Destination Discourse

Destination Discourse
  • 5.0 (13)
  • Marketing
  • Updated Weekly

Destination Discourse is the essential podcast for DMOs and travel industry professionals who want to stay ahead in destination marketing, stewardship, and management. Hosted by industry experts Stuart Butler and Adam Stoker, each episode delves into the key issues and trends shaping the future of tourism. From cutting-edge innovations to the complex challenges of destination management, we offer thought-provoking insights, honest debates, and practical takeaways. Part love letter to the industry, part therapy session, and part user manual, Destination Discourse is your trusted source for real talk and expert advice. Join us to explore inspiring campaigns, hear from leading voices, and gain the insights you need to elevate your destination strategies.

  1. 5d ago

    101: Does Your DMO Need a Hive Mind? (Janette Roush)

    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.

  2. Sep 24

    100: After 100 Episodes, Which of Our Own Beliefs Didn't Survive?

    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.

  3. Sep 17

    99: Who's Actually the Theater Director of Your Destination? (Seth Lieber)

    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.

  4. Sep 10

    98: Are DMOs to Blame for Their Own Funding Crisis? (Bill Geist)

    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.

  5. Sep 3

    97: Are You Marketing a Destination, or Exporting a Culture? (Josh Albrecht)

    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.

  6. Aug 27

    96: Are You Optimizing Your Destination Into a Death Spiral? (Dan Janes)

    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.

  7. Aug 20

    95: When's the Last Time Your DMO Admitted a Campaign Bombed? (Dan Gibson)

    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.

  8. Aug 13

    94: Are LLM Visibility Audits Total BS? (Emily Zertuche)

    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.

See All (102)

5
out of 5
13 Ratings

About

Destination Discourse is the essential podcast for DMOs and travel industry professionals who want to stay ahead in destination marketing, stewardship, and management. Hosted by industry experts Stuart Butler and Adam Stoker, each episode delves into the key issues and trends shaping the future of tourism. From cutting-edge innovations to the complex challenges of destination management, we offer thought-provoking insights, honest debates, and practical takeaways. Part love letter to the industry, part therapy session, and part user manual, Destination Discourse is your trusted source for real talk and expert advice. Join us to explore inspiring campaigns, hear from leading voices, and gain the insights you need to elevate your destination strategies.

Information

  • Creator
    Destination Discourse
  • Years Active
    2024 - 2026
  • Episodes
    102
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Show Website
    Destination Discourse

You Might Also Like