Mayor Wants ‘Visit Duluth’ Back In Control Of Tourism Marketing After Arizona Firm

DULUTH, Minn. – As the city of Duluth gets ready to welcome in its new tourism marketing agency, Madden Media of Arizona, for the next two years, Mayor Roger Reinert told FOX 21 Monday that the goal during this new contract is to build Visit Duluth back up to a Destination Marketing Organization (DMO) that will once again handle all of the city’s marketing and the financial decisions around that – not City Hall.

Visit Duluth did just that for more than 80 years before former mayor Emily Larson sent that contract through an RFP process, which ended up going to Bellmont Partners out of the Twin Cities.

Mayor Reinert explained how the tourism marketing process unfolded and where it is going.

“Three years ago, a decision was made to bring it inside City Hall. There was actually a new city staff position created, funded with tourism taxes. [I] Strongly disagreed with that. I felt City Hall are not tourism marketing experts. Visit Duluth is,” according to Reinert.  “They’re the Destination Marketing Organization.”

So, I know there was a lot of controversy around this process, and each time I said, and that’s why we don’t want to do it in City Hall, everything here becomes overly political. And frankly, again … we’re experts on streets and utilities and public safety and parks and libraries. That’s what local government does. We don’t do tourism marketing,” Reinert explained. “We set up a process to award this contract because we had to. [In] probably just over a year from now, the process will start again. It will be led by Visit Duluth, by industry experts and stakeholders in one of our most important economic sectors.”