Experience is Not a Campaign: Why DMOs Must Rethink Their Role

A Signal DMOs Can’t Ignore

When travelers were asked what kind of experience they hoped for when traveling, 65% said they wanted to see the world differently.

That finding comes from a groundbreaking national study by Travel Analytics Group titled Beyond the Selfie. The research comprised a focus group and a national internet panel of 750 respondents, conducted in summer 2025.

The results should fundamentally reshape how destinations think about experience, strategy, and leadership, as they reveal that travelers don’t seek activities, attractions, or itineraries. It points to a deeper shift in traveler intent.

Experience, for today’s traveler, is no longer defined by what they do while they are away, but by how travel changes how they see places, people, and themselves.

Travel has become a lens. A way to test personal assumptions, gain perspective, and reconnect with meaning. Destinations are no longer places to visit; they are contexts for seeing the world – and themselves – differently. And that changes everything.

What Travelers Really Mean by “Experience”

When travelers say they are looking for an experience, they are rarely describing a checklist or a schedule. They are describing an internal outcome rather than an external offering. They are seeking moments that shift perspective, foster connection, and feel real rather than produced.

They want encounters that disrupt routine, challenge assumptions, and leave meaning that outlasts the trip itself.

In this sense, experience is not about what happens during the journey. It is about what changed because of the journey. The Beyond the Selfie research makes this unmistakably clear: travelers are no longer consuming destinations as products.

They are using them as mirrors and windows, mirrors to better understand themselves and windows to better understand the world.

Why Activities and Campaigns Miss the Mark

Despite this shift, much of destination marketing still treats experience as something that can be packaged, branded, and promoted. Activities are positioned as experiences. Campaigns are framed as solutions. This approach assumes that if the right story is told loudly enough, the desired outcome will follow.

But travelers are not asking to be persuaded. They are asking to be engaged in a way that reshapes perception.

No campaign, no matter how creative or well-executed, can produce that outcome on its own. Experience does not live in advertising or itineraries. It evolves from first impressions and arrival moments, from human interactions and local tone, from the pace and rhythm of a place, and from the contrast between expectation and reality. It emerges when visitors are invited to participate rather than observe.

Experience is cumulative, contextual, and deeply personal. That is why activities are not experiences and why experience is not a campaign.

The DMO’s Role is Shifting

If people are traveling to see the world differently, then DMOs can no longer define their role narrowly around promotion, messaging, or content execution. The real work now lies in shaping the conditions under which experience unfolds.

It requires a fundamental shift in the questions destination leaders ask. Instead of focusing primarily on how the destination’s story is told, the more important question becomes how the destination is actually experienced.

What does it invite people to notice, feel, and question? Where do visitor expectations align with reality, and where do they clash? Which moments carry emotional or perceptual weight, and why?

These are not campaign questions. They are strategic, organizational, and leadership questions that cut across community alignment, visitor management, product development, and destination stewardship.

Experience as Perspective, Not Product

The destinations that resonate most strongly today are not those with the most things to do. They are those that offer a distinct outlook, a rhythm, a worldview, and a set of values embedded in place. That perspective may emerge from nature and scale, from community and culture, from creative expression, history, resilience, or even from simplicity and a slower pace.

The DMO’s role is not to package this perspective into a campaign. It is to protect it, align around it, and express it honestly. When that happens, marketing becomes amplification rather than fabrication.

Why It Matters Strategically

The shift matters because destinations are operating under increasing pressure. Crowding, housing constraints, workforce challenges, and resident sentiment are reshaping the definition of success. In this context, the quality of experience serves as the bridge between visitor demand and community well-being.

Travelers seeking perspective tend to engage more deeply, stay longer, travel more intentionally, and show greater respect for place and people. They value meaning over volume. This is not a philosophical argument. It is a strategic one.

A New Perspective for DMOs

Experience is not a campaign; it is not something you launch. It is something you steward.

The DMOs that will lead in the next era understand that travelers are not collecting destinations; they are collecting insight. They recognize that activities do not equal experience, that perception matters more than promotion, and that meaning has become the true differentiator. Most importantly, they understand that strategy must begin with how a place is felt, not just how it’s sold.

When travelers say they want to see the world differently, they are inviting DMOs to move beyond campaigns, rethink their role, and lead not just with messages but with meaning.

About the Beyond the Selfie Experience-Centric Travel Study

The Beyond the Selfie study was designed to answer a question the tourism industry had been circling for years but never fully defined: what does “experience” actually mean to travelers? 

While destinations and marketers routinely use the word experience, most still focus on promoting activities, assets, and attractions without understanding the deeper outcomes travelers seek. Through a combination of national qualitative focus groups and a quantitative survey of 750 U.S. travelers, the research decoded the emotional, cognitive, and cultural dimensions of travel.

The study revealed a fundamental shift from product-centric and activity-based travel toward experience-centric motivation, where meaning, connection, perspective, and personal transformation matter more than what is done or where someone goes.

Most notably, nearly two-thirds of travelers said they hope for an experience that helps them see the world differently, confirming that experience is about perception and insight, not consumption alone.

The research forms the foundation of a broader experience-centric framework developed by Travel Analytics Group, including tools such as the Experience Code™ and the Experience-Centric Index, which help destinations translate insight into strategy, positioning, and measurement.

To learn more about the research and how it can help your destination, contact TAG.