The Power of Presence

Aka: How I accidentally rage baited an entire industry with a folding table.

Last week I posted a photo of Airbnb's booth at a tourism conference.

That's it. Just their booth. No long manifesto, no "late-stage capitalism" TED Talk. A simple observation: for a company that made billions from hosts last year, the physical presence felt surprisingly...small.

The internet reacted like I'd slapped a Labradoodle at brunch.

Some people got exactly what I meant. Others translated my point into "Jenn thinks companies should spend more money on decor," which is hilarious, because that wasn't my point at all. My point was presence, and the reaction itself became a case study.

We are constantly reading signals from each other.

Effort, attention, participation, energy, emotional investment, care. We assess all of it, usually within seconds, usually without knowing we're doing it.

Presence communicates before communication ever begins. And tourism people, of all people, should understand this better than anyone, because our entire industry runs on emotional perception.

That's literally the job. We convince people that this destination feels welcoming, this hotel feels relaxing, this town feels alive, this experience feels worth attending. We are in the business of how things feel.

Which is why this conversation is about a lot more than one conference booth.

Presence gets confused with spending a lot. It's understandable. But a bigger budget won't buy it, and neither will a giant LED wall or branded espresso martinis served by an influencer named Brayden.

Presence is intentionality made visible. It's the feeling that someone thought about the experience of other people before they arrived. Humans feel that immediately, not always consciously, but they feel it and they act on it.

You've walked into restaurants where the staff made eye contact and the room felt alive. You've also walked into places where everyone looked emotionally unavailable and suddenly you wanted to leave before appetizers. Same food category. Completely different emotional outcome. That's presence doing its work.

There's a concept in behavioral science called costly signaling.

Humans subconsciously trust signals that required real effort to produce. Effort in the form of time, attention, preparation, energy. Our brains interpret visible effort as commitment. It's why handwritten notes still land. It's why a leader physically showing up changes room energy. It's why eye contact still builds trust in an era of infinite digital contact. We are all, constantly, asking everyone around us: how invested are you, really? And the answer almost never comes from a mission statement. It comes from behavior.

A leader who says "my door is always open" while never actually engaging with staff creates dissonance.

A destination that says "we value our community" while treating stakeholders like an inconvenience creates distrust.

A brand that says "we love our partners" while showing up with the energy of expired milk?

People notice the gap between message and behavior. Every single time.

And I think we're entering a phase where presence itself is a competitive advantage, because everything else is getting automated. AI writes the emails. Templates write the captions. Auto-replies handle the customer service.

Everybody's leveraging synergies until the room feels spiritually deceased. Actual human presence stands out more in that environment, not less.

The brands that win the next decade won't just be the loudest. They'll be the ones people can actually feel.

This whole thing made me think about my own presence, too. I've spent years trying to sound professional in the ways this industry rewards. Polished, measured, reasonable, corporate enough not to scare the stakeholders. Meanwhile, the posts that actually connect, the ones people remember and argue about, are consistently the ones where I just show up as myself. Opinionated, a little irreverent, sometimes absolutely bewildered by a sponsored charging station and a bowl of stale mints pretending to be engagement.

Which is probably why I'm changing my newsletter to Barbee v. Tourism. Me, trying to make sense of this weird, beautiful, dysfunctional industry out loud. Sometimes funny, sometimes frustrated, sometimes genuinely inspired. But present. That's the difference.

For the record: some of the strongest presence I've ever seen in tourism came from organizations with almost no budget. Small towns, tiny teams, overworked visitor centers running on caffeine and civic duty. But they cared visibly. And that changes everything, because hospitality without presence is just logistics, and leadership without presence is just management.

The post went viral. People argued. But underneath all of it was a bigger lesson: people don't just remember what you said. They remember how it felt when you showed up.

That's the whole game now.

Later in the week, I'll be writing about the VR industry more, updates from our field surveys, etc. But for now, the booth gets my attention...again.

I'm Jenn Barbee. Tourism strategist, speaker, and co-founder of Destination Innovate. Creator of Hosts & Home Teams™, a growing movement helping destinations and short-term rentals stop acting like divorced parents at a soccer game. I write about tourism, leadership, perception, systems, and the weird psychology of this industry on LinkedIn.