Congratulations on the New DMO Job. Please Don’t Do It Yet.

The most valuable thing a new destination leader knows may be what they haven't learned yet.

Last week, I committed a small act of tourism heresy and suggested that perhaps we should stop asking brand-new DMO CEOs for their strategy for attracting more visitors before they know where visitors park.

I was kidding.

Mostly.

Because underneath that joke is something that makes my whole brain itchy: we may have the sequence of destination leadership backward.

We hire smart people to lead extraordinarily complicated local economies and then immediately begin teaching them how the institution understands that economy.

Here is the strategic plan. Here is the research. Here are the KPIs. Here are our stakeholder groups. Here is the board structure. Here is the budget. Here are our historical sacred cows, although obviously nobody calls them that.

By the end of the first month, the new leader is learning to speak fluent DMO.

Cool, cool.

It may also be exactly the wrong thing to optimize for first.

The Problem With Getting Good at Your Job Too Quickly

Organizational science studies a phenomenon that tourism should probably pay more attention to: expertise changes perception.

This is mostly a good thing. Experts recognize patterns faster, filter irrelevant information, and make decisions using mental models built through experience. Cognitive scientists call these mental structures schemas. They allow us to process a complicated world without reconsidering every piece of information from scratch.

Otherwise, every board meeting would take nine years.

But schemas have a downside.

Once we become familiar with a system, we get better at seeing what we expect to see.

Researchers have described related phenomena as cognitive entrenchment, functional fixedness and path dependence. Different disciplines use different language, but the practical problem is similar: knowledge helps us navigate an existing system while sometimes making it harder to imagine that the system itself could be different.

Organizations develop schemas too. Over time, "how we do things" quietly becomes "how things are." That's why the new person asking an apparently stupid question can be incredibly valuable.

Why do we measure this?

Why don't we work with them?

Why is this our target market?

Why does everyone say July is our strongest month when every business owner I talked to says July is miserable?

Why is that neighborhood absent from our visitor strategy when thousands of visitors are sleeping there every night?

Why do we call these businesses stakeholders instead of part of the product?

The new executive isn't necessarily smarter than everyone who came before them; they simply haven't learned which questions they're apparently not supposed to ask yet.

That is a temporary strategic asset.

And we tend to onboard it right out of them.

We Teach the Organization Before We Teach the Place

Repeat after me: A destination organization is not the destination.

It is one institution operating inside an extraordinarily complicated system of businesses, governments, residents, infrastructure, capital, labor, culture, housing, transportation, hospitality and human behavior.

Yet our onboarding process naturally begins with the institution because that's the thing we control.

So a new CEO learns the DMO's version of the destination first.

The visitor profile. The brand research. The economic impact study. The strategic plan. The stakeholder database. The board's priorities.

All valuable.

But those are representations of the system. They are not the system itself.

In organizational theory, sensemaking describes how people interpret complex and ambiguous environments well enough to act within them. That's essentially the first job of a destination leader: figuring out what kind of system they have actually inherited.

And that requires more than learning the organization's existing explanation of itself. It requires fieldwork.

Where is investment occurring? Where has it stopped? Which businesses are scaling? Which ones keep failing? Where does the visitor experience break? Where are residents experiencing tourism without experiencing its benefits? Which entrepreneurs are building something interesting at the edge of the traditional tourism ecosystem? What does the destination believe about itself that the market no longer believes?

And perhaps most importantly: what changed faster than the institution did?

Because that last question brings us to lodging.

For the Love of Bed Tax, Learn Lodging

Of all the knowledge gaps in modern destination leadership, this may be the one I find most consequential.

We need DMO leaders who understand lodging.

Not hotel relations.

Not a monthly occupancy report.

Lodging economics.

This shouldn't be a radical proposition. The modern destination organization in the United States is deeply connected to the economics of overnight visitation. Destinations International's funding research has found that public sources account for the overwhelming majority of DMO funding, with dedicated occupancy taxes representing roughly 79% of that public funding.

In other words, much of the institutional architecture of destination marketing is literally attached to the transaction of someone paying to sleep somewhere.

And yet we don't consistently treat lodging literacy as a foundational executive competency.

I think we should.

A destination CEO should understand occupancy, ADR and RevPAR, certainly. But those are the beginning of the conversation, not the end.

They should understand supply and demand dynamics. Compression. Seasonality. Booking windows. Length of stay. Distribution. Revenue management. Development pipelines. Customer acquisition costs. Channel mix. The economics of direct versus third-party bookings.

They should understand why an operator might rationally prefer a lower occupancy at a higher rate, why adding supply can be healthy in one market and destabilizing in another, and why a "record year" in room revenue doesn't necessarily tell you whether the underlying lodging economy is becoming stronger.

And today, that education has to extend far beyond hotels.

The lodging ecosystem now includes resorts, motels, vacation rentals, individually owned condos, extended-stay products, campgrounds, RV parks, branded residences, second homes moving in and out of rental inventory, and lodging models that don't fit neatly into any of those categories.

These are not interchangeable units of supply.

They have different ownership structures, cost structures, distribution systems, booking patterns, customer profiles and relationships with the communities around them.

Which makes the phrase "lodging partners" increasingly inadequate. We're not talking about a "stakeholder category."

We're talking about an economic system.

The Lodging Map Is Also a Map of Tourism's Impact

This is where lodging gets particularly interesting to me.

Where a visitor sleeps influences much more than the lodging tax collected from the transaction.

It influences where the visitor begins and ends each day, which businesses they encounter, where their spending disperses, which infrastructure they use and which residents experience their presence.

For decades, lodging supply was relatively legible. A destination could point to the hotel district, convention hotel, resort corridor or motel strip and have a reasonably good idea where overnight visitors were concentrated.

Short-term rentals disrupted that geography.

They didn't merely introduce another accommodation choice. They distributed hospitality infrastructure through residential communities.

That matters economically, socially, and politically.

Suddenly a neighborhood that had never contained a hotel could contain hundreds of visitor accommodations. Thousands of individual property owners could become participants in the visitor economy. Professional property managers could become significant hospitality operators without fitting the traditional hotel model.

...The visitor economy moved.

In many places, our institutional map didn't move with it.

This is why I think the endless hotels-versus-STRs framing has been largely unhelpful. From a destination systems perspective, the more interesting questions are not which lodging model wins.

The questions are:

Where is the supply? How is it changing? Who controls it? Who communicates with the guest? Where does the guest spend? How does each lodging type respond to changes in demand?

And what does the evolution of that supply mean for housing, infrastructure, neighborhood experience, destination revenue and future product development?

Those are not STR questions.

They are destination strategy questions.

And Then There Is the Guest

There is another piece of lodging literacy I think DMO leaders increasingly need to understand: distribution is also power.

The entity that controls the booking often controls a meaningful part of the relationship with the traveler.

Hotels have spent years thinking about this through the tension between direct bookings and online travel agencies. Customer acquisition isn't free. Distribution isn't neutral. A room sold for $300 does not create identical economics through every channel.

The same principle applies to vacation rentals.

And it raises a question that I think destination leaders should be mildly obsessed with:

Who owns the relationship with the visitor?

We spend enormous amounts of money creating destination awareness and generating demand. Then the traveler enters a distribution ecosystem in which the DMO may know very little about where they ultimately stay, how they booked, who communicates with them before arrival or what information they receive once they're there.

That is an extraordinary strategic blind spot.

Because the future role of a DMO cannot simply be getting someone interested enough to search for a trip.

The destination should be thinking about the entire journey from inspiration to booking to arrival to experience to return.

And lodging sits directly in the middle of it.

Marketing Is an Amplifier, Not a Repair Kit

None of this diminishes marketing.

It allows marketing to do its actual job.

Marketing is extraordinarily good at generating attention and demand. What it cannot reliably do is repair structural weaknesses in the product receiving that demand.

If transportation is inadequate, marketing can send more people into inadequate transportation.

If a district lacks enough businesses to capture visitor spending, marketing can send more people through it.

If the lodging economy has changed dramatically but the DMO is still communicating primarily through a legacy set of partners, marketing can increase visitation without increasing the organization's ability to influence the visitor experience.

And if resident sentiment is deteriorating because the costs and benefits of tourism are distributed unevenly, increasing demand may amplify that problem too.

This is basic systems thinking: interventions produce effects throughout the system, not merely at the point where they are applied.

Which is why "more visitors" is not, by itself, a strategy.

It is an input.

The strategic question is what happens next.

Maybe the First 90 Days Should Be a Research Project

If I were designing onboarding for a new destination CEO, I would treat the first 90 days less like orientation and more like ethnographic research.

Yes, learn the budget. Meet the board. Understand the legislation. Read the research.

But also go experience the economy you're about to influence.

Stay in the hotels.

Stay in a vacation rental.

Ride the transit.

Try to park downtown.

Book the attractions.

Walk the visitor districts at 8 a.m. and 10 p.m.

Talk to a hotel revenue manager about what they're seeing in the forward-looking data.

Talk to a vacation rental manager about booking behavior.

Talk to an individual host about what guests ask them.

Talk to housekeepers.

Talk to bartenders.

Talk to developers.

Talk to the restaurateur who opened last year.

Talk to the one who closed.

Talk to residents who think tourism is fantastic.

And absolutely talk to the residents who think it isn't.

In research, this is triangulation: approaching a question through multiple sources or perspectives rather than assuming any single data set tells the whole story.

Destination leaders should be exceptional triangulators.

The hotel report says one thing. STR data says another. Visitor research says something else. The bartender says something completely different.

Good.

Now we have something interesting to investigate.

Mystery shop your own economy.

Not because anecdotes are better than data; they aren't.

Because data becomes considerably more useful when you understand the system that produced it.

Product Before Promotion Is Not Marketing Last

Before you come for me...

I'm not suggesting that new DMO CEOs spend six months wandering around interviewing bartenders while the marketing department sits in a dark room waiting for permission to turn Instagram back on.

I'm suggesting that destination strategy has a sequence.

1. Understand the place.

2. Understand the lodging economy.

3. Understand the businesses.

4. Understand the resident experience.

5. Understand the visitor.

6. Understand the infrastructure.

7. Understand the friction.

8. Understand where investment is occurring and where it isn't.

Then ask the marketing question.

What kind of demand would make this system stronger?

That is a much more interesting question than simply asking how to attract more visitors.

Maybe the destination needs more visitors in February and fewer compression problems in July. Maybe it needs a different lodging product. Maybe it needs restaurants that stay open later. Maybe it needs workforce housing before another 200-room hotel. Maybe the opportunity isn't acquisition at all, but increasing length of stay. Maybe thousands of guests are already sleeping in neighborhoods the DMO barely communicates with. Maybe the highest-return tourism investment isn't another campaign.

Maybe it's fixing the thing the campaign keeps promising.

That's product development, and product development isn't separate from destination marketing.

It determines whether the promise we're marketing can actually be kept.

Then Market the Hell Out of It

Because I absolutely want destinations to grow.

I want hotels performing well. I want hosts booked. I want restaurants busy. I want entrepreneurs opening things we haven't thought of yet. I want attractions expanding and residents able to point to things they love that exist partly because visitors help support them.

I want visitors staying longer, spending more, and sending mildly annoying voice notes to their friends about how they HAVE to come here.

But growth is considerably more valuable when we understand what we're growing.

That's the difference between promotion and destination stewardship.

And perhaps the greatest gift we can give a new DMO CEO isn't an immediate mandate to produce a vision. Maybe it's a temporary license not to have one yet.

Because for a very brief period, that new leader possesses something everyone else in the organization has lost.

Fresh eyes.

They haven't learned which questions are dumb.

They don't know which ideas were rejected in 2019.

They haven't inherited every institutional assumption.

They can still see the destination before they learn to see the DMO.

So instead of asking:

"What's your strategy for attracting more visitors?"

I think I'd ask:

"What have you noticed that we've stopped noticing?"

And then, for the love of bed tax, everybody be quiet long enough to hear the answer.

I'm Jenn Barbee, thanks for coming to my TED Talk. Strongly worded responses may still be directed to the Department of Tourism Heresy.

It's me.

I am the department.