I Accidentally Wrote 131 Articles About STRs and DMOs. Anyway, Here’s the Problem.

This started as a very innocent question.

“When did I first start writing about short-term rentals?”

So I pulled my archive, had GPT help synthesize.

And apparently… a while ago. Like 131 separate articles ago.

That’s a pattern. Possibly a cry for help.

But once I stopped laughing, something clicked. Across all those years, markets, cycles, and mood swings, the same problem kept showing up. Dressed differently. Argued louder. Avoided creatively. But fundamentally unchanged.

So here it is, plain.

The problem is not short-term rentals.

It’s the way (some) destinations refuse to acknowledge who is actually hosting their guests.

We keep treating STRs like a glitch in the system instead of admitting they are now a permanent part of the visitor economy.

A workforce. An inventory. A front door.

And yet, we don’t onboard hosts. We don’t align them. We don’t communicate with them. We don’t train them. We don’t include them in destination standards or expectations.

We just hope they behave.

DMOs don’t have an STR problem. They have an alignment problem.

This is where the conversation usually goes sideways, because it’s more comfortable to argue for or against STRs than to talk about governance.

STRs exposed where destinations were already fragile.

Housing pressure. Workforce strain. Political tension. Data avoidance. A widening gap between brand and reality.

STRs didn’t create those cracks. They just grew inside them.

Hosts are not the villains we keep casting them as.

Are there bad actors? Of course. There are also bad hotels, bad employers, bad tourists, and bad board members.

Most hosts are residents trying to make their place work in a weird economy. They are not anti-community by default. They are under-informed, under-engaged, and often completely invisible to the destination organizations that market the place they operate in.

Which is wild, when you think about how much of tourism runs on people who will never log into LinkedIn.

We talk endlessly about “hospitality,” but we don’t extend it to the people literally hosting guests in our communities.

That disconnect is doing more damage than any platform ever could.

You can’t brand your way out of a systems problem.

This is the part that makes people uncomfortable.

Destinations sell: Welcome. Authenticity. Local pride. Sense of place.

Then act surprised when residents feel pushed out, workers can’t afford to stay, and visitors land in communities that feel strained instead of supported.

Identity isn’t what you market. It’s what you protect.

And if your destination identity can’t survive contact with your own housing market, workforce realities, and political constraints, that’s not a messaging issue. That’s a leadership one.

Everyone wants the revenue. No one wants the responsibility.

We love record-breaking years. We love occupancy. We love spend.

We are far less enthusiastic about: – standards – enforcement – shared data – host onboarding – resident trust – or explaining how all of this is supposed to work together

So we end up with a system that prints money and resentment at the same time.

And then we act shocked when it turns into a mess.

This is why the STR–DMO relationship feels like a situationship.

Because we keep doing the worst version of dating.

DMOs: “We’re not together.”

STRs: “I’m literally in your house.”

Platforms: “We don’t know her.”

Residents: “Can you all please stop pretending this isn’t happening?”

Everyone else: “Let’s not make it weird.”

It’s already weird.

Avoidance is not neutral. It’s a decision.

After 131 articles, the takeaway is simple.

This isn’t a content problem. It’s not a podcast problem. It’s not a platform problem.

It’s a systems problem.

Which is also why this work has moved out of articles and into the Hosts & Home Teams Lab.

Because at some point, continuing to write about misalignment without building a place to actually fix it becomes its own kind of failure.

The Lab exists to do the unglamorous part: Put the right people in the room. Surface real data. Work through the friction. Build alignment that actually holds.

Not conversations. Not hot takes. Alignment.

Because whether we like it or not, we all host this place.

Leadership doesn’t start with answers. It starts with naming the right problem.

STRs didn’t create chaos. Avoidance did. And until we’re willing to name misalignment as the real issue, we’ll keep cycling through the same arguments with higher stakes and lower trust.

Naming it gives us something solid to work on together.

I’m Jenn Barbee. See you in the Lab.