Destination Discourse

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.