Destination Marketing Online 2009 style V 1997 style

Xotels Blog last week posted their Top 20 Best Practices for DMO Websites

As always the case in digital marketing, everyone you ask will have a their own [often different] opinion however the article is a good read and nicely covers much of the basics of what DMO’s and CVB’s should be doing online.

I found it particularly fascinating to compare it to an early article on Destination Marketing on the World Wide Web from Travel Marketing guru Alastair Morrison. The internet archive record says 2002 but it’s basically unchanged from an original draft circa 1997.

There are lots of exciting new "channels" and tools in terms of content distribution, social media, mash-ups and of course an infinitely higher penetration of fixed line bandwidth and mobile technology (mobile was always said to be “just around the corner” in the 1990’s) to work with today however the lists are actually remarkably similar.

Question is, what will the landscape look like 12 more years from now? What will change and what similarities will remain?