Tourism RFPs: Revisiting and Revitalizing the Industry

A tourism RFP is a solicitation from a public or quasi-public travel organization for services that attract or serve visitors. That covers advertising and media buying, brand and creative campaigns, public relations, visitor research, websites and booking platforms, wayfinding, event production, shuttle services, and the food, beverage and retail operations that run inside parks and visitor sites.

The market is worth understanding because it is fragmented in an unusual way. The buyers are small organizations with large discretionary budgets, they are scattered across state, county and municipal levels, and a significant slice of the work is procured through a mechanism that is not an RFP at all. This guide covers who issues these solicitations, what they buy, where to find them and how the scoring differs from an ordinary services bid.

Who Issues Tourism RFPs?

There is no single tourism procurement office. The buyers sit at every level of government and in several quasi-public bodies.

• State tourism offices — usually a division of a state economic development or commerce department, buying advertising, creative, media planning, research and international representation. Their solicitations post to the state procurement portal, not the tourism site.
• Convention and visitors bureaus and destination marketing organizations — city and regional bodies, often funded by a lodging tax. They buy the same marketing services as states plus sales representation and convention services, and they post to their own websites.
• Convention centers and stadium authorities — venue operators buying event production, audiovisual, concessions, cleaning, security and technology, generally on multi-year operating contracts.
• Port and airport authorities — significant tourism buyers in their own right, contracting for terminal concessions, ground transportation, visitor information services and passenger experience work.
• State and national park systems — they procure lodging, food service, retail, campground operations, guided activities and equipment rental for visitors, and the National Park Service does so through concession prospectuses rather than conventional RFPs.
• Brand USA — the national destination marketing organization for the United States, which publishes its own requests for proposals, information and quotes on its website, covering work such as content and video production.
• City and county special-events offices — smaller but frequent buyers of festival production, staging, traffic management, temporary staffing and shuttle operations around recurring annual events.

What Do Tourism RFPs Buy?

The scopes split into three families, and vendors usually fit one of them cleanly. Marketing and communications work covers brand campaigns, creative, media planning and buying, public relations, social and content production, and international representation in source markets. This is the highest-value category and the most competitive, because national agencies bid against regional ones.

Research and technology covers visitor profile studies, economic impact analysis, destination websites, booking and reservation platforms, digital wayfinding and data dashboards. Operations covers everything a visitor physically touches: transportation and shuttles, guided tours, equipment rental, food and beverage, retail, visitor center staffing, cleaning and event logistics. Operational contracts attract fewer bidders than marketing ones, which is worth knowing if you are choosing where to compete.

How Do Concession Contracts Differ From Service Contracts?

This is the part of the tourism market that trips up experienced bidders. In an ordinary service contract, the agency pays you to perform work. In a concession contract, the direction of payment reverses: you are granted the right to operate a commercial service for visitors, you collect the revenue from those visitors, and you pay a franchise fee to the government.

The National Park Service solicits these through a prospectus, published on its concessions pages, which describes the opportunity, the facilities involved, the required investment and the minimum franchise fee. Some are also announced on SAM.gov. Your proposal is judged on your operating plan, your financial capacity and your ability to maintain government-owned facilities, so the financial section carries far more weight than it would in a marketing bid. State park systems, airports and stadium authorities use similar structures under their own names.

Where Are Tourism RFPs Posted?

In more places than any one person can watch. State tourism office bids sit on the state's central procurement portal. Bureaus, convention centers, airport authorities and park systems each post to their own procurement page. Federal opportunities are on SAM.gov, park concessions on the National Park Service concessions site, and Brand USA on its own. A vendor covering three states is already monitoring dozens of sources.

Bid Banana searches 1.6 million bid pages across all 50 states, updated daily. Filter to tourism and hospitality and narrow by agency, state or NAICS code, then save the search so new matches arrive by email each morning. It is $49.99 a month or $479.99 a year, with a 7-day free trial.

Search the deliverable, not the industry. "Destination marketing," "media buying services," "visitor center," "shuttle services," "concession operations" and "event production" surface solicitations that a search for "tourism" never returns, because buyers title bids by what they are purchasing. Building and refining that term list is the substance of a good bid search strategy.

What Do Tourism Evaluators Look For?

Tourism buyers are accountable to boards, councils and often to the lodging businesses whose tax funds them, which shapes what earns points.

• Destination knowledge — evidence you understand this destination's actual visitors, seasons and competitive set. A campaign concept that could be dropped on any state loses to one built on their visitor data.
• Measurable return — the buyer has to justify the spend publicly, so say what you will measure, how, and how often you will report it. Vague promises of awareness score poorly against defined metrics.
• Named team — small tourism organizations care who they will actually work with day to day. Name the account lead and the working team, not just agency capabilities.
• Operational realism — on concessions and visitor services, show staffing at peak, how you handle seasonal hiring, and how you maintain facilities you do not own. This is where operating experience beats presentation.
• A price grounded in history — tourism budgets are public. Checking award data from previous contracts tells you the incumbent and the value before you build a proposal around a number the buyer was never going to approve.

How Do You Handle Seasonality in Tourism Bidding?

Tourism procurement runs ahead of the season it supports. A summer campaign is awarded in winter, a winter sports campaign in late summer, and operational contracts at parks and venues have to be signed and transitioned before peak visitation. That means solicitations appear in the destination's quiet months, which is exactly when a seasonal operator is least likely to be watching for them.

The fix is to decouple your bidding calendar from your operating calendar. Set standing searches so new solicitations reach you in your off-season, note the end date and renewal options of every contract you lose so you can prepare for the next cycle, and keep a maintained library of case studies, team biographies, insurance certificates and standard forms so that reusing content across bids takes days rather than weeks. Tourism contracts recur reliably; the advantage goes to whoever is ready when they do.