5 Surefire Fixes for DMOs Losing Meeting RFPs in the Age of AI

Let’s rip off the bandage and get to it. Most destination marketing organizations are phoning in their digital marketing for meetings and conventions. Keep embracing Cvent and relying on relationship building, but it’s time to realize the potential of AI and automation.

A quarterly e-newsletter, sporadic LinkedIn posts and a refreshed meetings landing page once every three years is the bare minimum. Meanwhile, corporate and association planners are living in a world of hyper-personalized outreach, instant answers and AI-assisted research.

If your digital footprint for meetings isn’t embracing automation, you’re leaving RFPs on the table, especially from U.S. and Canadian planners who expect consumer-grade digital experiences in their work lives.

The future of landing meeting business is smarter, automated, AI-powered systems that move planners from curiosity to contact without relying on heroic efforts from your sales team.

Here are five hard truths paired with opportunities to address them.

1. Planners Do Their Homework Before Talking to Sales

By the time a serious planner fills out your “Contact Sales” form, they have already searched generic queries, browsed your facilities and reviewed case studies. If your meeting’s content is thin, generic or buried under leisure messaging, they’ll move on. And no, your newsletter that they never subscribed to is not going to save that.

The opportunity: Embrace AI to analyze your website search terms and on-page behavior so you see what planners are actually looking for and what they can’t find.

Trigger smart pop-ups and chatbots when someone visits key meetings pages multiple times and offer a downloadable planning guide, airlift overview or sample agenda by industry.

Automatically score and route those engaged visitors as warm leads to your sales team instead of waiting for a form fill. If your only “signal” is one RFP form, you’re blind to most of the buying journey.

2. Meetings Newsletters Look Like Digital Brochures

Many meetings newsletters point to generic lists, dated talking points and the same hotel partners. Success resides in opens and clicks, not RFPs or warm conversations. That’s not nurture marketing. That’s broadcast.

The opportunity: Create segmented journeys, not one list, that cater to corporate audiences, associations, small meetings or city wide events. Feature unique content for different verticals like healthcare or financial services based on what stands out most.

Lean into automation to leverage behavior-based triggers so if a planner clicks on “sustainability,” they’re automatically moved into a short sequence on green venues. Use AI to draft multiple variations of content tailored to different planner personas, then automate A/B tests to see what actually drives inbound interest.

Your email platform should behave like a smart sales development rep, not a 1990s e-blast machine.

3. Meetings Websites Need 24/7 Salesperson Vibe

Too many DMO sites for planners are static lists of generic catch-all information with a vague “submit your RFP” button. The differences from one DMO to another need to be clearer for yours to be competitive.

The opportunity: AI can help build dynamic content through different hero messaging based on meeting planner type or behavior. If the meeting planner is coming from a pharma association email campaign, highlight case studies and compliance, not generic “world-class destination” fluff.

Consider building a sample agenda with AI tools to auto-generate three or five-day meeting outlines. Automated room block and venue capacity tools can suggest the right places for a planner’s event.

A simple AI-powered chat tool for planners can be trained to highlight your destination’s meeting assets. It can answer simple questions about hotels within a short walk of the convention center or incentives for city-wide events over 2,000 room nights.

Don’t feel pressured to do it all immediately. Choose one of these automation processes to work on this year and fold it into your routine. It can all be connected to your CRM so that when a planner is ready to talk to a human, your sales team already has context on what they’ve explored.

4. DMOs Are Sitting on Data Mines

Most destinations have years of lost business reports, trace data by industry or season, past RFPs, satisfaction surveys and web analytics. That data often lives in separate systems and rarely gets used for daily marketing decisions.

The opportunity: AI and automation can spot patterns in both won and lost business. It can identify which industries you win most often or which group sizes and dates are your sweet spot.

It can sift through data to identify high-probability planners and build targeted outreach and content only for them. Use these tools to predict the best times of year and markets to push specific segments and automate campaigns accordingly.

And when it comes to existing content, engage all of your brand standards, venues, case studies and incentives into internal AI tools so that the outputs reflect your destination. Use it to draft landing pages, proposals and segmented emails that human staff refine but won’t have to write from scratch.

Instead of sending another monthly newsletter, you’re sending the right message, at the right time, to the planners you have the highest chance of actually converting.

5. DMOs Need to Meet Personalization Expectations

Corporate and association planners managing six and seven-figure budgets are used to personalized experiences in their consumer lives: curated streaming, targeted offers, travel apps that remember their preferences. Your meetings marketing should feel similar. 

The opportunity: Use AI to generate personalized recaps after a trade show or sales mission. Automate follow-up emails that pull in content related to what each planner asked about at your booth. Create proposal templates that automatically adjust key language, case studies and visuals based on industry, group size and objectives.

AI-assisted social listening tools can monitor planner conversations about your destination, airlift, safety, or logistics. These tools will automatically flag themes that sales and marketing can address with content.

This isn’t replacing your sales team. It automates time-consuming tasks so your team can focus on the relationship.

Why This Matters: The RFP Shift Is Already Here

Competing destinations are already experimenting with AI and automation because they know planners are under pressure to do more with less time. Today’s planners are digital natives who expect instant information. 

If your DMO is still relying on a static meetings site, a generic newsletter and a sales team that manually chases every lead routinely, then you’re making it for those competitors to win.

The future of landing more RFPs is not another “Meetings in [Destination]” newsletter that screams generic. Instead, shift from broadcast to intelligent systems where AI and automation do the heavy lifting. DMOs will see improved leads, stronger planner relationships and clearer proof of ROI for their boards and stakeholders.

Those that don’t will keep wondering why their open rates look fine, but their pipeline is leaking business.