People App: the stakeholder relationship platform built for destination management organizations

There's a moment in every destination manager's week that no software has ever captured. You're at a chamber breakfast and you learn that the couple who bought the old inn are struggling to fill shoulder season. You run into Sarah from the kayak company at a networking event and she mentions she's been offered a role at the new resort. Ahmed at the tourism board pulls you aside to say he's planning to retire next spring (but keep it quiet for now).

I've had these conversations hundreds of times and the thing I kept noticing is that the people who are great at this job carry an extraordinary amount of knowledge in their heads. You know your destination better than any dashboard can show you, because you know the people, not just the businesses.

With Whereabouts, relationships travel with people, not businesses. That's not just a tagline, it's the core insight behind everything we built in the Whereabouts People App. The person who just moved from the kayak company to the new resort is still the same person you've spent three years building a relationship with. The challenge is that most tools treat her as a "contact" tethered to a business account, and when she moves, that history evaporates. We thought that was worth solving.

In case this is your first time here: Whereabouts is the simple tourism CRM built for DMOs and CVBs. Today we’re talking about one of its features, the People App. 

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The problem with using a generic CRM for destination management 

You already know the options out there. Legacy destination platforms like Simpleview were built for large convention bureaus tracking meeting planner pipelines. They think in "accounts” and “leads," where the person is secondary to the business. 

Generic CRMs like HubSpot and Salesforce are powerful, but built for sales teams closing deals at scale, not destination managers building community relationships. Both Simpleview and generic CRMs require months of implementation or expensive customization to get anywhere close to what you actually need.

At Whereabouts, our mantra is know your destination, make it known. Making it known is the marketing side, and we have tools for that. But “knowing your destination” starts with knowing the people behind the organizations. Here's how the People App does that.

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Whereabouts People App: features built for DMO stakeholder management 

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Profiles that stay with the person, not the business  

In the People App, every individual gets a profile connected to their business listing. Contact information autofills from the directory, saving you time and typos. But the profile belongs to the person — so when Sarah moves to the new resort, her history, notes, and relationship with your organization stay intact. She simply gets linked to a new business. You never lose the thread.

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Stakeholder segmentation with built-in and custom tags 

The app’s built-in tags let you sort people into lists by role, region, or sector. If you need something specific, you can create custom tags for whatever categories make sense for your destination. But the real power is what you do with those tagged lists once you have them. With Whereabouts, you can use a tag to create your member communications list, and send them direct messages using Broadcasts. Pull together your annual conference attendees, or generate a billing list for membership fees. Tags are how you go from "we have a list of contacts" to "we can actually act on what we know about our community."

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Relationship timeline: a full history of every interaction  

The timeline feature in the People App tracks your conversations and notes on time-stamped cards. When your colleague has a phone call with Markus about his new seasonal offering, they log it. When you run into Lisa at an event and she mentions she's closing for renovations next winter, you make a note and @mention a teammate who needs to know. Over time, each profile becomes a living record of the relationship, what was discussed, what was promised, and what needs follow-up. A new hire could open any profile on day one and understand the relationship without spending months building that knowledge from scratch.

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Self-service stakeholder profiles: let business owners update their own listings  

Invite stakeholders to manage their own profile in Whereabouts. A business owner can log in, claim their business, and update their own information hours, photos, descriptions, contact details. Think about how much of your team's week gets consumed chasing listing updates, verifying business hours before a holiday weekend, or manually entering information the operator already has on hand. This shifts that work to the people who know the information best, and gets your team back to the relationship work that actually moves your destination forward.

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Inbound opportunity tracking, built right in. 

Connect Whereabouts to your website forms, and every new inquiry automatically becomes a person in the system, tagged by form type, visible to your whole team. Visitor guide requests, magazine advertising inquiries, relocation interest, conference and event RFPs: they all flow into the same workspace where you're already managing your stakeholders. Notify team members to follow up, check items off on the timeline, and make sure nothing sits unanswered. No extra software, no complicated integrations.

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How Whereabouts connects your people, businesses, and communications 

This is the part that's hard to appreciate until you're inside the system: everything in Whereabouts is connected. Want to communicate with a group of people? Use the Broadcasts app to send messages and track who opened them. Want to see which businesses a person is associated with? The Directory app manages all of your business listings, and the People App links directly to them. Need to pull a report on stakeholder engagement? It's all drawing from the same data. There's no exporting from one tool and importing into another, no syncing between systems that weren't built to talk to each other. It's one integrated platform where every app is aware of everything else.

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Whereabouts is a purpose-built CRM for DMOs and CVBs—because we’ve been there too. 

Whereabouts exists because we've been on the other side of this problem. We've submitted listings to clunky portals, managed stakeholder relationships out of spreadsheets, and watched destination managers spend more time fighting their software than doing the work they're great at. The People App came from that experience: purpose-built for the way destination management actually works, not adapted from something that was designed for a different industry.

The People App is a reflection of what we believe destination management actually is: knowing your community, connecting with the humans who make it run, and making sure that knowledge compounds across your entire organization. It's not about replacing the person who knows everyone. It's about giving them a system worthy of everything they know.

If your current tools track businesses but not the people behind them, you're managing a directory. Whereabouts helps you manage a destination.

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