A useful business book wearing the clothes of a juicy, slightly trashy beach read. That was the assignment, and it is also the argument: disarm the reader, then make the invisible visible.

There are villains. Inconveniently, most of them are not people. They are systems, incentives, and habits we have repeated so many times that we started calling them best practices.

The chapters are short on purpose, because the people who need this are reading it on a plane between two site visits they did not want to take.

I speak about how tourism actually works, the systems we accidentally institutionalized, and the things everybody seems to know but nobody remembers agreeing to.

Every talk gets rebuilt for the room it is going into. I ask for your numbers ahead of time and I read them. If your board has been circling the same argument for three years, tell me. That is usually the talk.

Tourism is a multibillion dollar industry running on institutional memory nobody bothered to record. Decisions made in 1983 are still shaping budgets. Rules everybody follows were somebody's temporary fix that nobody got around to undoing. Ask why and you get the same answer in four hundred different accents: that is how we have always done it.

I have been inside it for almost thirty years. I built my first websites in 1993, back when destinations weren't sure they needed one, started working with them in my twenties, and have been in the room for most of the arguments since. Four hundred destinations, give or take.

These days I work with destination organizations, boards, city leadership, trade associations and short-term rental hosts, mostly on the parts of the job that do not fit neatly into a marketing plan.

So I started writing it down. Some of it is history. Some of it is a warning. Most of it is the part somebody finally says in the parking lot after the meeting.

I have a lot of friends in this industry. None of them get to edit me. That’s the whole point of Barbee v. Tourism.