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.