Keeping the Promises We Make

Destinations International (DI) is the trade association that represents destination marketing organizations (DMO) like Meet Minneapolis. According to DI, “destination organizations are charged with representing a specific destination and helping the long-term development of communities through a travel and tourism strategy … (and) serve as a broker or an official point of contact for convention, business and leisure travelers. They assist planners with meeting preparation and encourage business travelers and visitors alike to visit local historic, cultural and recreational sites.”

In other words, a DMO is responsible for concisely and compellingly communicating a community’s vision to a visitor. Meet Minneapolis and our counterparts around the world use our cooperative marketing platform to deliver unified destination assets and amenities message in a way that an individual business cannot. Bringing that vision to life for the visitor falls on the shoulders of those partners businesses.

Jenn Schaal leads our partnership team. This team serves as a primary conduit between the work our sales and marketing professionals do to attract visitors and our local partner businesses that provide the goods and services those visitors need. It is hard work recruiting and retaining the businesses that Meet Minneapolis relies on. Our partnership team reports that we have nearly 700 partner businesses and are on pace to top 800 by the end of the year. This is a testament to the work of our partnership team and the great work of those partner businesses.

I believe that the future remains bright for businesses – small ones in particular – to be players in our region’s tourism economy. According to the U.S. Travel Association, a national advocacy organization representing the travel and tourism industry, 83% of a DMO partner businesses are categorized as small businesses. Our own visitor profile data lists the major activities visitors come here for as:

- Biking
- Amateur and professional sports
- Weddings
- Winery/distillery/breweries
- Live music
- Festivals/fairs

This wide range of visitor interests is encouraging news for our local businesses.

Our partner businesses count on Meet Minneapolis to paint the picture of how our city can fulfill the needs of an individual visitor or group of visitors, while the Meet Minneapolis team counts on those businesses to deliver on the individual, tangible, components of the visitor experience. This symbiotic relationship has been successful in attracting individual visitors, conventions and special events to the region.

We take our responsibility seriously and will continue to expand our network of business partners, large and small, to provide an exciting and memorable visitor experience. And we thank you, and all of our reliable and dedicated partner businesses, for helping us keep the promises we make to visitors.