I Come With Baggage.

I come with a lot of baggage.

Some of it is emotional, but my therapist has asked me to stop bringing that up at work.

The rest is professional. Thirty-something years of collecting strange, wonderful, occasionally horrifying little pieces of the tourism industry.

I know things about hotel operations that would make you question the entire concept of hospitality.

I know things about destination marketing that would make you question the entire concept of marketing.

I once watched a regional tourism organization outshine the entire state with a movie quote and some very good timing. I’ll tell you about it in a minute.

And I know approximately eleven thousand people who believe their town is uniquely complicated.

It isn’t. But I admire their commitment.

I’ve been extraordinarily lucky to wander into rooms where interesting things happen. Sometimes I was invited. Sometimes I was hired. Occasionally I suspect somebody just assumed I belonged there and nobody checked.

Every time, I came away with something. A clever idea. A spectacular mistake. A story I can’t tell until several people retire.

I put it all in my purse.

My purse is a public health concern.

I’m not one of those women with a tiny handbag holding a lipstick and one credit card.

My purse could sustain a small expedition.

I have chargers for devices I no longer own. Receipts from restaurants that have closed. Several lip products that are almost, but not quite, the same color.

There’s probably a fork.

But when somebody says, “Does anyone have a safety pin?”

Guess who suddenly becomes the most important person in the room.

My brain works the same way. Someone describes a problem with short-term rentals, and I remember something a hotel revenue manager told me in 2008. Somebody unveils a revolutionary new strategy, and I realize I’ve watched it fail in three states and one Caribbean island.

Hang on. Let me dig around.

It’s in here somewhere.

The good stuff comes from everywhere.

I’ve sat with people at Disney so sharp that I left feeling like I’d accidentally enrolled in graduate school.

I’ve also sat with people running tiny tourism offices who knew more about their visitors than executives with entire departments devoted to finding out.

And I’ve met magnificent idiots at every level.

Stupidity scales beautifully. So does brilliance.

A hotel housekeeper can tell you what the executives got wrong. A vacation rental manager can tell you what guests actually complain about. A small business owner can explain the economic impact of a decision better than a consultant with a 90-slide deck.

Somewhere in all of that is a better understanding of tourism than any one organization could ever hold.

The trick is getting people to share it. Which brings us to a small problem...

Everybody’s in a different room.

The hotel people have their conferences.

The destination marketing people have theirs.

Vacation rental managers, chambers, attractions, meeting planners, tour operators. Everybody has a conference. Everybody has a newsletter.

God help us, everybody has a committee.

The hotel people are talking about compression.

The vacation rental people are talking about occupancy.

The DMO is talking about shoulder seasons.

The chamber is talking about economic development.

And the visitor is standing in a parking lot wondering why everything closes at eight.

Same place. Different conversations.

Here’s why that matters more now. Short-term rentals make up about 14% of US lodging demand, and in 2024 they were projected to add more new demand than hotels and cruises combined.

Most of it is run by somebody with one property. AirDNA found that at the end of 2023, 70% of Airbnb’s hosts, about 3.5 million people, had a single listing. Those hosts have no conference, no committee, and no newsletter with their name on it.

Now look at where the growth is going. AirDNA expects the fastest new supply in rural, small-city and mid-sized markets. That’s where the DMO might be three people and a very tired intern. In a 2019 Destinations International survey of more than 500 DMOs, over 64% had budgets under $5 million, and nearly 25% were under $1 million.

The fastest-growing piece of lodging is landing where the fewest people have time to sit down with it. Nobody planned that. It’s just where the rooms ended up.

Somebody asks me a question and I start rummaging.

“Actually, I saw something in Fort Worth...”

“Wait until I tell you what happened in Vegas...”

“There’s a little town that figured this out...”

Okay. The little town.

Well, not exactly a town. Florida’s Space Coast.

Years ago, I watched this regional destination punch so far above its weight during a shoulder-season campaign that its organic performance was outdoing Visit Florida’s.

The hook? A line from Back to the Future.

“Where we’re going, we don’t need roads.”

For a destination with actual rocket launches, that’s a pretty spectacular piece of borrowed cultural currency.

No enormous production budget. No committee spending six months deciding whether the public understood the reference. Just somebody recognizing that a line from a movie about time travel was practically begging to be used by a place that sends things into space.

And people responded.

The interesting part wasn’t that a smaller destination could outperform a state tourism organization on a particular campaign. It was that somebody close enough to the destination saw an opportunity that didn’t require a giant budget to exploit.

That’s the kind of thing I put in my purse.

Different people, different budgets, different geography. Same problem wearing a different hat.

Sometimes the answer to yours is sitting in a completely different part of the machine.

You just have to know where to look. Or know somebody with a very big purse.

Two things you can do this week.

Hosts: Ask your DMO for next year’s sold-out dates. Put them on your calendar before your guests do.

DMOs: Call three hosts and ask what their guests complain about. You’ll learn something by Friday.

Neither one costs a dime.

So I’m opening the purse.

I’ve spent years handing these out one at a time. A story here. A framework there. A cautionary tale about something that went sideways in 2009.

My business partner Kristen Cruz has her own enormous collection. Between us, we’ve seen enough to know nobody has all the answers, and plenty of people have really good ones.

So we made a place to pass them around. We call it The Club.

It’s part of our Hosts & Home Teams work, and it’s twenty bucks a month. Because good ideas shouldn’t require a conference badge, a corporate expense account, or knowing somebody who knows somebody.

There’s a growing library of things you can actually use, a live briefing every month, and notes from us whenever we find something worth passing along.

But here’s what I’m really hoping for.

I want the person running four vacation rentals to tell the Disney executive something they didn’t know. I want the little tourism office with three employees to discover that the problem keeping them up at night was solved in another state ten years ago.

And I want somebody to tell me something that makes me go, Well, I’ll be damned.

Because after thirty-something years, that’s still my favorite part of this job.

I’ve collected a lot. Some of it is brilliant. Some of it is ridiculous. Some of it probably should have been thrown away in 1998.

And I’m quite sure there’s a fork in there.

Anyway, I’m opening the purse.

Bring yours.

Join The Club. $20/month.

Members Only. Everybody Welcome.

Sources: Tourism Economics, US Lodging Trends. AirDNA via Skift. AirDNA 2026 Midyear Outlook. Destinations International DestinationNEXT 2019.