Every city has the thing it’s famous for, and the DMO’s marketing follows the crowds there. If your tours sit outside that, you’re competing for attention with the biggest names in town, and a busy DMO rarely goes looking for you. Orlando, a city the world knows for its theme parks, is about as clear a case as there is. Thali Sugisawa leads cultural tourism at United Arts of Central Florida, the local arts agency that set out to get the city’s DMO talking about local arts and culture alongside the parks.
Her conclusion is that a DMO gets behind you when you show up with something it can use right away, tied to goals it has already written down, and then keep showing up. Thali learned that by building the partnership from nothing, tours included, and testing what visitors actually buy. Listen to this one if your tours aren’t what your city is known for and you’ve wondered how to get your DMO on your side. You’ll come away knowing how to approach them and what to bring.
Resources:
Key Takeaways
- Find out whether your county’s tourism tax funds grants for marketing local experiences to visitors. 06:40 to 08:44 In Orlando, the tourism development tax funds a Cultural Tourism Grant that pays arts organizations like the ballet and the opera to advertise out of market. The money was there, but nobody had connected those organizations to the DMO or shown them what works with tourists. That gap is the opening for an operator: the DMO wants local experiences packaged so visitors can book them, and local organizations want help reaching visitors. A tour that links the two solves a problem for both.
- Ask locals how they’d show your city to a cousin who only knows the famous version, and build your tour around their answers. 09:16 to 10:50 The prompt: a DNA test just turned up a third degree cousin in Kansas City, they’re coming to visit, and all they know about your city is its famous attraction. How would you describe the local scene? Where would you take them? Once they’re here, what’s missing? Put that question to artists, venue owners and other locals. The answers show you what a visitor would miss and the accolades your city has been too quiet about, like the Grammy award winning directors who live in Orlando.
- Ask your DMO who actually visits before you decide who your tour is for. 11:34 to 13:30 The common assumption in Orlando is that around 90 percent of visitors bring kids. The real figure is about 30 to 35 percent, which opens the door to adult only experiences. The audiences to design for: the cultured family, the culturally curious adult, and business travelers. Convention visitors often stay a full week and come back every year, or every few years when a convention rotates, and they bring partners and colleagues who need something to do.
- Show up at the DMO in person so its PR and marketing teams think of you when they plan. 13:30 to 15:02 DMOs are busy with big things, and a small partner is out of sight, out of mind. United Arts works from an office inside Visit Orlando, and some days that just means walking the floor saying hi. Because of that, the PR team remembers the arts when it builds a FAM tour, and marketing remembers them when it builds a campaign like the culinary one. You may not get a desk, but in person visits do the same job better than virtual check ins.
- Search Viator for your city and build the kind of tour that isn’t there. 15:30 to 17:32 A Viator search for things to do in Orlando turned up boat tours, manatee encounters, eco tourism and food tours, and nothing related to arts, history or science. That missing category became the first new tours. A food tour operator agreed to “create something that doesn’t exist,” walked possible routes downtown, in Winter Park and in Loch Haven, and met with the museum of art and the galleries to work out how a group visit would run.
- You don’t need to be an art expert: walk the group to the museum and let a docent lead a short tour inside. 18:00 to 19:44 The operators were intimidated by art and didn’t think they could lead an art tour without knowing museum history or who’s exhibiting now. The format that works: the guide learns a few talking points, walks the group between stops, and hands them off at each museum or gallery to a docent or someone from the education department for a very short tour. Brief each venue on how the handoff works before you launch, because they won’t have done it before.
- When a DMO or local organization helps build or sell your tour, offer FAM tour and private group discounts. 20:01 to 21:55 United Arts first took a 10 percent cut of the art tours it helped create on Viator, then dropped it after a few months, because the operators are solo entrepreneurs and family businesses. The deal now: operators give discounts for FAM tours and private groups. A DMO asking a big attraction for free tickets in exchange for media exposure is a different ask than the same request made of a solo operator, so propose discounts you can afford before someone asks for free seats.
- Sell a culture tour to private and convention groups through the DMO first, because leisure travelers balk at $60 for a walking tour. 21:55 to 22:45 After about 18 months of testing price, content and marketing, the art tours work well for private groups coming through Visit Orlando, like agencies, operators and convention groups, at a higher price point. Those groups book through the DMO relationship, separately from the booking platforms. Leisure travelers hesitate at around $60 for a walking tour, especially when a food tour at a similar price feeds them along the way.
- Add coffee stops to make a culture walk easier to sell to leisure travelers. 22:45 to 23:35 The new Caffeine and Culture tour of downtown Orlando uses the city’s local coffee shops, many with their own twist, like Asian owned and Hispanic owned shops. Guests get their coffee, matcha or chai, then see museums, murals, galleries and landmarks while caffeinated. “Coffee is culture.” Results from the plain art tour give good reason to expect this version to sell better to leisure travelers.
- Get your tour listed on the local arts or culture site visitors use, alongside the museums’ own tours. 23:54 to 25:20 United Arts built artsinorlando.com as a visitor site, separate from its fundraising pages, and made tours and experiences the first category, ahead of music, dance and theater. It lists the tours built with local operators, the tours museums already run, and community tours that are part of the culture even when they aren’t about art. If your city has a site like this, ask to be on it. If it doesn’t, the local arts agency is the place to pitch one.
- Get your tours into the DMO’s events calendar through a local partner that already sends it listings. 25:36 to 26:25 Visit Orlando’s calendar doesn’t connect automatically to anyone else’s. Every month United Arts exports its full calendar, cuts it down to what makes sense for visitors, and sends it to the DMO to import. Find out who already feeds your DMO’s calendar and get your public tour dates into that feed.
- Find the DMO’s strategic plan on its website and pitch your tour as help with one of its goals. 26:41 to 28:20 DMOs are often membership organizations with a separate institutional website, and that’s usually where the three or four year strategic plan lives. Read the leisure strategy, the meetings and conventions strategy, and the community impact strategy, and find where your tour fits. Then pitch it in their terms: I see you have this goal, and I have something that helps you reach it. DMOs are worn out by people calling to ask for things, and showing up with something already in their plan gets you halfway to a partnership. A group of operators pitching together carries more weight than one small bike tour operator.
- Pitch the DMO a story ready to run, the way you’d pitch a journalist. 28:20 to 28:36 Bring the story already written so their job gets easier. Asking them to cover you puts all the work on them.
- Start every DMO meeting by asking what they need help with. 28:36 to 29:12 Open with: I’m here to serve you and bring the extra thing that hasn’t been added yet, so tell me where you’re stuck and we’ll think creatively. The mindset is “what can I offer you?”
- Read the DMO’s yearly blog posts and send the editor events to add, because AI pulls answers from blogs. 29:22 to 31:00 Blogs are having a comeback because they’re what AI reads and cites. Visit Orlando updates a standing fall activities post every year. When something new fits a post like that, message the media manager directly and suggest adding it. Keep doing it even when they’re busy with bigger things, and don’t get bitter when they are.
- Team up with other operators to package your tours as one named season, and hand the DMO a media kit with photos, clips and blurbs. 31:09 to 33:00 Orlando’s shoulder season is September and October, which is the busy season nearly everywhere else. Pulling every arts event for those eight weeks turned up more than 100 local music shows. They were packaged as Live + Local Music Season with a landing page and a media kit of photos, graphics, short clips and every blurb, and handed to Visit Orlando ready to use. The DMO loved it because it could talk about one thing and cover more than a hundred.
- Once one season works, offer the DMO the next one. 33:00 to 34:03 After the fall campaign, Visit Orlando asked for winter and spring. Winter became #FestivalMode, more than 20 festivals in two months, and it’s now the strongest seasonal campaign. Spring leans on family and outdoor activities before the heat sets in. Look for the themes your city already runs on for a few weeks or months at a time, since those are the easiest to brand. Your own reach is small next to the DMO’s, so the media kit is what does the work.
- Name tours with “culture” instead of “art,” which scares people off. 34:23 to 34:52 “Art” intimidates guides and guests alike. Knowing that, the Orlando tours would have been named differently from the start, and Caffeine and Culture follows the rule. “The word culture is a little less intimidating than the word art.”
- Train hotel front desk staff to recommend your tour by giving them top three picks for each type of guest. 36:43 to 38:10 The Cultural Concierge course launched in February: three parts, 30 minutes in total, video based, for hospitality and travel professionals who get asked “what else is there to do?” There’s an in person version too, where Vianka Rivera visits hotels and teaches front desk staff what to recommend, with top three lists for theaters, for Gen Z, and for families with kids. The goal is that staff remember where to send people.
- Explain your tour to the people who recommend it, because they won’t know what an art walk is. 38:10 to 38:41 Give recommenders the tools to recommend you without guessing. The same goes for food tours or any other format. Operators take for granted how much educating the customer and the market need.
- Give concierges a specific line to use: “Have you seen the new mural right across the corner?”. 38:41 to 39:21 Hospitality staff are busy, and to them your tour is an add-on, so even 30 minutes of their time is a real ask. Don’t be entitled about it. What makes a recommendation stick is detail: have you seen the new mural right across the corner? Walk two more blocks and you can meet the artist who made it.
- Measure any DMO partnership by bookings and extra days visitors stay. 39:27 to 40:34 After two years of building and testing, Orlando’s program has data on what to do more of, less of, and stop doing. The next phase is keeping what works and becoming essential to the DMO. The measures that matter are butts in seats and extending visitors’ stays.
- Local partnerships fill seats without heavy commissions or a big digital marketing effort. 40:34 to 41:07 Partnerships with a DMO, an arts agency or other local organizations put people in seats without the heavy commissions and the hard work of digital marketing.