DMOs are known as tourist boards, tourism authorities or "Convention and Visitors Bureaus".
Additionally, where a suitable infrastructure exists, they encourage event organizers to choose their location for meetings, incentives, conferences, and exhibitions, collectively abbreviated as MICE.
[1] However, in many cases, the observed decline in tourism following cutbacks to public-sector expenditures has motivated the tourism industry to create a private sector coalition in order to provide the functions of a DMO.
[3][4] With the arrival of the internet more and more Destination Management Companies adopted the term "visit" and added it as a prefix to their city or country name.
The phenomenon started in America in 1995 / 1996 and spread over the world with major organizations like the London Tourist Board adopting the concept after the turn of the century.