.
At the recent 2018 Destinations International Annual Convention, Miles had the opportunity to share an immersive storytelling experience with convention attendees in our Global All-Stars Immersion Lab. Joined by the team at OmniVirt, we displayed a combination of Miles projects and OmniVirt projects that showcased interactive and immersive experiences.
Storytelling is a great way to show the strengths of a destination- the people, the culture, the hidden gems and all the experiences one can have. Sharing content that will engage and inspire travelers not only promotes a destination, but influences the viewer’s decision throughout the Trip Planning Life Cycle. At Miles, we curate...
Word of Mouth Still Rules for Hyper-Informed Travelers
In our recent blog, “The Hyper-Informed Traveler, a Decade of Growth,” we highlighted the growing fragmentation and complexity of media use by US leisure travelers. The travel media landscape of 2018 presents a bewildering range of media, content and channels used by travelers in researching travel and planning their next trip.
But outside of media, one channel remains dominant in shaping travelers’ perceptions and decisions–traditional word of mouth. Travelers talking to family and friends about their experiences remains the most important source of information by some distance. When Destinations Analysts plots all media by frequency of use and level of trust, no other source of information compares. The graph below from Destination Analysts highlights the dominance of Word of Mouth. The left or Y-axis plots the Level of Trust held in media sources by US travelers and the bottom or X-axis tracks the frequency of use. The size of the data points signifies the importance of the media source.
Google Brings Changes, Challenges and Opportunities
Over the last couple of years, Google has been quickly evolving both search and its travel related platforms. These enhancements have created challenges and opportunities for the travel industry. Google notes this evolution is in response to changing travel behavior and technology shifts. In addition, new technologies and the power of artificial intelligence has spurred the growth of voice search, intelligent assistants, smart speakers are more. This is a trend that is beginning to change how we conduct and interact with travel related searches.
In this blog, we highlight some of these changes and what this means for destination marketing organizations (DMOs) and tourism businesses of all types.
