Recently, Global DMC Partners, the largest global network of Destination Management Companies (DMCs), hosted their fourth annual Peer Exchange in Boulder, Colorado to foster education, learning, and best practice sharing within their partnership of over 65 independently-owned DMCs. 40 DMC members – varying from DMC owners to sales, operations, and creative staff—spent two days brainstorming on ways to enhance their individual DMC operations and Global DMC Partners’ network-wide services. Denver-based DMC Partner, Realize Colorado, assisted Global DMC Partners with co-hosting the event locally.

Starting with the inaugural Peer Exchange in 2015, Global DMC Partners has offered their DMC members a unique education opportunity within the meetings and events industry. Catherine Chaulet, President of Global DMC Partners, stated, “There are numerous benefits of the Peer Exchange, and the first is that it provides all levels of DMC employees – not just DMC owners – a collaborative space to learn best business practices and share creative ideas with no competition around. It also allows Global DMC Partners to educate our DMC Partners on current trends and regulations in the industry, which is ultimately a huge benefit to our clients and the larger meetings and events industry.”  

Global Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) was an area of focus at the Peer Exchange to benchmark the success of Global DMC Partners’ GDPR Education Initiative, which launched earlier in 2018 to foster awareness, education, and global implementation of data protection processes within their partnership. Eighty-eight percent of the network’s DMCs have implemented changes in their data storage and sharing processes, and during the Peer Exchange, attendees shared their DMC’s best practices for data security.

Business and competitive trends – such as an increase in sales lead volume and short turnaround times – were identified in a pre-event survey sent to the DMC Partners and shared during the Peer Exchange with participants. Many of the interactive roundtable discussions revolved around technology, where Peer Exchange attendees shared insight on valuable online tools and mobile apps to aid in their DMC’s event management and creative content creation processes.

Chaulet said, “No other group offers this type of education to all levels of employees at independently-owned DMCs, contributing to the betterment of the DMC industry and ongoing education within the meetings and events industry. I firmly believe that our network is the DMC industry’s strongest thanks to the annual Peer Exchange and the extraordinary collective knowledge of our members.”