Start a conversation
tourism alignment architects

Most destinations have an alignment problem and call it a marketing problem.

Destination Innovate is a tourism strategy firm. We build the plans, the rooms and the research that get a destination, its industry and its residents facing one direction.

Start a conversation See how we work
50 yearsTwo founders, five decades of destination marketing, hospitality and strategy between them
400+Destinations advised, planned for, argued with and learned from
3 practicesLabs, research and advisory, taken separately or run as one arc
The Watch No. 001 September 2026

Airbnb stops collecting local lodging tax across most of Alabama on September 15.

Nine jurisdictions keep collection and none of them are in North Alabama, where the state rate is highest. Hosts who have never filed a lodging tax return become personally liable, and Vrbo has never covered the gap. What changed, who is exposed, and what a destination can still do in the time remaining.

Read the brief

All briefs in The Watch

What we work on

A destination has a dozen conversations running at once. We are hired when they stop agreeing with each other.

Destination strategy
Long-range plans built with the stakeholders who have to live inside them.
Board governance
Education, retreats and the onboarding that turns volunteers into a working board.
Brand and positioning
What a destination says it is, measured against who the traveler becomes when they book it.
Stakeholder alignment
Lodging, attractions, chamber, council and residents, in one room with one mechanism.
The host economy
Short-term rentals, ordinance, supply data and the operators nobody put on the agenda.
New organizations
Charter, board, staff and first-year plan for a destination organization starting from zero.
Association strategy
Program design, board advisory and counsel for state and national tourism associations.
Reset work
The engagement that follows a failed plan, a public fight or a leadership change.
What we do

Labs

We put everyone with a stake in one room for a day and make them build something before anyone leaves.

Stakeholder intensives · Field Labs · activations

Research

We publish the numbers the industry keeps arguing about without, and the frameworks that make them usable.

Reports · frameworks · licensing

Advisory

Strategic planning, board education and the long unglamorous work between the big moments.

Planning · Boards · Coaching
Tourism is a multibillion dollar industry with a multibillion dollar moat. Trust is now the most expensive thing in it.
Destination Innovate · operating principle
One specialty · the host gap

The gap we are best known for closing is the one nobody else wanted to stand in.

Short-term rentals became a third of the bed base in a lot of destinations while the people who run them stayed outside the room. Councils write rules for a supply they cannot measure. Hosts organize into associations because nobody organized with them first.

It is the same failure as every other alignment problem, with higher stakes and worse manners, and it is where we planted a flag. If it is not your problem, it is not your section. The Labs and the research go into it properly.

Identity proximity
The distance between what a destination says it is and who a traveler believes they are when they book it. Close that distance and most positioning arguments end.
Alignment as an operating system
A shared definition, a shared data set, and a plan each party had a hand in writing. Campaigns expire. An operating system is what the next director inherits.
The Host Alignment Framework
The above, applied to the host economy: identity, shared data, promotion and community health. It is the spine of every Lab, and it lives under Hosts & Home Teams™.
How an engagement usually starts
  1. 01

    A conversation

    Thirty minutes on what is actually happening in your destination. No deck. We will tell you if we are the wrong people for it.

  2. 02

    A read of the ground

    We read what you already have: the last plan, the board minutes, the research on the shelf, and whatever the argument is actually about.

  3. 03

    A scope you can defend

    A Letter of Engagement written in plain English, with a terms table, a timeline from signature to stage, and a fixed number.

The Room · our Labs

A room built so the conversation everyone has been avoiding can finally happen.

Labs are designed days. Nobody sits on a panel. Seating, sequence, materials and follow-through are production decisions, and we make every one of them on purpose. Every Lab ends with something built.

The Field Lab and the Mature Market Lab are built around the host economy. Amp Camp and the activations take the same machinery to whatever a destination is actually stuck on.

Flagship

Field Lab

One facilitated day for the people who never share a room: short-term rental hosts, DMO staff, city and county officials, and the industry voices they already read. Hollow rectangle seating so nobody sits at the head of the table. Four build rounds covering identity, shared data, promotion and community health. A fishbowl for the conversation that needs witnesses.

Every participant seals a letter to themselves at the close and opens it ninety days later. Roughly half of what a Field Lab produces shows up in that envelope.

Field Lab No. 1 ran at The Reser in Beaverton, Oregon in July 2026 with 28 participants. Five destinations asked us to bring it to them before the room had cleared.

FormatOne day, facilitated
Room28 to 100 participants
InvestmentFrom $15,000 plus production
Second generation

Mature Market Lab

Built for destinations that already did the first round of short-term rental work and found that permits and dashboards did not produce alignment. The day is progressive. Instead of one ballroom, the group moves through three or four working vacation rentals in the destination and builds in each of them.

Four stages: See what the supply actually is, Imagine what it could carry, Build the mechanism, Move it into someone's real budget and calendar.

FormatOne day, progressive
Best forMature STR markets
Investment$18,500 plus travel
Stakeholder intensive

Amp Camp

A one-day alignment intensive for the stakeholders a destination has to carry: lodging, attractions, restaurants, chamber, council, and the people who show up to public comment. More workshop than lab. Built for the moment before a plan goes public, or the moment after one went badly.

The multi-day version is an activation: a takeover that goes where stakeholders already are and uses smaller rooms across a week rather than asking everyone to clear a day.

FormatOne day, or a week-long activation
Best forPre-plan or post-conflict
InvestmentFrom $12,000
Hosting one
  1. 01

    You host, we produce

    The host destination covers production. We bring the design, the facilitation, the workbook and the show bible.

  2. 02

    The room is curated

    Every seat is filled on purpose. Intake happens before the day, so the build rounds start with real material.

  3. 03

    Ninety days is the point

    The sealed letters come back, a follow-up session runs, and the destination can see what actually moved.

Ask about hosting a Lab
Research

The industry argues about short-term rentals with almost no shared numbers.

So we publish some. Two things here are finished work you can put in front of a board. The rest of our thinking lives in the blog, where it belongs.

Available now

The Lodging Gap Report, Volume One

Forty-one pages on the structural disconnect between destination marketing organizations and the short-term rental supply inside their borders, built on our own Alignment Sentiment Study of hosts and destination staff.

Free to any destination. One email address and it downloads on this page.

2026 · Volume Two in production · published under Hosts & Home Teams
Open to licensing

The Host Alignment Framework

The four-part model behind the Labs: identity, shared data, promotion, community health. Destinations, associations and consultancies can license it to run the work themselves.

Also available as a facilitated working session for teams that want to apply it without hosting a full Lab.

Licensing and team sessions · by conversation

Everything else is writing

Standardization, ordinance fights, identity proximity, what a mature STR market actually looks like: those arguments live in the blog and in the column Barbee v. Tourism, where they can stay unfinished and get argued with. They are free, they are not gated, and they are the fastest way to find out whether you want us in your room.

Give us an email address and the Gap Report downloads right here. No call, no sequence you cannot leave. Write to us separately about licensing it or presenting it to a board.

Ask about licensing

One email address, then the report. We do not call.

Asking for the report adds you to our monthly list. Unsubscribe from the first email and keep the PDF. Privacy.

Advisory

Plans that survive the board meeting, and boards that survive the plan.

The consultancy work. Strategic planning, board and staff education, executive coaching and the ongoing counsel that keeps a destination pointed the same way between the big moments.

Planning

Strategic planning

Full destination strategy built with the stakeholders who have to live in it. We run the listening, design the sessions, write the plan, and stay through the part where it meets a budget cycle.

Plans are written to be read out loud in a public meeting. If a sentence cannot survive that, it does not go in.

EngagementScoped by destination
Typical arc3 to 9 months
Governance

Board education and retreats

Board members are volunteers with day jobs, handed a governance role in an industry that changes every eighteen months. We build the retreat that gets them current: what the organization actually does, what the numbers mean, where the pressure is coming from, and what a good decision looks like.

We also run full onboarding for brand-new destination organizations. Charter, board, staff and first-year plan, from a standing start.

FormatHalf day to two days
AudienceBoards, staff, new DMOs
Coaching

Executive coaching

For destination CEOs, directors and the person who just got promoted into a job nobody trained them for. Structured terms rather than open-ended retainers, because the work has a shape.

Terms3, 6, 12 or 18 months
TeamsFrom $5,000 per month
Working sessions

Private virtual workshops

A three-hour session for up to twenty-five people, on one of eight topics, with an intake call before and written takeaways after. Built for teams that cannot get everyone on a plane but still need the conversation.

Format3 hours, up to 25 people
Investment$2,500
Short form

A Second Opinion

Seventy-five minutes on one decision. A plan you are about to sign, an ordinance you are about to support, a reorganization you are not sure about. You bring the material, we bring the questions nobody on your payroll can ask.

Format75 minutes
Investment$495 charter rate
Associations

Association advisory

One annual relationship covering strategic counsel, board and committee advisory, and program or content design for state and national tourism associations.

TermAnnual
InvestmentBy quote
Talk through a scope
Our Story

We started Destination Innovate because the meeting we wanted to attend did not exist.

Between the two of us there are fifty years inside destination marketing, hospitality and strategy, across more than four hundred destinations. Most of that work is the ordinary spine of the industry: plans, boards, positioning, budgets, the community meeting that runs long.

Then we watched the short-term rental economy grow into a structural part of the bed base while the industry treated it as a compliance problem, a competitor, or a rounding error.

Nobody was building the room where those parties talked to each other. So we built it, and then we built the research to give that room something to work from. The advisory practice is the older half of the firm and the part that keeps the work going after everyone flies home.

We are a small firm on purpose. The work is facilitation and judgment, and both get worse when they are delegated down a bench.

What we will not do
Write a plan nobody in the room helped build. Run a listening session with no mechanism behind it. Sell a lab to a destination that needs a hard conversation with its council instead.
How we contract
A Letter of Engagement with a plain-English terms table, a signature-to-stage timeline and a closing note written by a person. No forty-page master services agreement.

Jenn Barbee

Co-founder

Strategist, writer and speaker. Leads the research program and the keynote work, and co-hosts every Lab. She writes the column Barbee v. Tourism, and her speaking and coaching live at jenniferbarbee.com.

Known for saying the thing in the room that everyone had agreed to say in the parking lot afterward.

Kristen Cruz

Co-founder

Strategist and facilitator. Leads the advisory practice, runs the planning and board engagements end to end, and co-hosts every Lab as an equal partner in the room.

The one who turns a day of good conversation into a plan with owners, dates and a number attached, which is the part most destinations have never actually been given.

The mark
tourism alignment architects

The circle is alignment

Our previous mark pointed at a location. This one points at a fit. A circle is the shape of perfect alignment, and it is the only saturated thing we let on a page.

The i gives up its dot

The i of innovate loses its dot, and the dot reappears inside the D of Destination. Two letters from two words, one of them making room. That is the whole thesis of the work.

The standalone circle is the ecosystem

Lifted out of the wordmark it carries continuity, community and belonging. It marks sections, it opens Labs, and it is the closest thing we have to a signature.

Start a conversation

Tell us what is actually happening in your destination.

No form funnel, no drip sequence. One of us reads it and writes back, usually within two business days.

Sending opens your email program with the message ready to go. One of us reads every one.

Email innovate@destinationinnovate.com
The platform Hosts & Home Teams™
Also worth reading Barbee v. Tourism

Want the Lodging Gap Report? It is free under Research — one email address and it downloads on the page.

Alignment is cheaper than the argument you are about to have.

Start a conversation