The global tourism industry is undergoing a structural shift that is changing how destinations allocate marketing budgets and tourism development funds. For decades, the standard playbook for tourism boards involved subsidizing hotel construction, expanding airport capacity, and running broad-reach advertising campaigns. That model is being replaced by something more granular and more economically productive.
Destination marketing organizations (DMOs) across North America, Europe, and Asia-Pacific are redirecting significant portions of their budgets toward experiential tourism — the curation, promotion, and infrastructure support for unique, often locally rooted activities that travelers cannot replicate elsewhere. The pivot reflects changing traveler behavior, particularly among high-spend visitors who increasingly evaluate destinations based on what they can do rather than where they can stay.
What Is Driving the Shift
The Skift Research 2025 Experiential Travel Report estimated that experience-based spending now represents more than 40% of total trip budgets for travelers aged 25 to 55, up from approximately 28% a decade ago. This trend is most pronounced among affluent travelers and younger demographics, both of whom DMOs prioritize for their high per-trip yield.
Three forces are accelerating the shift. First, hotel supply across most developed tourism markets has reached saturation, meaning incremental hotel investment delivers diminishing returns on visitor growth. Second, social media has fundamentally changed how travelers research destinations — visual, shareable experiences now drive far more booking decisions than traditional destination marketing imagery. Third, post-pandemic travelers have shown a sustained preference for activities that feel meaningful, time-limited, or otherwise unrepeatable.
DMOs that recognized these dynamics early have outperformed their peers in visitor spending growth. Those still focused primarily on hotel-led tourism strategies are facing harder questions about return on investment.
How DMOs Are Restructuring Their Investment Approach
Curated Experience Ecosystems
Modern DMOs are no longer content to simply list attractions on their websites. They are actively building experience ecosystems by partnering with local operators, providing infrastructure support, and co-funding marketing for activities that align with the destination’s positioning.
Tourism Australia’s “Come and Say G’day” campaign represents a clear example, focusing almost entirely on experiences — wildlife encounters, Indigenous cultural tours, food and wine trails — rather than accommodation. VisitBritain has taken a similar approach, building thematic experience corridors around heritage, culinary tourism, and rural adventure. The campaigns work because they sell something travelers cannot get at home.
Aerial and Sightseeing Tourism as a Growth Segment
Among the experience categories receiving renewed DMO attention, aerial sightseeing has emerged as a particularly strong performer. Helicopter and scenic flight operations generate high per-visitor revenue, distribute economic activity to regional airports, and produce the kind of shareable visual content that drives organic destination promotion.
Las Vegas has built one of the most developed experiential tourism portfolios in North America, and aerial sightseeing plays a meaningful role within it. The Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority has consistently integrated scenic flight operators into its destination marketing, recognizing that GC Flight helicopter rides over the strip or to the Grand Canyon often become the centerpiece memory of their trip — and the most shared image on social media.
Similar dynamics are playing out in Hawaii, where DMOs work closely with helicopter and seaplane operators to manage volume while preserving the experience quality that justifies premium pricing. Norway’s tourism authority has built scenic flight integration into its fjord region marketing. New Zealand has done the same for its alpine and glacier markets.
Culinary Tourism Infrastructure
Food has become one of the most heavily invested experience categories for DMOs. Tourism Ireland, Visit Portugal, and the Korea Tourism Organization have all increased culinary tourism budgets significantly over the past five years, funding everything from chef development programs to culinary trail signage and digital storytelling content.
The economic logic is clear. Culinary experiences support local producers, distribute visitor spending across rural and urban areas, and create year-round demand that helps offset seasonal tourism patterns. Antigua and Barbuda’s recently launched Culinary Crawl Experience reflects this thinking, as does Jamaica’s continued investment in agritourism connected to its broader tourism portfolio.
Immersive Cultural Programming
The third major experience category seeing increased DMO investment is immersive cultural programming. This goes well beyond traditional museum and heritage site marketing to include living cultural experiences — community homestays, traditional craft workshops, ceremonial participation, and Indigenous-led tourism.
These programs serve dual purposes. They generate visitor spending that flows directly to communities often excluded from traditional tourism economics, and they create the kind of differentiated experiences that resist commoditization. New Zealand’s Maori tourism development programs and Canada’s Indigenous tourism strategy both represent significant DMO investment in this space.
The Economic Case for the Shift
The numbers support the strategic pivot. WTTC data consistently shows that experiential travelers spend more per day, stay longer, and return more frequently than travelers whose trips center on accommodation and general sightseeing alone. They also distribute spending more broadly across the local economy, supporting small operators and rural businesses that traditional tourism models often bypass.
For DMOs operating under public funding mandates, this economic distribution matters. Tourism investment is increasingly evaluated not just on total visitor numbers but on how broadly tourism revenue reaches across the destination’s communities. Experiential tourism delivers stronger results against that metric.
There is also a resilience dimension. Destinations heavily dependent on a single hotel cluster or a narrow set of attractions are more vulnerable to disruptions — whether from natural disasters, geopolitical events, or shifting traveler preferences. A diversified experience portfolio provides multiple revenue streams and multiple narrative angles for marketing recovery.
Challenges Facing the Transition
The shift toward experiential tourism is not without complications. DMOs face several persistent challenges as they restructure their investment models, including the following areas of friction:
● Quality control becomes harder as experience portfolios expand across many small operators with varying service standards
● Carrying capacity management requires careful coordination, particularly for fragile environments and small communities
Visitor management has become a particularly pressing issue. Several high-profile experience destinations — Iceland, Bali, parts of the Norwegian fjords — have faced overtourism pressures that forced DMOs to reconsider how they promote certain experiences. The next phase of experiential tourism marketing will likely focus more heavily on dispersing demand across time and geography rather than concentrating it.
What This Means for Industry Stakeholders
For hotel operators, the shift does not represent an existential threat, but it does change the competitive landscape. Properties that integrate authentic local experiences into their offerings will outperform those positioned purely on amenity quality. For independent experience operators, the trend creates significant opportunity, particularly for those willing to invest in the operational professionalism that DMO partnerships require.
For aviation and ground transport operators, experiential tourism growth supports the case for continued investment in scenic and specialty services. Helicopter operators, scenic rail providers, and small-ship cruise lines are all positioned to benefit from the structural shift in traveler spending.
For DMOs themselves, the transition requires building new competencies — experience curation, operator development, community engagement — that traditional destination marketing teams may not have developed. The most successful DMOs in the next decade will be those that adapt their organizational structures to match the shift.
Looking Ahead
The experiential tourism shift is not a marketing trend. It reflects a fundamental change in what travelers value and how they evaluate destinations. DMOs that recognize this and restructure their investment portfolios accordingly will outperform those that continue to allocate resources based on outdated assumptions about hotel-driven tourism economics.
The destinations leading this transition — Las Vegas, New Zealand, Portugal, Iceland, Japan — share a common trait. They have stopped marketing themselves as places to stay and started marketing themselves as places to do something specific that travelers cannot find elsewhere. That is the future of competitive tourism marketing, and the industry is moving toward it faster than many stakeholders realize.
By Amey Myers
