Following a two-year absence, we’ve updated our annual study that looks at North Carolina lodging taxes and their investment across the state. We’ve produced this comprehensive report since 2013 and made it available free of charge to anyone who downloads it from our website: https://www.magellanstrategy.com/research/. It’s a helpful guide to understanding the many issues surrounding occupancy taxes in the Old North State and how that revenue is utilized. It’s also a very helpful sleep aid.

As always, please let us know if you have any questions or discover any errors or omissions.

I have a friend of mine who only vacations on cruise ships. Obviously, one has to love cruising in order to spend every vacation on the high seas or a navigable river. But his motivations go well beyond a fondness for exotic ports of call, sumptuous buffets, and flashy stage shows.

He likes cruising because for him, it’s easy. Pick a cruise line, find an itinerary that appeals, and go. It’s not always that simple, of course–but compared with planning a week-long vacation trip to a large attraction like the Happiest Place on Earth or a complex domestic or foreign destination, he finds it a relative breeze. The cruise line will arrange shore excursions, the ship offers a relatively limited number of choices for meals, and the question of where to stay is no question at all. My friend is not a planner by nature, and hates the perceived (and often very real) amount of planning that goes into travel in the twenty-first century.

In 2023 Expedia reported that the average traveler visited 277 webpages as part of their travel planning process. While travel advisors and AI are obvious tools for reducing the hassle of travel planning, how many travelers don’t even consider a destination or attraction because of their perception that the experience isn’t worth the trouble of research and planning?

I started my career in consumer packaged goods marketing, promoting apparel and food products sold through the supermarkets and big box retailers of the world. But with the possible exceptions of wine and beer, no category in Walmart or Target comes close to the abundance of choices a consumer faces when considering travel experiences.

That’s why a book published in 2003 (the year before I started my consulting career), The Paradox of Choice: Why More is Less by Barry Schwartz, changed my view of the tourism category. Schwartz argues that the side effects of having more choices is that decisions require more effort, mistakes are more likely, and the psychological consequences of those mistakes are more severe–that the very culture of cherished abundance that characterizes America robs us of our satisfaction.

What’s funny to me is that we don’t often assess the perception of how hard an attraction or destination is to visit. We often just assume having “more” is enough. Is the consumer’s consideration set of travel experiences diminished before the traveler even begins to engage with the vacation planning cycle because of a perception that a place is too hard to visit? And what are we doing as a sector to reduce that perception in the event that traveler decides to visit our website or engage on social media?

Here are a few practical ideas for minimizing the traveler’s anxiety over having too many choices:

1. Maybe it’s time to step away from the flashy ad that tries to cram a thousand images into a :30 television spot, something that is characteristic of way too many tourism promotional efforts. That’s not telling a story. It’s taking a box of photos and dumping it on the kitchen table of your target audience and asking them to like you because of it.
2. Include a question in your next market research brand awareness initiative that asks how hard your attraction or destination is to visit, and ask it of both visitors and non-visitors.
3. Do a customer journey mapping research exercise.
4. Take another look at your website. Are you just throwing activities and ideas at your potential guest and asking them to figure it out? I know that destination websites in particular have to be agnostic (or, at the least, reflective of the “coalition of the willing” of partners who return a phone call or respond to an email), but they don’t have to be devoid of consumer insight, either. Itineraries that reflect both destination strengths and traveler interests are one simple solution, but only if they’ve been appropriately curated. (I’ve always thought Alabama Mountain Lakes Tourist Association does a nice job with their Trails of North Alabama.)

I recently worked on a destination marketing organization client project that required research into comparative DMO budgets. The client was facing an imminent threat of reduced funding that would significantly reduce their competitiveness against their comp set, so understanding the financial resources available to their competition was essential for developing a case in favor of funding support.

I began by looking at other DMO websites for budget information. When that failed, I reached out to the DMO directly to ask for basic annual budget information and funding structure. The data I sought was nothing terribly complicated. In some cases, my contact at the DMO was known to me, but there were others with whom I had no existing relationship. I offered to share the data I found with the comparative DMO.

Now, I’m a consultant. I know my place in the hierarchy of need-to-know. And so it didn’t necessarily surprise me that no one responded to my requests. I didn’t take it personally–no one at the DMO has an obligation to email me a response or call me back, as they might have for an elected leader, hotelier, or resident. And I understand competitive concerns about revealing too much information. After all, this is the most competitive category in the world.

But it made me think that, despite all the progress that has been made on transparency and for all the effort put forward towards being accountable, maybe we still have a long ways to go in terms of walking the walk. The fact that this kind of basic information isn’t readily found on many DMO websites is another obstacle in trying to get residents, partners, and elected leaders to understand what DMOs do, how they are funded, how they invest their funding, and the results they generate for the community.

If a DMO is funded by any kind of tax revenue, at a minimum the organization should have as much financial information on their website as their local government does. Don’t get me wrong–local governments aren’t always the best at executing easy-to-navigate websites and placing financial data on those sites that isn’t annoyingly opaque. But maybe DMOs can and should be the model for how to do it right. DMOs often rightfully claim the mantle of being the best storytellers in the community. Being open and upfront about funding is simply another story to tell.