Turning Data Into Destination Advantage: How DMOs Can Win in 2025 and Beyond

How DMOs Can Win in 2025 and Beyond

In destination marketing, the gap between keeping pace and setting the pace is rooted in how well you can harness your data. The U.S. Travel Association’s ESTO 2025 Conference is set for August 17–19 in Phoenix, and we’re looking forward to connecting with destination marketing leaders from across the country out in the desert. These conversations give us valuable perspective on the challenges DMOs face, from tightening budgets to shifting traveler expectations. Understanding the challenges that folks are facing in the industry fuels our mission: helping DMOs turn information into insight, and insight into action, so they can market smarter, react faster, and plan with confidence.

The Data Is Already There:
Now It’s Time to Activate It

Most DMOs aren’t struggling to collect data. Website analytics, booking data, social engagement metrics, CRM records, and advertising reports are all in the mix. The real challenge is pulling those sources together in a way that’s clean, connected, and actionable.

When your data lives in silos, opportunities get missed. Marketing decisions become reactive instead of proactive. Reporting  of any kind becomes time-consuming and limited. That’s where a modern data foundation changes everything.

Data Lakes and Dashboards
Equal Clarity and Control

At Red Oak Strategic we use Amazon Web Services to help DMOs design and implement data lakes that unify every data source into a single, trusted hub. This eliminates the guesswork of “which numbers are right?” and ensures the entire organization is working from the same playbook.

From there, we layer in Amazon QuickSight dashboards, custom-built to track the KPIs that matter most to your destination. These dashboards bring metrics into sharp focus:

• Lodging Performance Visibility: Occupancy and booking trends from hotels and short-term rentals, compared across multiple data sources.
  

• Marketing Impact Tracking: Impressions, clicks, cost, reach, and engagement across paid search, paid social, organic social, and streaming media.
  

• Visitor & Market Insights: Guest origin, booking windows, cancellation rates, stay length, and segmentation by traveler type or geography.

• Trend & Demand Correlation: Overlay weather, events, and campaign timing data to understand demand spikes and seasonal shifts.

Proof in Action

One of our clients, The Pocono Mountains Visitors Bureau (PMVB) has long excelled at promoting one of the most scenic and vibrant year-round travel destinations on the east coast, the Pocono Mountains Region of Pennsylvania. They have a unified, member-first tourism strategy, creative seasonal event-based campaigns, a fully in-house marketing team, designers, and a 24/7 television station, all of which make them an industry leader and early adopter of current trends in destination marketing. With the goal of being ready to take advantage of the marketing and AI tools of the future, PMVB partnered with Red Oak Strategic to take ownership of their data in a centralized and scalable data lake.

Before the project began, the client had data siloed across their marketing platforms, social media, website, and more. They needed a way to take action on their insights. Designed for convenient viewership of analytics, strategic decision making, and built for the future, this project is at the core of how Red Oak Strategic helps businesses harness the power of their data. The impact of this ongoing project is already clear: 20+ critical data sources have been integrated into the data lake and standardized for analytics use. More than 115 metrics that PMVB use to track the health of the community and its members are now available online through a custom interactive Amazon Quicksight Dashboard. Gen AI powered Amazon Q allows for natural language queries directly against the data lake, generating insights, reports, and dashboards without the need for code or technical expertise. Internally, the use of Amazon Clean Rooms to allow for double-encypted data collaborations have opened up a pathway to secure analytics that use first-party data to measure the impact of marketing campaigns in an intuitive and customer-friendly manner. The success of this PMVB data lake project is a perfect example of how smart, data-first DMOs can adopt modern analytics solutions to reach new horizons.

The Next Phase of Data-Driven
Destination Marketing

Right now, many DMOs are focused on cleaning and centralizing their data, but the next wave is already here: predictive analytics and personalization at scale. With the right foundation in place, DMOs can start to:

• Forecast visitor demand based on seasonality, events, and macro trends.
  

• Deliver personalized content to travelers at every stage of the decision journey.
  

• Model the impact of new campaigns before spending a single dollar.

What makes this next phase exciting is that it moves DMOs from describing what happened to anticipating what’s coming. We’re also seeing the rise of privacy-safe data collaboration, like AWS Clean Rooms, that let destinations work with partners to measure campaign performance and visitor behavior without ever exposing sensitive customer data. Combined with AI-powered tools such as Amazon Q, teams can surface insights instantly with natural language questions, eliminating the lag between curiosity and action.

For DMOs ready to compete at the highest level, these capabilities exist today. And the organizations that adopt them now will set the standard for what destination marketing looks like in the next five years and beyond.

Final Thoughts

The competition for travelers is only getting sharper. DMOs that rely on gut instinct alone will be outpaced by those that can spot, act on, and measure opportunities in real time. The technology is ready. The destinations that win will be the ones who put it to work strategically. Centralized, connected, and actionable data empowers you to predict what’s coming, pivot faster than competitors, and prove the value of every marketing dollar. As we head to ESTO 2025, we’re excited to keep the conversation going with the people who make destinations shine. If you’re in Phoenix, let’s connect and talk about how your data can be the engine that drives your destination forward.