Destination Discourse

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.