One DMO tried HubSpot, Mailchimp, and a standalone member portal. None of them solved the real problem.
How Ontario's Highlands Tourism Organization unified their destination management with Whereabouts and turned their members into active participants.
Ontario's Highlands Tourism Organization (OHTO) covers one of Ontario's largest and most diverse tourism regions. Their mandate is enormous: visitor marketing, product development, investment attraction, research, and workforce development. Their team? Two full-time staff and a network of contractors.
For years, OHTO cobbled together a patchwork of tools to manage their nearly 1,000 member businesses.
"We went through a number of options," says Kasey Rogerson, Director of Industry Development at OHTO. "We used Mailchimp, HubSpot, and another service provider for a separate member portal that people could use, but it didn't have email marketing or CRM capabilities. . We were using a patchwork of apps and platforms to meet our membership management needs."
Why HubSpot doesn’t work for DMOs
HubSpot was the most ambitious attempt. On paper, it had everything. In practice, it had far too much.
“There are several service providers, like HubSpot, that we found offered more services and products than what we needed,” says Kasey. “The cost to get the small amount we needed—it was just too much.”
This is a pattern familiar to DMOs across North America. Enterprise CRMs like HubSpot and Simpleview pack in features designed for sales teams and large marketing departments. DMOs pay premium prices for platforms where they use a fraction of the capability, and inevitably, one person becomes the de facto "CRM person" while the rest of the team disengages entirely.
OHTO needed the opposite: something any team member could pick up and use without specialized training.
What a CRM built for tourism actually looks like
OHTO was one of the earliest adopters of Whereabouts, so early, in fact, that their feedback helped shape the product itself.
“We saw the vision of Whereabouts and its potential to offer us the ideal platform we needed,” says Kasey. “One of our greatest challenges has been finding a CRM that would work for a regional destination marketing organization like OHTO. None truly fit our needs.”
What stood out immediately was the simplicity. Where other platforms required extensive onboarding and training programs, Whereabouts was intuitive from the start.
"It is very user friendly. It’s easy to navigate between apps and what you're trying to do," Kasey says.
“The training module and tutorials provided by the Whereabouts team were helpful with onboarding. It made it easy for me to bring members of our team into the fold, so it’s not only me managing the CRM.”
That last point matters. When a two-person team can get contractors and marketing partners up to speed quickly, the entire organization moves faster.
How to turn your member directory into a live SEO content engine
OHTO migrated their full database of roughly 1,000 businesses into Whereabouts. But the real breakthrough came when they connected Whereabouts to their consumer-facing website, ComeWander.
The integration meant visitor-facing businesses could now have a live profile page on ComeWander.ca, pulling directly from the Whereabouts directory. When an operator updates their hours, photos, or description, those changes sync to the consumer site automatically.
"That integration has been the biggest game changer," says Kasey. “We are now able to offer a live profile page for each individual member on ComeWander.ca so they can benefit from the website’s SEO while continuing to feed visitors the information they’re seeking and refine the path to purchase.”
The result? Members started claiming their listings and actively managing their own information.
“Our members have embraced having ownership of their business profiles and managing the information about their business that appears on our website. This transition has helped us ensure that business information is accurate and up to date.”
For smaller operators, those who might only have a Facebook page and no formal website, the Whereabouts-powered profile on ComeWander.ca offers something they couldn't build on their own: a credible landing page on a trusted regional tourism site.
“Having a presence on our regional tourism website gives visitors a level of trust and credibility in the offerings from a small business that may not have a strong digital presence,” Kasey explains. “Especially for new businesses who are starting out and don’t have strong SEO, this can help elevate them and even the playing field.”
Beyond surveys: measuring member engagement without asking for feedback
One of OHTO's ongoing challenges was measuring membership engagement and satisfaction with their programming. Feedback surveys had low response rates, making it difficult to know whether their programming was landing.
Whereabouts' Broadcast feature changed that equation. OHTO now sends targeted updates and resources directly to its membership database, including specific member segments, and can track member engagement and interactions with content in Whereabouts.
"Having that ability to push out the information and see the engagement from our membership directly, has helped us optimize our performance tracking and reporting.”
"One of the challenges was we don't have strong uptake in feedback surveys. So the best way we can monitor that is by seeing who actually engages with it. That's been a huge game changer," says Kasey.
OHTO has gone further, building out courses and online assessments using Articulate and distributing them through Whereabouts. They can see where members drop off, which content resonates, and adjust accordingly, all without sending another survey.
What's Next for OHTO: events, curated galleries, and deeper member integration
OHTO is now exploring Whereabouts' events calendar feature, something that was previously outside their scope entirely.
“Marketing events have been a challenge for our content marketing approach on ComeWander.ca,” says Kasey. “How do we curate all of the great community events happening across our entire region—a three-hour drive from one end to another—and ensure accurate, relevant, and timely information is being shared with visitors. With the Events app, we can now not only curate local tourism events but also effortlessly integrate them directly into ComeWander.ca in a way that aligns with our content marketing needs.”
They're also looking at curated widget galleries, pulling themed collections of operators directly from Whereabouts into editorial content on ComeWander, so that every story they tell links seamlessly to the businesses featured in it.
The bottom line: the right DMO platform does everything you need and nothing you don’t
OHTO's story is a familiar one for DMOs: small team, big mandate, and a graveyard of software that promised everything but delivered fragmentation. Whereabouts gave them a single platform built for the way destination organizations actually work, not a sales tool dressed up as a tourism solution.
"At OHTO, we see innovation and collaboration as key drivers for supporting rural tourism development,” says Kasey. “Using just one app—Whereabouts—we’ve been able to not only optimize our ability to engage our membership, but also better integrate our members with our consumer marketing engine, ComeWander.ca"
Ontario's Highlands Tourism Organization manages destination marketing and development for one of Ontario's largest tourism regions. Learn more at ComeWander.ca.
