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Destination Discourse

Destination Discourse

Written by: Destination Discourse
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 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.

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Episodes
  • 63: What Questions Would You Ask a DMO If You Were New to the Industry? (Dustin Rowe)

    63: What Questions Would You Ask a DMO If You Were New to the Industry? (Dustin Rowe)
    Jan 8 2026
    Stuart and Adam start off completely off the rails, then do something they don’t usually do: hand the keys to their guest. Dustin Rowe, CEO of whatsgood.city, flips the script and asks the questions that a lot of people entering the industry are thinking but rarely get to ask out loud.

    This episode turns into a rapid-fire tour through the DMO reality: what the job actually is, why ROI is so hard to prove, how resident sentiment fits into the visitor economy, and where “marketing” ends and “product” begins.

    Dustin’s “Stu’s News”: the airline loyalty backlash

    Dustin brings a story that’s catching heat online: American Airlines no longer lets customers earn miles on Basic Economy (for new bookings). Adam doesn’t get the logic and argues it removes a reason to stay loyal. Stuart plays devil’s advocate and suggests the airline likely ran the numbers and decided the tradeoff was worth it, even if customers complain. Then Stuart admits he doesn’t actually like the change at all and was just enjoying the debate.

    What DMOs do, and why it’s hard to explain

    Dustin shares that friends and family often don’t understand what a DMO is, and the only time they notice is when public funding hits the news. Adam frames the DMO role as building a long-term, sustainable economic pillar for the community through tourism. Stuart admits the industry has a branding problem because “if you’ve seen one DMO, you’ve seen one DMO,” and that ambiguity could come back to bite. He describes DMOs as sitting at the intersection of government, residents, businesses, and stakeholders, protecting and growing the visitor economy while managing the balance between tourism’s positives and negatives.

    The ROI problem: marketing that doesn’t own the transaction

    Dustin asks the big one: how do you prove ROI on long-term projects like Traveling the Spectrum versus tactical channels like paid search and social ads? Stuart says it requires assumptions, stakeholder education, and defining what you can measure upfront—reach, earned media, cultural conversation, and anecdotal signals from surveys and visitor feedback. Adam adds his hunting versus farming analogy: stakeholders love “hunting” because it’s measurable, but “farming” builds residual value that can last for years, even decades.

    Backlash, risk, and the Reddit lesson

    Dustin asks whether DMOs have experienced marketing backlash. Adam says a lot of pushback is just anti-tourism sentiment in certain communities rather than controversy from creative. Stuart tells a story about two Reddit campaigns: one that leaned into AI satire and went viral in a good way, and another that tried to poke fun at Gen Z culture and got shut down quickly because it was perceived as punching down. The lesson: risk can pay off, but satire has rules.

    Locals vs visitors: are DMOs missing the resident opportunity?

    Dustin pushes on whether DMO content—especially event information—should be designed for locals as much as visitors. Stuart says Visit Myrtle Beach needs to do a better job talking to residents and building civic pride, especially around downtown events and community participation. Adam makes the case that residents are one of the biggest drivers of visitation because visiting friends and relatives is such a large portion of travel, and it’s backwards that many funding structures restrict in-market messaging. Stuart agrees residents matter, but argues DMOs shouldn’t try to do it alone; it takes a coordinated ecosystem with city, county, chambers, and partner organizations.

    Product vs marketing: what really drives reputation

    To wrap, Dustin asks how they think about destination product versus destination promotion. Stuart says the experience is the main thing—marketing can influence, but the on-the-ground product determines whether people return and tell friends. He argues DMOs should increasingly be involved in product and experience, not just promotion. Adam keeps it simple: as marketing sophistication increases, investment and focus on product should rise right alongside it.

    Closing

    They close with how to find Dustin and tease seeing people at February conferences. Then the conversation keeps going after the “official” outro with candid advice to Dustin on how to grow a vendor business in this industry: lean hard into testimonials, simple case studies, and asking for warm introductions—because trust and relationships are the real currency.
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    48 mins
  • 62: What Are Stuart Butler’s Predictions for Destination Marketing in 2026?

    62: What Are Stuart Butler’s Predictions for Destination Marketing in 2026?
    Jan 1 2026
    Stuart Butler and Adam Stoker kick off 2026 with a New Year’s episode built around Stuart’s “predictions” (not resolutions). They open with optimism (and a little healthy fear) about uncertainty, talk about the industry’s need for more honest conversations, invite listeners to two live appearances in Q1, and then dig into three big predictions for the destination marketing world in 2026: the DMO website won’t “die” this year (but the shift is real), consolidation will accelerate across vendors and DMOs, and experiences will increasingly outrank destinations as the primary travel motivator. Stu’s News Instead of a traditional news item, Stu’s News is an invitation: • Live appearance #1: South Carolina Governor’s Conference — Tuesday, February 10 (in Myrtle Beach, SC) • Live appearance #2: Destinations International Marcom Summit for Destinations — February 24–26 (they expect to speak on Thursday, February 26) • Stuart and Adam frame these as chances to bring real discourse to conference stages, pushing beyond “safe” programming and into the tougher conversations the industry needs. ⸻ The 3 predictions for 2026 1) AI won’t kill the DMO website in 2026 (but the era is changing) Stuart’s headline take: DMO websites won’t be “dead” within 12 months, but “it is the end of the beginning” for the traditional website-driven model. Key points discussed: • Humans are the bottleneck: capabilities are racing ahead, but adoption lags. • Website traffic decline is real, especially organic traffic, but much of what’s lost is low-value “simple Q&A” traffic now answered directly in search experiences. • DMOs shouldn’t panic, but they also shouldn’t pause preparation: start planting now (lean into conversational commerce and new user journeys). • Adam reframes it like an investment strategy: even if the website still performs, you diversify before the market shifts. 2) Massive consolidation is coming (vendors and DMOs) Stuart predicts consolidation on “both sides of the fence”: Vendor side • Budget pressure on DMOs squeezes agencies, platforms, and software providers. • Stuart argues the current ecosystem is too fragmented and consolidation could create more cohesive product suites. • Adam agrees consolidation is inevitable (especially in SaaS), but worries consolidation could reduce the nimble, high-touch benefits of smaller agencies—and potentially slow innovation if done poorly. • Both agree: if consolidation happens, it needs to be additive and accelerate innovation, not stall it. DMO / community side • Stuart predicts growing consolidation through regional alignment, collaboration, and potentially mergers, driven by two scarcities: • Money • Human capital (the workload is expanding faster than staffing can) • He expects more “radical collaboration” across tourism, economic development, downtown/placemaking, realtor groups, etc. • Adam strongly agrees tourism and economic development being separate is often a miss, and gives an example from Utah where visitors don’t experience the boundaries between jurisdictions, yet the organizations are structurally split and duplicating efforts. • Stuart adds Myrtle Beach-area context: consumers don’t differentiate between lines on a map, so alignment matters. 3) Experiences will replace destinations as the primary driver Stuart’s most provocative concept: 2026 may be “the beginning of the end for the destination”—meaning the brand pull shifts toward experiences, moments, and events. Highlights: • Travel decisions increasingly start with a concert, a game, a viral restaurant, or something seen on social media, not “I want to go to X destination.” • Stuart shares examples of experience-driven demand (viral food spots, status posts, even hate-posts driving curiosity). • The implication: DMOs may need to re-embrace roles they’ve moved away from, including: • Experience curation • Product development influence (helping stakeholders “up their game”) • Event promotion and/or creation • Truth-bearing / trust-building as the source of what’s legit and worth doing • They agree this topic deserves a full standalone episode. Memorable moments & themes • “This is not financial advice, this is not legal advice” (Stuart jokingly sets the tone for predictions). • The “humans are the bottleneck” thread runs throughout the AI conversation. • “Radical collaboration” is positioned as more important than who gets credit. • A running joke about needing a new Stu’s News jingle by 2026 (and maybe flying cars too). What’s next They tee up several upcoming 2026-focused episodes: • An episode featuring submitted predictions from industry peers • Adam’s resolutions/predictions episode • A future episode with Amir discussing trends not strictly tied to AI
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    54 mins
  • 61: Has our ability to measure outpaced our ability to explain? (Emily Zertuche)

    61: Has our ability to measure outpaced our ability to explain? (Emily Zertuche)
    Dec 25 2025
    It’s a festive Destination Discourse that turns into a full-on industry thought exercise. Stuart Butler and Adam Stoker welcome back Emily Zertuche (record-setting past guest) for a Christmas episode that starts with meta-glasses and “Stu’s News” lyrics finally appearing on YouTube… then quickly escalates into a serious conversation about “data hangovers,” measurement overload, and why DMOs struggle to answer the simplest question in the boardroom: Did it work?

    Emily argues the problem isn’t a lack of data. It’s a lack of narrative coherence and governance across an increasingly messy data stack. She introduces the “whiskey and Coke test” for communication: boards don’t want an over-sweetened cocktail of metrics, they want a simple, defensible truth. The group debates attribution, false precision, and how AI will soon act like a prosecutor cross-examining discrepancies across dashboards and vendor reports.

    Then Emily goes for the sacred cow: she says the marketing funnel is a foundational conceptual error for destination marketing because vacations don’t behave like checkout flows. Travel decisions are messy, probabilistic, and shaped by circumstance. That pushes the conversation toward counterfactuals (“what if we did nothing?”), humility, and ranges instead of single ROI numbers.

    They wrap by calling it an existential issue for the industry, and invite more people into the conversation. Emily’s homework: go figure it out and come back in early January.

    ⸻

    What you’ll hear in this episode
    • A chaotic Christmas intro, eggnog energy, and the debut of Stu’s News lyrics on YouTube (because Stuart didn’t realize Zoom exports could include screen share).
    • Meta glasses talk: capturing content hands-free, plus the “creepy” reality of audio + AI + ad targeting.
    • Stu’s News topic: Thailand’s “Half and Half” domestic travel subsidy and the idea of governments paying people to travel, plus discussion of whether incentives could ever apply to leisure travel.
    • Emily’s big thesis: DMOs have a “data hangover” from too many tools, dashboards, vendors, and definitions.
    • The boardroom moment of truth: “Did it work?” and why it’s so hard to answer coherently.
    • Emily’s framing: this is not just a data problem, it’s a meaning problem and a narrative problem.
    • The “whiskey and Coke test”: if you can’t explain the system simply, it loses legitimacy.
    • Funnel vs field: vacations behave like weather and probability, not a linear cause-and-effect funnel.
    • Counterfactuals and incrementality: what would have happened without the spend?
    • The danger of false precision (single ROI numbers) vs the honesty of ranges and assumptions.
    • The AI warning: stakeholders will use tools like ChatGPT/Gemini to find discrepancies and expose narrative-first reporting.
    • The prescription: govern the data stack (vendor layer → modeling layer → narrative layer) so the story is coherent, honest, and defensible.

    ⸻

    Key quotes and concepts (verbatim from the transcript)
    • “Data hangover.”
    • “Did it work?”
    • “Measurement capacity has outrun our narrative coherence.”
    • “If a system can’t explain itself simply… it will eventually lose legitimacy.” (the “whiskey and Coke test” idea)
    • “False precision is so much more dangerous than uncertainty, because it’s a lie!”
    • “We’re not here to sell a number, we’re here to sell the logic that produced the number.”
    • Funnel critique: travel decisions are “spaghetti” (and even “spaghetti with maple syrup”).
    • Counterfactual framing: the honest question is “What if we did nothing?”
    • AI as prosecutor: it will cross-examine discrepancies across reports and dashboards.

    ⸻

    Listener takeaways
    • If you can’t answer “Did it work?” in a way a board member can repeat, your measurement system is a risk—not an asset.
    • You don’t need more dashboards. You need governance and a narrative hierarchy that explains assumptions and uncertainty.
    • Stop treating destination decisions like e-commerce conversions. Travel influence is probabilistic and delayed.
    • If your reporting relies on cherry-picked metrics or “real data” claims, assume AI will expose it soon.
    • Credibility comes from assumptions + logic + ranges, not one magic ROI number.
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    1 hr
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