Destination Optimization
Destination Optimization is a program pioneered by Miles Partnership that bridges the gap between your community's online presence and its real-world experience. This initiative ensures your destination's tourism assets, local businesses and services are accurately and attractively represented across today's most influential travel planning platforms, and that they are discoverable by AI.
The program creates new opportunities for meaningful engagement with your partners and stakeholders, enhances tourism readiness and delivers long-term impact for your visitor economy—all while supporting your destination's strategic objectives.
Our Approach
AI is rapidly transforming how travelers discover, plan and book their experiences, while AI-driven recommendations are powered by accurate and informative business citations as well as user-generated content. That means if your community has missing or incomplete information, it’s not just overlooked by travelers—it’s ignored by AI.
To address this challenge, Destination Optimization is a three-step, customizable solution that identifies gaps, activates improvements and strengthens your destination’s presence.
- Evaluate: Comprehensive destination audit identifies how your community assets currently appear across the most critical online travel planning platforms.
- Activate: Strategic implementation of targeted improvements strengthens the visibility and representation of your local businesses and tourism product across platforms, with measurable results to track improvements.
- Elevate: Empower local partners through workshops, one-on-one support and upskilling opportunities designed to help them maximize their digital presence for long-term success.
Interested in learning more about Miles' support services for Destination Optimization?
Program in Action
The Destination Optimization Program, which evolved from the Google DMO Partnership Program launched in 2017, has expanded to include Tripadvisor, Yelp, Apple Maps, official destination websites and beyond. More than 300 destination organizations worldwide have participated, resulting in over 4 billion organic views of destination content without any media spend and demonstrated improvement in the completeness of market representation.
Here are a few examples of how the program has been applied:
Tennessee Rural Communities
2024 ESTO Mercury Award for Community Engagement
Tennessee's Destination Optimization program tackled a big problem: 65% of rural businesses had incomplete Google profiles. By providing hands-on training through webinars, one-on-one support and video lessons, they helped local businesses improve their digital presence. The results were impressive—incomplete profiles dropped 20%, Tripadvisor listings improved 60%, and over 4,000 contributed photos have racked up 45 million views. One local steakhouse photo alone hit over a million views, showing how powerful good digital marketing can be for small-town businesses.
La IDEA: Island Digital Education Academy
(Discover Puerto Rico)
2022 ESTO Mercury Award for Innovation
Discover Puerto Rico's La IDEA program sent recent grads as "Gurús Digitales" to work hands-on with over 5,000 businesses across all 78 municipalities. This bilingual initiative—which snagged the 2022 ESTO Mercury Award—provided 10,000+ professional photos to 700+ tourism businesses for free and even mapped uncharted islands with Google Street View. Beyond the impressive technical upgrades, the program boosted community sentiment toward the tourism board. After proving its impact, La IDEA relaunched in 2025 to help another 1,000 businesses level up digitally.
Visit Rapid City
New Expanded Activation
Visit Rapid City piloted 360 Activation, which goes beyond Google and Tripadvisor to boost small businesses across the entire search landscape. The results speak for themselves: 18 new Apple Maps listings, a perfect success rate for new Yelp pages and an 18% jump in complete Yelp listings. The team added over 60 photos to previously bare-bones Yelp pages and improved business data quality on Yahoo and Bing through platform integrations. It's proof that casting a wider digital net really pays off for local businesses.
Wind River Country
Improving Representation for Native Communities
The Destination Optimization program helped Wind River Country create its own dedicated Tripadvisor page for the reservation, separate from neighboring towns, showcasing 25 reservation-specific businesses and attractions. They added over 80 images to Google Maps, which sparked a 400% jump in views the first month and has since racked up 4.8 million total views. Complete Tripadvisor listings increased 40%, with newcomers like Fremont Local Market quickly climbing to #7 in Riverton's attractions. Recent workshops with local chambers trained over 40 businesses on boosting their digital presence.