Your In-Laws Are Coming. We Have Rooms.

Sometime between now and Thanksgiving, the tourism industry will collectively lose its mind over a cup of hot chocolate.

You know the ads.

A charming downtown. Twinkling lights. A couple in matching scarves. A child gazing in wonder at something just outside the frame. Possibly a horse-drawn carriage, depending on how much money the destination had left in the photography budget.

The copy says something about making memories.

Lovely. Truly.

But I have another idea.

Your in-laws are coming. We have rooms.

There’s your holiday campaign.

Buried underneath the very real American tradition of pretending we enjoy sharing bathrooms with extended family is an enormous piece of the visitor economy that we routinely underestimate.

The people who were coming anyway.

Tourism has a name for people who travel to visit friends and relatives.

VFR.

Visiting Friends and Relatives.

We have an acronym for absolutely everything. Somewhere there’s probably a committee deciding whether we should add another letter.

VFR travel is one of those enormous, ordinary parts of tourism that rarely gets the glamorous campaign treatment.

Nobody’s standing in front of a waterfall with their arms outstretched because their brother-in-law lives in Toledo.

They’re going because somebody had a baby. Somebody’s getting married. Grandma expects them at Thanksgiving. Their daughter moved across the country and has apparently forgotten how expensive airfare is.

The destination is almost incidental, but the spending isn’t.

These visitors buy groceries. Eat out. Visit attractions. Shop. Rent cars. Book activities. Sometimes they stay in hotels or vacation rentals. Sometimes they sleep in somebody’s guest room under a framed photograph of a person nobody can identify.

The traditional tourism scoreboard has a tendency to get very excited about hotel room nights.

Understandably. Lodging taxes help fund most destination marketing organizations, and paid accommodations are relatively straightforward to measure.

But the visitor who sleeps at Aunt Linda’s house and spends money around town doesn’t cease to exist because nobody charged them for an extra pillow.

They’re still part of the visitor economy.

And Aunt Linda? Aunt Linda is doing destination marketing.

For free.

While making deviled eggs.

We’ve Been Marketing to the Wrong Person

Ohkay, not entirely.

But consider how much destination marketing is designed to persuade somebody who has never visited a place to choose it over somewhere else.

Beautiful photography. Emotional storytelling. Carefully researched visitor personas. A brand promise involving authenticity, discovery, or the word unforgettable.

Meanwhile, an enormous number of travel decisions begin with a text message:

Are you coming for Christmas?

That’s the destination decision.

Nobody compared five competing destinations. Nobody consulted a travel magazine. Nobody was inspired by a thirty-second video of a woman walking through a field in a linen dress.

Mom said Christmas was at her house this year.

What hasn’t necessarily been decided is where everyone will sleep, what they’ll do, where they’ll eat, whether they’ll extend their stay, or how many hours the family can spend together before somebody brings up politics.

And those are all opportunities. Not necessarily to create a new visitor.

To serve an existing one better.

So here’s the campaign I’d run.

First, I’d stop talking exclusively to potential visitors.

I’d talk to residents.

Specifically, residents who are about to have houseguests.

I’d create a holiday hosting campaign that brings together the destination marketing organization, hotels, short-term rental hosts, attractions, restaurants, local retailers, and tour operators.

One campaign. A bunch of different ways to participate.

And the whole thing would be built around a very simple idea:

We love your family. Let us help you survive them.

The advertising practically writes itself.

• For hotels: “Your childhood bedroom is a Peloton room now.”
• For short-term rentals: “Twelve relatives. Four bedrooms. Zero air mattresses.”
• For restaurants: “Let somebody else cook for once.”
• For tour operators: “We’ll take them for three hours. You’re welcome.”
• For attractions: “Three generations. One afternoon. We’ll handle it.”

And my personal favorite, for a hotel breakfast buffet:

“Nobody here will ask why you’re still single.”

Tell me that wouldn’t get shared.

More importantly, tell me those aren’t real problems people are actively trying to solve during the holidays.

Sometimes the best marketing opportunity is already sitting at the kitchen table, arguing about the thermostat.

For the Love of God, Don’t Build a Microsite.

I’d build a simple, genuinely useful holiday hosting hub.

Not a microsite that requires fourteen meetings, a custom content management system, and a six-month brand discovery process.

A page.

Maybe two. Use Claude, go wild.

Places for relatives to stay. Restaurants that accommodate groups. Holiday events. Activities for kids. Things to do with grandparents. Tours that don’t require everyone to walk six miles. Places to take teenagers who have decided the entire family is embarrassing.

And I’d organize it around the questions families actually ask.

• Where can my parents stay near us?
• What can we do with eight people?
• Who’s open on Christmas Eve?
• Which restaurants can handle three generations and a toddler who only eats orange food?

Useful stuff.

Then I’d make it ridiculously easy for residents to share.

A link in the city’s newsletter. A social campaign. QR codes at local businesses. Partnerships with neighborhood groups, employers, apartment communities, and real estate professionals.

I’d even invite residents to submit their favorite ways to entertain visiting family.

Because nobody knows how to occupy an out-of-town relative quite like somebody who has been doing it for twenty years.

And here’s the thing: this doesn’t require the DMO to become a booking platform.

It requires the DMO to do what a good destination organization is supposed to do.

Connect the pieces.

And the hosts? Oh, the hosts should be all over this.

Short-term rentals have a pretty obvious advantage here: space.

Maybe Grandma’s house can’t accommodate fourteen people. Maybe nobody wants to spend five days cooking for everybody. Maybe the family would like to gather without forcing one poor relative to become an unpaid innkeeper.

A vacation rental solves that. Not because it has a hot tub and a sign that says Gather, but because it has four bedrooms, a kitchen, and enough bathrooms to prevent a constitutional crisis.

Property managers could package holiday stays with grocery delivery, restaurant recommendations, local experiences, and transportation. Actual hospitality, tailored to the people staying there.

Tour operators, you’re up.

Somebody’s hosting eight relatives for five days. They’ve planned the meals, cleaned the house, and located the folding chairs.

By Friday, they’re ready to pay someone to make everybody disappear for three hours.

Hello, tour operators.

Holiday lights tours. Food walks. Private history tours. Family-friendly outdoor adventures. Experiences built for three generations who don’t necessarily agree on what constitutes fun.

You already know how to move groups of people around and keep them entertained.

Here’s a whole market of people who may not even realize they’re group travelers.

They just think they’re visiting Grandma.

Anyway, you’re welcome.

HotelTonight and Wyndham already figured out that people will pay good money to escape their relatives. I’m just suggesting we stop thinking so small.

Why sell them a hotel room when an entire destination could profit from Uncle Gary being unbearable?

We spend an extraordinary amount of time and money convincing strangers to visit places they’ve never been. We study their interests, track their behavior, build personas, buy advertising, and hire agencies to tell us what shade of blue makes people feel adventurous.

Meanwhile, somebody in your town is Googling “hotels near me” because their sister just announced she’s bringing the kids, the dog, and a husband who has recently gotten very into smoking meat.

And that person probably doesn’t know your tourism department exists.

Which is a shame, because this might be the first time they’ve ever desperately needed you.

So run the ads. Make them ridiculous. Give residents something worth forwarding to the family group chat, preferably before somebody suggests putting an air mattress in the laundry room.

Your In-Laws Are Coming. We Have Rooms.

Steal it. Run it. Send me the ads.

And for God’s sake, don’t spend six months workshopping the tagline.

Thanksgiving is in six weeks.