Granicus, a leading provider of customer engagement and experience technology, has announced the launch of Destinations Experience Cloud (DXC) and the creation of Granicus Destinations, a dedicated business segment focused exclusively on supporting destination marketing organisations (DMOs) and place-based brands.
The news comes at a time when DMOs are accountable for attracting visitors and demonstrating the benefits of tourism investments to residents, elected officials, businesses and other community stakeholders. As a result, DMOs are seeking more integrated approaches that make it easier to measure and prove value, manage impact and confidently support data-driven decisions.
The new business segment and DXC platform help destination leaders replace disconnected tools and inadequate reporting with purpose-built technology, shared data, automated insights and embedded expertise. This integrated approach by Granicus, which powers over 30 billion digital interactions annually across 7,000 public sector organisations, will bring transformative innovation to DMOs, allowing them to monitor thousands of destinations worldwide, including all 11 FIFA World Cup host cities across the US, Canada and Mexico.
DXC and Granicus Destinations build on the company’s acquisition of Simpleview and more than 25 years of leadership in the destinations market, supporting over 1,000 destinations worldwide and helping them connect with more than 400 million visitors each year. The new segment maintains dedicated leadership, products, services and customer success teams designed to work in concert to support the expanding goals of DMOs, drive economic growth and build connected communities for the constituents they serve. DXC customers are supported by Experience Partners that work with destination leaders to translate organisational and community goals into coordinated execution and measured outcomes.
DXC is designed around the three core tenets of modern destination management: demand generation, meetings and events sales and stakeholder accountability. The platform unifies disconnected websites, CRM, analytics and reporting tools with a single, shared data foundation. DMOs using DXC benefit from Granicus’s long-running investment in applied AI and data science, gaining access to advanced data analytics and digital engagement capabilities as they seek to better understand and serve visitors, meeting planners, residents and other stakeholders. This shift enables destination organisations to operate as accountable economic stewards, using shared data to justify investments, align tourism with community priorities and attract high-value business.
Ian Roberts, UK Managing Director of Granicus, said: “Given the economic uncertainty and wider change the UK has experienced over the past 12 months, there is a growing need for local regions to drive tourism as a lever for economic growth. Destination organisations play a central role in supporting communities, attracting investment and creating places where people want to live, work and study.
“At the same time, DMOs are under increasing pressure to balance visitor growth with the needs of residents and demonstrate clear value. By bringing together data, engagement and reporting in one place, organisations can utilise DXC to take a more joined-up, evidence-based approach to managing tourism and delivering long-term community benefit.”
“As we transition and evolve Simpleview into Granicus Destinations, we are honoured to carry forward the people, products, history and deep industry partnership that DMOs have come to trust,” said Mark Hynes, CEO of Granicus. “By combining over 25 years of tourism and destinations expertise with Granicus’ unique history of building and supporting community experience and intelligence solutions at scale, Granicus Destinations is uniquely positioned to help DMO leaders manage an increasingly complex and connected landscape of stakeholder engagement. No solutions partner is better equipped to help leaders understand, measure and address the ‘whole of the community’ complexities necessary to support economic growth and vitality than Granicus.”
DXC creates pre-defined adoption paths for DMOs to leverage combinations of technology, data and services that meet today’s needs while providing pathways for increasing maturity and capability. With integrated data-driven insights and connected technologies, DXC allows DMOs to incorporate advanced reporting, product innovations and AI-enabled capabilities seamlessly and automatically as DXC platform advancements are continuously released. Granicus Destinations is bringing practical AI applications into DMO and stakeholder experiences to drive operational efficiencies, optimise demand generation through AI-driven user journeys and proactively surface actionable opportunities from industry-leading visitor and meetings sales data available in Granicus systems.
