Destination Discourse

This is part one of a two-part reaction to episode 103, where a panel of leading destination agencies agreed on two big things: AI is commoditizing tactical execution, and the DMO procurement process is broken. What they didn't settle was what comes next. Stuart Butler and Adam Stoker pick up those threads and try to move from diagnosis to solutions - with part two digging into where they disagreed with the panel.

If DMOs can bring more execution in-house, the real question becomes how to value and pay for strategic thinking - and no pricing model for that exists yet. Stuart and Adam take on an RFP process that treats creative partners like toilet paper and lawn care, judges the future by the past, and asks agencies to give away their best ideas for free. They work through alternatives: paid sprints with finalists, an approved vendor bench with annual scorecards, initiative-based partnerships instead of agency-of-record retainers, and incentive structures where agencies take on real risk for a meaningful upside tied to the right objectives.

Plus, Stu's News: the Tesla Roadster launch, and the AI-generated deepfake Elon livestreams that outranked the real event on YouTube - and what that means for trust in official channels.

Bottom Line: None of these fixes work while DMO incentives reward spending the budget instead of producing outcomes. If AI handles the doing, DMOs need to get clear on what they're actually buying from their agencies - and build relationships where everybody only wins if everybody wins.

Every DMO says it wants community partners, yet most ignore the one institution already moving thousands of people into their destination every year. Kristen Adamo, President and CEO of Go Providence, joins Stuart Butler and Adam Stoker to argue that local colleges and universities are an untapped engine for both visitation and political protection.

Kristen explains how city budget pressure on tax-exempt schools - through payment-in-lieu-of-taxes (PILOT) negotiations - has opened the door for DMOs. Her team launched "Providence Hearts Brown," a partner campaign that became a citywide rallying cry after a tragedy on campus, and hosted Brown's roughly 300 internal meeting planners on a holiday site tour to win conferences. Stuart shares how Visit Myrtle Beach works with Coastal Carolina University and Horry Georgetown Technical College on workforce pipelines, culinary events and a marching band activation in London. Adam challenges DMOs to drop the fight over credit, sponsor college athletics and recognize that NIL now affects a school's ability to draw visitors. The group also covers parents weekend, campus tours, alumni capture and fam tours for elected officials.

Bottom Line: Your local university already moves visitors and holds influence at every table you need. DMOs that partner with it build both a visitor pipeline and a coalition that will defend their funding.

For the first time ever, four of destination marketing's biggest agency partners sat down together, on the record, to talk openly about where this industry is headed. Dan Janes of KHM, Laura Libby of Miles Partnership, Barbara Karasek of Paradise Advertising and Craig Compagnone of MMGY Global join Stuart and Adam for the kind of candid conversation that usually only happens in conference hallways.

Nothing was off the table. Why only about 20% of DMOs have any AI roadmap, and how agencies are closing the gap between super users and reluctant adopters. Why procurement processes built for defense contracts grade strategic partners like toilet paper and lawn care. Why, in a room of 225 DMO leaders at ESTO, 80% had an agency of record and not one would say they loved theirs. And why the addiction to vanity metrics and heads-in-beds KPIs leaves DMOs exposed when their funding is questioned.

The panel agrees AI is commoditizing the doing, which shifts an agency's value to strategy, flexibility and shared risk. Each guest closes by waving a magic wand: modernize the legislation, rethink the funding model, privatize the DMO, redefine the AOR, and lead with unbridled optimism.

Bottom Line: The DMO and its agency partners are facing the same existential question - prove your value or lose your funding. The ones who drop the transactional mindset, share risk and align around community outcomes instead of vanity metrics will come out the other side stronger.

Luxury hotels keep going up. Affordable housing doesn't. As destinations chase the top of the K-shaped economy, the residents who staff the front desks and pour the pints are getting priced out - and without them, the luxury experience falls apart too.

Longtime listener Shannon Lowery, formerly of Visit Savannah and now living in Dublin, brings the thesis: the K-shaped economy isn't new, it's the same problem in a different costume on both sides of the Atlantic. Stuart opens with Stu's News on Hook & Barrel being named TripAdvisor's No. 1 casual dining restaurant in the U.S., and what its surprise-and-delight welcome and signature bourbon bacon teach every business about standing out. The group debates whether great experiences can be built for the bottom of the K, and whether businesses should market based on where their customers sit on it.

Then it gets practical. What can a DMO actually do about workforce, housing, transportation and childcare when it shouldn't lead any of them? Stuart makes the case for a seat at every table, Shannon pushes for real hospitality training partnerships with local schools, and Adam floats a hospitality worker perks program that scares Stuart.

Bottom Line: Your visitors' experience is only as good as the locals who deliver it. DMOs don't have to own every problem, but they have to be at the table, and be willing to trade credit for impact.

Every DMO generates a constant stream of intelligence - agency reports, meeting transcripts, sales calls, partner conversations - and most of it ends up trapped in someone's inbox or a folder nobody can find. What if all of it fed one central brain?

Janette Roush of Brand USA returns (jingle included) to explain the "hive mind" concept, inspired by Y Combinator's AI-first restructuring, where every input flows to one place and the humans' job is to add to it and extract from it. She walks through the version she built at Brand USA: Claude indexed monthly reports from 15 international offices stored in Box, so anyone can now ask questions across months and markets. Nobody had to change how they worked.

Adam raises the hard question: permissions. How do you keep sensitive data like salaries out of the wrong hands? Janette explains why an index works like a librarian rather than an all-knowing oracle, why that beats a vector database for finding facts, and how connectors can mirror each user's existing access. Plus, Stu's News on ChatGPT 6 and whether anyone can still catch the frontier labs.

Bottom Line: AI is only as good as the context it can reach. Pick one place where information is siloed, start there, and get deliberate about how you store and name things. Discipline breeds freedom.

Two years, 100 episodes, and zero preparation. In the first-ever live edition of Destination Discourse, Stuart Butler and Adam Stoker take audience questions in real time and put their own positions on trial.

Adam explains why he moved from championing owned media to arguing that earned media now carries the most weight, because answer engines value third-party conversation above everything else. Stuart argues DMOs should focus less on owning the conversation and more on stimulating word of mouth, from reviews to Reddit.

Then it's the agency-client relationship. When Adam asked 225 people at ESTO who loved their agency of record, not a single hand went up. He argues both sides are unhappy because agencies get paid for hands, not brains. Stuart pushes back on agency bloat and event spending, and on DMOs that use agencies as scapegoats. They also cover surveying staff, stakeholders, residents and visitors, hiring for aptitude and attitude over experience, and why being kind matters more than being nice.

Bottom Line: If you believe exactly what you did two years ago, you haven't been paying attention. The DMOs and agencies that thrive will be the ones willing to challenge their own assumptions, and to say unspoken expectations out loud before they turn into resentments.

Destinations International's 2025 Destination Next study says DMOs should stop just promoting the visitor experience and start owning it. Seth Lieber, founder of Seth Lieber Creative and a former DMO and theater professional, joins Stuart and Adam to make that case - using an extended theater metaphor where the destination is a production and someone has to direct it.

Stuart and Adam push back. If the DMO is expected to direct the show, why does it have zero authority over the actors - the municipalities, Main Street orgs, promoters, and businesses that actually deliver the experience? Adam floats a blunt fix: merge tourism and economic development into one department. Seth counters with a real model, Align Southern Indiana, a nonprofit that coordinates DMOs, chambers, and economic development without one director.

They also stress-test Seth's 15-point "Visitor Readiness Framework," a checklist for vetting events before a DMO backs them. Stuart and Adam worry it would've killed Coachella, Bonnaroo, and Conway's "City of Halloween" - all of which took years of rough, money-losing runs before becoming hits.

They close with an idea Myrtle Beach is testing: instead of waiting for promoters to pitch the destination, what if the DMO issued an RFP - offering incentives like guaranteed promotional spend - to recruit events it wants?

Bottom Line: Every DMO is told to own the visitor experience. Almost none have the authority to direct it - and this episode never resolves whether that's a structure to fix or a limit to accept.

A city council in Georgia just replaced a high-performing DMO with a firm that faked its client list - and barely anyone with standing pushed back. Returning guest Bill Geist (Board Leadership for Destinations, making his 3rd appearance on DD) joins Stuart Butler and Adam Stoker to unpack what actually happened in College Park, GA, and why it's a warning sign for every DMO watching its funding get more precarious. A recent LinkedIn poll found 81% of destination marketers say funding protection is their #1 problem - more than double the 42% who said the same in last year's Destination International Futures Study.

But this conversation pushes past the funding-under-attack narrative to a harder question: are DMOs actually driving the value they claim, or have years of "outcome theater" and vanity metrics left the industry unable to prove it? Stuart, Adam, and Bill dig into self-preservation vs. impact, why some DMOs are shielding community-facing work through 501c3 foundations and regional collaboratives, and whether destination leaders should sit down with their harshest critics - or even run for office themselves.

Bottom Line: DMOs aren't just losing funding fights to hostile politicians. Many are losing them because they've spent years defending their budgets instead of proving their impact - and that's exactly what makes them easy to replace.

Most DMOs still ask how to get outsiders to notice their destination. Josh Albrecht, CMO of VISIT Milwaukee, argues that's the wrong question - a DMO's real job is to export culture until the destination becomes part of someone's identity, the way his dad stayed loyal to Coke even when Coke wasn't on the menu.

Josh walks through how Milwaukee tested that thesis: an Adidas sneaker collab that sold out online in 20 minutes (75% local buyers), a homegrown TV show driving visitation growth in markets like St. Louis and Kansas City with zero added ad spend, and a $0 partnership with Dwyane Wade's scholarship foundation that became a fully organic campaign.

Adam pushes back on the sequencing: if the mandate is getting outsiders to visit, why spend so much time and budget on culture before ever reaching them? He also shares a gut-check moment from a hometown parade where every local business showed up - except the DMO.

The episode opens with Stu's News on two unsettling data points: fewer than 1% of users click through Google's AI Overviews, and restaurants without a website are over 50% less likely to surface in AI-generated recommendations.

Bottom Line: If your destination doesn't have a culture people are proud enough to wear, buy, or show up for, no amount of outbound marketing will build the loyalty that actually drives visitation.

Stuart and Adam open with Dubai's viral resident-referral campaign - turning locals into paid travel advocates - before returning Destie Dan Janes (KHM Agency) lays out his thesis: DMO boards have never been more anxious about their budgets, right as the fundamentals of travel demand have never looked stronger.

Dan explains why travel spending is economically inelastic, why an AI-driven "vacation dividend" is coming, and why the industry-wide shift toward harvesting existing demand (branded search, retargeting, lower-funnel conversion) instead of creating new demand is exactly backwards at exactly the wrong time. The group digs into the K-shaped economy reshaping who travels and what they expect, and why destinations need a real product-development strategy instead of just a promotion budget.

Stuart pushes back on the legislative risk of loosening restricted tourism funding, and the three debate how DMOs shed the "protect the budget at all costs" instinct before a funding crisis forces the issue - including Stuart's own shift at Visit Myrtle Beach toward a mission built around visitation, economic growth, and shaping the destination experience, not just promotion.

Bottom Line: If your marketing budget is optimized entirely around harvesting demand someone else already created, you're winning today by borrowing against tomorrow. The DMOs investing in new demand - and the product to back it up - are built to survive what AI is about to do to travel planning.

Every DMO panel is a highlight reel - so why does no one ever mention what didn't work? Returning guest Dan Gibson (Visit McMinnville) joins Stuart Butler and Adam Stoker to make the case that destination marketing's biggest blind spot isn't failure - it's the refusal to talk about it.

They dig into how vanity metrics let DMOs claim success on their own terms, why agencies get punished the moment a campaign underperforms (even though hiring only risk-averse agencies just guarantees more sameness), and why the sea of sameness in destination marketing exists precisely because nobody is closing doors through real failure. Adam makes the case that opportunity cost compounds quietly for years - the campaigns you never tried are costing you more than the ones that flopped.

Stuart walks through Visit Myrtle Beach's own string of failed podcast launches before Charlie's Place became an award-winning hit, and the group lands on a framework for talking to boards about risk: lead with what you learned, not what went wrong. Dan also explains why resulting - judging a decision by its outcome instead of the thinking behind it - is wrecking how DMOs evaluate their own work.

Bottom Line: If your organization can't point to a recent, real failure, you're not innovating - you're coasting, and the compounding cost of that caution is bigger than any single bad campaign.

Every vendor in the industry suddenly has an "AI visibility score" to sell you. Stuart Butler and Adam Stoker dig into whether GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) is real measurement or an expensive mirage, joined by repeat guest Emily Zertuche, CDME, founder of Zertura (formerly Visit Corpus Christi), in her first episode as a vendor.

The trio unpacks a Fast Company piece questioning whether GEO is real. Emily explains why most "visibility scores" fall short of basic statistical rigor - testing a prompt three times isn't a sample, it's noise. She cites IAB's May guidance acknowledging there's no real standard yet for measuring non-deterministic LLM outputs, and lays out what rigor actually looks like: repeated sampling, confidence intervals, margin of error - not a single score.

Stuart argues the industry chases feel-good numbers that don't move demand or economic impact, while Adam pushes back that writing off an entire vendor category discourages the experimentation destinations need. All three land on a better path: quality scores, sentiment tracking, net promoter score for visitors and residents, and treating visitor experience as the real driver behind citations and LLM recommendations.

Bottom Line: There's no silver-bullet AI visibility score today. Ask vendors to show their methodology and confidence intervals before you buy in, and keep measuring real experience and sentiment - that's what actually earns citations.

Stuart Butler and Adam Stoker step outside destination marketing to spot the trends reshaping consumer attention right now - and don't even agree on which ones matter most.

Adam opens with Reddit, still one of the most under-used channels in marketing. He breaks down how a fitness app built a 16,000-person community by posting like a real Redditor instead of an advertiser, plus stats on how much Reddit shapes purchase decisions and LLM search results.

Stuart argues the value equation has flipped: consumers aren't chasing low price, they want affordable indulgence. He points to Taco Bell's "Luxe" value menu and Walmart's new premium-positioned budget line as proof that framing now beats price.

Adam makes the case for nostalgia and genealogical travel, especially for millennials starting to feel old and craving connection to their past.

Stuart pushes DMOs to ditch age-based targeting for psychographics and life stage, using the non-alcoholic beer brand Athletic as an example of ignoring demographics entirely.

Adam explains why low-production, authentic content is outperforming polished hero videos on social - and why budgets need to flip.

Stuart closes with the biggest shift: marketers no longer control product perception, audience, or distribution. The move now is collaboration over promotion, not ownership of every channel.

Bottom Line: The destinations that win next aren't the ones with the biggest budget or sharpest demographic targeting - they're the ones willing to show up authentically in conversations they don't control.

In this episode of Destination Discourse, Stuart Butler and Adam Stoker recap Adam's latest CMO Jam - a live, candid roundtable with six DMO marketing leaders - and dig into the ideas that stuck.

The biggest one: panelist Christian Mingle pushed back on the word "relevance," calling it table stakes - do people know we exist? He argued DMOs should chase significance instead: do we actually move the needle for our destination? The framing reshaped the rest of the discussion.

They also cover the agency model's unraveling. Multiple CMO Jam panelists said they'd fired their agency of record in favor of specialists hired for specific problems, as in-house teams get more capable with AI. Adam argues agencies must shift from selling execution to selling strategy and partnership, and predicts real disruption over the next three years.

The conversation closes on budget: money is moving from paid media into content, but not owned content. Stuart makes the case for incentivizing residents and locals to create authentic destination content instead of DMOs producing and owning it themselves - trading control for reach and distribution.

Adam also announces DMO Jam, a new recurring mastermind cohort for destination marketers, expanding on the CMO Jam format.

Bottom Line: Relevance just means people know you exist. Significance means you can prove impact - and that's the bar DMOs, and their agencies, now have to clear.

AI is already cutting DMOs out of the trip-planning conversation - and Will Wright (Destination Core) thinks most destination websites are wasting the one asset that could save them: real local knowledge.

Will's thesis: DMOs are sitting on one of the most powerful editorial assets in travel - trusted, local, authentic knowledge - but keep acting like paid listing sites instead of genuine local experts. His fix is a layered approach to data. Below the "hygiene" facts (hours, room counts, amenities) that OTAs already own, there's a "vibe" layer - subjective, experiential judgment that only comes from people who've actually been there. He argues DMOs could become an accreditation layer: not hosting reviews themselves, but vouching for which ones are legitimate, like a digital version of the vanishing visitor information center.

Stuart pushes back hard - member businesses will revolt if you start scoring them, and scraping reviews off TripAdvisor and Expedia runs straight into their terms of service. The two go back and forth on whether accreditation is realistic or just a nice idea that dies on contact with stakeholders.

Also covered: Claude's new consumer-facing trip-planning feature and what it signals about AI disintermediating DMO websites entirely, and why DMOs may have been collecting first-party data for the wrong reasons all along.

Bottom Line: Your website's opening-hours-and-amenities data is already commodity information. The differentiator is the layer only your team can provide - genuine, experienced, local judgment - and if you're not building that, an AI or an OTA will fill the gap for you.

In this episode of Destination Discourse, Stuart Butler and Adam Stoker tackle a question most DMOs would rather avoid: why should AI ever trust your content over anyone else's? Stuart's thesis - DMOs have grown addicted to equitable treatment of every stakeholder, from alphabetized hotel lists to identical exposure for every attraction, even when real-world demand isn't equal.

The conversation opens with Stu's News: Meta's new AI-powered search inside Facebook, now synthesizing answers instead of pointing to profiles, plus the controversy over Meta's "Muse" image tool training on public photos - both signals of how fast AI is reshaping the search landscape DMOs operate in.

Stuart's example: if Ripley's Aquarium pulls 5x the visitation of Ripley's Believe It or Not, why promote both the same? He argues DMOs need a firewall between promotional and editorial content, like old-school newspapers. Adam pushes back: the fix isn't softer language, it's stakeholder education - clear performance criteria (a review-score threshold, say 4.2+) and the courage to tell underperforming members they won't be featured until the experience improves.

They also flag a measurement problem: referral traffic to stakeholder sites, the metric most DMOs lean on, is heading toward zero as bookings move inside closed AI ecosystems.

Bottom Line: LLMs don't reward promoters, they reward trust - and no DMO is entitled to it.

Dan Flores, Head of Tourism at Satisfi Labs, joins Stuart Butler and Adam Stoker with an uncomfortable premise: most DMOs are still treating AI like a gadget instead of a coworker. Dan explains why "we need AI on the website" isn't a strategy, and why organizations without a written, department-by-department plan can't assign ownership, measure ROI, or know if a tool is actually working.

The conversation turns tactical fast. Stuart shares that Visit Myrtle Beach is benchmarking employee AI comfort and effectiveness through survey data before hiring a dedicated internal AI engineer, treating the role like a new department alongside IT and HR. Dan describes how Satisfi Labs froze every team for 30 days to standardize tools company-wide, then had to walk back over-automation once token costs spiked. Adam draws the line between consumer-facing AI strategy and internal efficiency, and shares how one Claude conversation delivered a 19-point LinkedIn audit that turned into 5-6x engagement growth.

Before the AI talk, Stuart and Adam dig into the viral wave of international visitors documenting their first trips to America during the World Cup, and why every DMO should study those videos as a reminder of what makes their own destination remarkable to outsiders.

Bottom Line: If your DMO can't name who owns AI, what problem it's solving, and how you'll measure success, you don't have a strategy. You have a tool nobody's accountable for.

Most DMOs talk about economic impact. Chris Fair, CEO of Resonance Co and author of the annual Best Cities report, talks about something harder to measure — and more consequential: whether a city is actually lovable.

In this episode, Fair shares data from Resonance's perception vs. performance analysis across hundreds of destinations. The gap between how a place performs on objective metrics and how people actually feel about it is where most DMO strategies fall apart. DMOs that focus narrowly on defending their budget and organizational territory are becoming obsolete — while cities that integrate tourism, economic development, and community quality into a unified lovability strategy are pulling ahead.

The conversation gets into why the traditional DMO model is structurally misaligned with how people actually choose destinations today, what the Best Cities data reveals about which markets are winning and why, and what it would take for a DMO to genuinely lead a city's positioning rather than just promote it.

Bottom Line: DMOs that protect their narrow lane are engineering their own irrelevance. The ones that survive will be the ones willing to own the harder question - not just "are people visiting?" but "do people love this place?" - and build the cross-sector partnerships to do something about it.

Most DMOs measure success in website clicks and visitor guide downloads. Gary Sherwin has spent 20 years at Visit Newport Beach asking a harder question: if you disappeared tomorrow, would your stakeholders call you essential - or just convenient?

This episode covers the implications of Google I/O, where itinerary builders and shopping carts inside search may soon make the DMO website an afterthought, through to Gary's case that technology disruption has never been the real threat. He's seen the internet, the OTAs, and now AI - and DMOs that survived all three did it by becoming indispensable to their communities.

That means funnel reviews where hotels open their full pipeline and you strategize on closing business together. It means crashing the BAFTAs in London without asking permission and building an event PBS eventually broadcasts to millions. It means a private funding model where major hotels voluntarily give Visit Newport Beach 5% of revenue on 10-year deals - because they've decided it's worth it.

Stuart and Adam push back on the Google question, debate agentic search, and ask whether DMOs are harvesting demand their partners should be converting themselves.

Bottom Line: The technology disruption is real, but it isn't the existential threat. The threat is DMOs that stay convenient instead of becoming essential. Gary's prescription: build relationships deep enough that your stakeholders fight for you, not just renew with you.

Stuart Butler and Adam Stoker welcome back Dan Holowack (CrowdRift) and Janette Roush (Brand USA) for a tactical deep dive into how DMOs are actually using AI day-to-day.

The episode opens with a provocative Stu's News: 92% of respondents to an AI-enthusiast newsletter poll said they want more regulation — a number that surprises even the hosts. The group unpacks the growing backlash, from commencement speech boos to younger generations feeling shut out of the American dream, and why communicating purpose may matter more than promising prosperity.

The conversation then shifts to practical tools. Janette and Dan break down voice-to-text tools like Monologue and WhisperFlow — how they outperform traditional dictation, boost speed 3–4x, and why building the habit is the hardest part. The group also digs into Granola and the Plod recording device: how Brand USA deployed them across their entire IPW team, creating a shared, queryable knowledge base from every meeting.

Stuart shares how building Claude skills has cut his podcast publishing time nearly in half, and the group challenges DMOs to audit their workflows and identify what AI can automate today.

Bottom Line: The tools are here, they work, and the gap between DMOs using 20% of AI's potential and those using 70% is growing fast. Start with voice, start with meetings, and start building skills — the technology is no longer the barrier.