by Pádraic Gilligan, Co-founder, SoolNua Consulting

Destination Management Companies or Consultants, depending on how you prefer to unpack the acronym, along with incentive houses and agencies, are the indispensable, iconic and frankly irreplaceable elements in the incentive travel supply chain. They always were. The question, as the sector approaches its sixth decade, is whether the reasons for that remain the same.

The term DMC was coined in the seventies (see here for an historical perspective) to differentiate, define and champion the particular skill set and expertise that a destination specialist could offer to the organiser of an incentive travel experience. Receptive or incoming agents with experience handling leisure groups would fall well short, both in delivery standards and creative ambition, for planners whose destination experience had to be highly customised, one-of-a-kind, extraordinary, and conspicuously unavailable in any tourist brochure.

Enter a new kind of destination partner: the DMC, a specialist in designing and delivering extraordinary experiences to reward and recognise winners, that is, top-ranking corporate executives whose performance was undeniably exceptional. For exceptional performance there was an exceptional reward, and so all standard itineraries, tours and packages were eschewed in favour of high-touch, inside-the-velvet-ropes moments that money alone could not buy.

From the outset, the core value proposition of the DMC was rooted in destination knowledge and connections, layered with an appreciation and understanding of the process by which qualifiers actually ended up in a destination in the first place. DMCs knew they were not dealing with tourists. They were dealing with individuals who had earned this trip.

The sector has faced more than its fair share of change, disruption and evolution across the past five decades. The advent of the internet in the nineties made destination information readily available, twenty-four seven and frictionless, reducing at least the perceived need to consult a local expert. Corporate procurement policies in the noughties demanded disintermediation, pushing one intermediary or the other out of the supply chain. Technology forced DMCs to add service offerings like online registration platforms, sometimes at the expense of the local knowledge that was their original differentiator. Regulations around health and safety, sustainability and DEI added a compliance dimension that would have been unrecognisable to the sector’s founders. And shifting qualifier demographics led to radically different programme design, with significantly more choice, more free time and more high-production events.

We also saw the advent of marketing consortia, where solo DMCs in individual destinations went to market collectively under a shared brand, sometimes simply held together by one highly connected individual with a great industry profile. A newer variation is the global DMC concept, the one-stop shop where a buyer can access an entire world of destinations through a single HQ organisation, conducting all negotiations, at least initially, in one place.

Since Covid, there has been significant consolidation across the sector as legacy DMC personalities, having fought the good fight and put in their shifts, exit from their successful businesses, acquired by national, international, corporate or VC entities.

Given everything that has happened in the almost sixty years since the sector came into being, what is the value proposition of a DMC today? Has it moved beyond local expertise? What other value and values do DMCs bring to their customers, whether corporate end users or agency buyers, and to the broader business events industry, including other destination suppliers, National Tourist Offices and Convention and Visitor Bureaux?

This is exactly the question that SITE posed in its most recent Pulse Survey, conducted across April and May 2026, which received almost 300 submissions from buyers, DMCs and suppliers. Respondents were asked to rank their top five from a list of ten criteria that could hypothetically determine why a DMC would be chosen.

The full findings land in mid-June. But here is a taste of what is coming.

Despite fifty years of disruption, despite the internet, procurement pressures, technology overlays, the arrival of the global DMC model and VC-driven consolidation, one thing has not shifted. All supply chain stakeholders, and most notably those on the buyer side of the equation, still put local expertise at the very top of the list when selecting a DMC. Not margin. Not technology. Not compliance. Not national or global presence. Local expertise. First. By some distance.

But that headline, while compelling, does not tell the full story. Within the ten criteria we asked respondents to rank, the gaps between buyer expectations and DMC self-perception are, in at least two cases, striking. There is one criterion where buyers and DMCs are so far apart in their rankings that it raises genuine questions about how well the two sides of this relationship actually understand each other.

There is also a generational story buried in the data, one that suggests younger buyers weigh the criteria quite differently to their more experienced counterparts, and which will have real implications for how DMCs position and present themselves in the coming years.

And then there is the sustainability finding, which will surprise some and confirm what others have quietly suspected for a while.

The full SITE Pulse Survey report publishes in mid-June 2026. If you work in, or alongside, the DMC sector, you will want to read it.

Watch this space.