Menton, France is known for lemons. Lemon soap, lemon tea towels, lemon-print dresses, lemon sorbet, limoncello, and lemon tarts in every café window.

A few weeks ago, I was wandering le vieux (old) village and popped into a boutique on Rue Saint-Michel. The shopkeeper handed me a slice of Menton lemon. Rind, pith, pulp. Eat the whole thing, she said. So I did. No bitterness. The peel and pith were almost sweet.

That’s the part most people throw away.

Most visitors to Menton never taste it.

I wanted to know how a lemon could taste like that. So I went looking for the origins of the Menton lemon and contacted Maison Gannac to make a reservation to visit their mountainside orchard.

The lemons at Maison Gannac are the size of grapefruits. A few are even bigger.

I walked steep dirt paths above Menton. The path was loose under my feet. I kept stopping, stunned that branches could hold fruit that big. Huge lemons with thick peel, slightly knobbed, a deep saturated yellow that made the Meyer lemons we get in the United States look small and inadequate. On the ground was a box of freshly hand-picked Menton lemons. The leaf and a bit of branch were still attached, by law. I folded a leaf between my fingers and smelled it. It smelled like the fruit.

The peel is where the flavor lives, Laurent Gannac will tell you. Having a peel you can eat is the entire reason this lemon exists.

Every February, Menton holds a festival celebrating the lemon. A quarter of a million people come from all over. The parade floats are made of real citrus — 140 tons of it. Most of those lemons are imported from Spain. Menton lemons are too rare and too expensive to build sculptures out of.

The fruit that comes off the floats afterward gets sorted and sold. Nothing wasted. The festival, the tourism office, and the farmers all work together.

Most of the festival goers never see a working orchard.

If you do, here’s what you find.

A working farm. Not a manicured tourist attraction. The paths along the restanques, or terraces. The dry stone retaining walls that turn a cliff into farmable terraces are steep and slick with loose dirt and stones. The men who pick the fruit carry 15-kilo boxes up the slope on their shoulders. The orchard sells trees to people who want to plant their own. There are bananas growing in a small grove. The micro subtropical climate exists because of the surrounding mountains, the winds come in from the sea, and sunshine.

The view is the Mediterranean to the south and Italy to the east.

A kilo of these lemons sells for €17 to €20, approximately $20-25 USD.

There are 56 producers left in Menton.

Trained in horticulture and landscape design, Laurent Gannac chose Menton for the subtropical climate. Citrus was at the center.

He had no idea what a Menton lemon was. He had never heard of it. He was building gardens for clients, and every time he brought a lemon tree to a property, the customer would ask the same question. Is that a Menton lemon?

The repeated question forced him to find out. That is how he discovered five hundred years of history.

Around that time, he met Vanessa Zeenni. In 1991, their son Adrien was born. Laurent planted his first lemon tree the same year. Laurent bought the hillside knowing he might lose every franc. Then more parcels. He laid them out as restanques. Every retaining wall on the property is one the family built.

There were no inherited terraces. There was no inherited orchard. Just a fallow hillside and two people who decided it was worth turning back into a farm.

A lemon tree takes three to four years to bear fruit. Vanessa watered trees six hours a day. To carry the family through the wait, she trained as a hotelier and worked as a concierge in Monaco.

Adrien grew up among the trees. He says it himself in a video from a few years back.

Other people are born in cabbages. I was born among the citronniers.

He went to business school in Nice, then got an agricultural diploma at the horticulture school in Antibes. He joined his father in 2015. He brought what his father didn’t have. The idea of building a brand that ran from the tree to the shelf.

The team grew from two has grown to 30. They make almost a hundred products now. Limoncello, jams, candied lemon in salt, lemon powder, a creamy spread called L’Onctueux that he developed with the chef Philippe Colinet. They work with brewers on citrus beers. With an olive oil couple, Anne and Erwan, who make a Nice olive paste they pair with Menton lemon. Mauro Colagreco at Mirazur, the three-Michelin-star restaurant on the Italian border, cooks with Gannac lemons. So does Alain Ducasse.

The orchard visits, the boutique, all of it is farm tourism. The visit isn’t an amenity. It’s part of how the farm survives.

When Adrien needed to plant 200 more trees and convert a building into a workshop, he raised €130,000 from people who wanted to support him. A regional youth-entrepreneur program, Initiative Menton, backed him on top of that. They said it themselves in their video:

We are aware of the difficulty of starting a business in agriculture.

On my visit, Céline was the guide.

A worker walked past us with a 15-kilo box of just-picked fruit balanced on his shoulder, headed up a path. A lemon Adrien grew last year took nine months to ripen and weighed over a kilo. It’s family lore now. I also saw a tree that produces lemons and oranges from the same trunk, grafted together. Two fruits, one root. After touring the orchard, I was treated to a tasting session. Jams, preserves, and liquors, from sweet to tart.

Menton is a town built by people from all over. The Grimaldis from Monaco. The Sardinians. The English in their winter villas. The Italians whose street names still run through the old town. Laurent from Occitanie. Vanessa from Beirut. Almost nothing in Menton was originally Menton.

What gets passed down is what gets chosen. Adrien chose to come back. His cousin works in the family’s logistics now too. Younger people are coming into horticulture and want to start their own orchards, Céline told me. The interest is there.

The land prices are the problem.

The hillside Laurent bought with the risk of not getting it back in 1988 cannot be bought that way today. The same tourism economy that saved the Menton lemon by giving it an audience has driven the price of farmable terraces high enough that a young person without family money cannot start what Laurent started. The lemon survives. The next Laurent might not.

Menton hasn’t solved how to make room for the next Laurent. Most destinations aren’t yet asking the question.

Menton got very good at it. The festival, the producer network, the chefs, the guided tours. All of it works.

What we overlook is whether the next producer can afford to start. Land prices. Cost of entry. Who can still arrive.

The Menton lemon almost disappeared once. It came back because two people arrived in 1988 and decided to plant it. If they were 25 today and walked into the same town with the same idea, they could not afford the hillside.

Walking down from the orchard, I kept thinking about the kilo lemon. Nine months on a branch above the sea. Cut by hand. The whole thing held together by people who decided it was worth doing.

Menton built a brand around a lemon that almost disappeared. The lemon came back because two people arrived in 1988 and planted it. If they were 25 today and walked into the same town with the same idea, they could not afford the hillside.

Most destinations don’t get a second comeback.

More from Destination Sunday

When I stepped off the plane and on to the tarmac, the humidity wrapped around me like a warm, wet blanket. I love that feeling. A baby blue and white Volkswagen bus (a combi), was waiting to take us south along the Cancun-Tulum corridor to Akumal. The combi’s sliding side door was missing and a side of a baby crib acted as a door. One set of the bench seats was removed so dive gear bags could be stacked. I sat on top, I was in charge of the beer. A cooler filled with cervezas bien fria. All of us knocked back beers, including the driver. And I watched the side of the road through the baby crib slats.

The highway 307 (or the carretera) to Tulum was equivalent to a rural road in the US. Far from the likes of the four lanes of today. Driving was certainly the most dangerous part of any trip. No shoulder, and if you catch the edge, it meant a tumble over the edge and into the jungle. And possible death.

The same shitty road into Aventuras Akumal still exists today as you get off the highway.

Our group stayed at a condo on the beach. Gary and I were offered the “crowsnest” a roof-top, palapa covered room. It was there where we were robbed the first night. I wish I could say it was the only time I have been robbed. It was not. The next day, a passport turned up in the shower. Another passport and wallet were gone. The second passport was later found in the jungle.

We took our dive group in that combi with the baby crib door, to the dive sites. Quite literally we would park alongside the road, careful not to topple into the jungle, and trek into the jungle with our gear.

We always asked the land owner for permission to dive. The owners often lived in a palapa with little or no electricity. A coke, or a small package of cookies, or a couple of pesos served as a thank you.

Today many of the cenotes have concrete or wooden stairways leading from the jungle floor to the water. We had barely a path to follow, sometimes jumping from heights to get into the water. Gran Cenote which tour buses frequent, had one single parking space, and a stick ladder to climb out. Each step was strategically placed on the wobbly rungs. One cenote Maya Blue now referred to as Cristalino was an effort for me to climb out of. Slippery rocks, grabbing saplings. My right leg slipped in between two rocks, up to my knee. I fell backwards. Landing on my doubles, on my back. “Is my light ok?”

Cave lights back then were custom-made plexiglass canisters with a battery inside. Crafted in someone’s garage in Florida. Heavy, expensive, and they don’t bounce well. The light survived. My knee, not as lucky.

I hobbled. It was the middle of our trip. I wanted to keep diving. That night I retold the story to our hosts. Someone produced a handful of pain meds. I continued to dive painfree and a wee bit woozy.

The big dive of any trip was to Nohoch Nah Chich, Mayan for the big bird house owned by Don Pedro. Mike Madden has been the primary explorer of the cave system. A couple-kilometer hike into the jungle. Don Pedro’s boys lashed our gear and tanks on to horses as we followed them through the scrubby jungle.

The boys used a rope through a crotch of a tree, as a makeshift pulley. Lowering our gear down to a stick platform at the water’s edge The staging area to set up for the dive. The water was so clear you could see the white calcite dunes and glimpses of the stalactites from the surface.

Returning to Baltimore I went to Johns Hopkins Sports Medicine Center for my knee. Of course the doctor wanted to know how the injury happened. As they were running tests, the attending doctor kept bringing in other staff saying “tell them how you got hurt, tell them,” and they looked at me like I was crazy.

No life altering injury, but my knee aches became a barometer while diving if I was close to getting “bent” (decompression sickness), and if it is going to rain.

And Mike Madden, whose dive shop filled my tanks, less than two years later he became my boss.

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I worked my way up in the PADI dive certifications and became a dive master for Sea Colony Aquasports. Aside from the general public we also did scuba training for the midshipmen at the Annapolis Naval Academy. Ah, the middies in their summer whites…. Oops I digress. Certification dives were done in a Pennsylvania quarry shadowed by the Three Mile Island Nuclear power plant silos. Love check out dives with the middies, yes ma’am, no ma’am.

It was there I met a dive instructor, Gary. I flirted with him over pizza and beer.

Gary and I talked on my commute home from work, almost every night. I had a cell phone, the big box one that sat between the two front seats. In that first month my cellular bill was well over $1200. I would talk about ads I had read about becoming a commercial diver, a merchant marine, or joining the Coast Guard. He shared stories about underwater cave exploration in Belize. Teaching cave diving in Florida. Cave diving. Huh? Never heard of it.

Finally, Gary asked me out on a date. The issue was that I had recently got engaged to a guy in Atlanta. A short-lived engagement, with an ugly ending, for another day.

One night sitting in a booth over dinner, I told Gary diving was number one and he was number two and as long as he understood that, we would get along great.

Weekends spent diving, rock climbing or working on house renovations he had started on his childhood home, where I then lived.

I had found a pair of rusty steel 72 cubic foot tanks in a barn in Virginia. The tanks were visually inspected at the dive shop. Gary offered to teach me how to dive doubles.

Off to the Three Mile Island quarry.

The steel tanks would turn me over on my back like a turtle. Over and over. Fighting each time to right myself.

It was not fun. I was frustrated. Crying in my dive mask. Gary said, “forget it, just get out of the water.” I took his words as dismissive and that pissed me off. I showed him. I fought my way to stay right side up, swam around and stubbornly crawled on my hands and knees on the shore getting out of the water on my own. So there.

I then started learning how to cave dive. I started my training in my rusty 72’s down in Florida, camping at Spring Systems. I was trying to learn the gear and the rules of cave diving. Wrestling my 72’s into the fill station at the end of each dive.

Some guy sat there watching me, grinning, asking about my tanks and if they were new. I looked at him like he was crazy. Telling him to look at the scuffed up paint and rust, no they are not new. Later that evening I learned that guy at the fill station was Sheck Exley, probably the most accomplished cave diver who ever lived.

Sheck was teasing, ME!

I had not finished my certification. Gary and I started running cave diving trips to Mexico anyway in 1990. Mexico. The mecca of cave diving. We stayed in Aventuras Akumal.

An area I did not know was going to become my home.

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Hungry, by the time I reached the village of Comps-sur-Artuby, I was ready for lunch. Comps sits at 900 meters. One of 23 villages spread across this relatively remote stretch of inland Provence. The eastern gateway to the gorges.

It is the kind of place you pass through on the way to somewhere else.
Most people do.

I walked into the Grand Hôtel Bain. A cute place with a terrace with tables. The chef was sitting outside at the table. Lunch service had ended, he said. But I could get a drink, a coffee or a dessert.

The bar area is classic with ceramic beer taps, shelves lined up with bottles, an espresso machine. Not a soul around though.

A woman’s voice came from somewhere in the back, “just a minute”. Standing in the doorway, I was getting a little antsy waiting. Looking up and down the main drag for other options.

Then she appeared, wiping her hands, and told me not to bother with the dessert menu. Go into the dining room, she said. Look in the case.

I did. Passing on dessert, I opted for an Aperol spritz.

Outside at a table on the terrace, the chef sat with a beer and a cigarette. Soaking up the sun with no particular interest in what time it was. A handful of people chatting at a nearby table looked like they were locals. An artisan shop across the street was open, as well as a local TABAC store (a local convenience store). A couple cars passed on the road to the gorge.

She brought my drink. Within seconds I toppled the glass. She waved it off. Then she leaned over cleaning up my mess and suggested the lavender ice cream. Homemade. “Lavender ice cream, ugh” I thought to myself. Yet, I said, sure with a smile, mainly out of guilt for spilling my drink. She returned with the ice cream and a fresh drink. The ice cream was amazing!

And no charge for the spilled drink.

I later discovered: the Bain family has been feeding passers-by at this crossroads since 1727. The hotel as it stands was founded in 1737 by Claude Bain and his wife Marguerite, under the reign of Louis XV. Arnaud Bain is the ninth generation. His son Clément just finished hotel school and is coming back to take over.

Also, the French military swallowed two thirds of this settlement in the 1960s. Building the largest artillery camp in Western Europe. The ancient hamlets are gone. What remains of Comps-sur-Artuby, the 346 people, the hotel, an artisan shop, a TABAC, a restaurant or two on side streets is what survived.

The Guinness Book of World Records recognizes the Grand Hôtel Bain as the oldest hotel in the world operated continuously by the same family.

The regional tourism association covers all 23 villages in this territory. They promote a variety of routes, sights, and places to visit. Their info for Comps reads:

“The Templar past of Comps lines the rocky ridges with chapel silhouettes. In the village, life unfolds peacefully with the rhythm of the seasons.”

Two sentences. That’s it!

No mention of the Bain family.

No mention of the world record.

No mention of the woman who tells you to ignore the menu, just have a look for yourself.

They described the landscape and the seasons.

They missed the person, the family story, part of what gives the village life and personality, beyond the view.

This is what so many destinations overlook. Not the gorge. Not the bungee jump off the Pont de l’Artuby. The woman who tells you to ignore the menu, just go have a look. The chef who has nowhere else to be on a Friday afternoon. The ice cream that was worth stopping for. The son who just finished hotel school and chose to come back to a village of 346 people.

Comps-sur-Artuby is not a destination. It is a place. There is a difference.

I went back to school for a master’s in travel and tourism for two reasons:

1. With nothing to do, I was afraid I would start having gin for breakfast.

2. I felt like I needed an advanced degree to validate myself and my 27+ years working in tourism and hospitality, while living on a dirt road.

I have a stack of certifications and accolades, all trying to prove something to “someone”.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I love learning and enjoy school.

It took a getaway to the south of France to see it. Since the day I handed the keys to the new owner of Loco Gringo, I have been presenting a sanitized, vanilla version of myself.

Then AI came along.

Being a bit of a geek, I jumped into the deep end of the pool. I built an AI app. Spent a fortune. Shut it down. Tried consulting. Cared more about their businesses than they did. Started writing frameworks on Substack. It was mechanical and unsatisfying.

I am changing my Substack. To share the stories of being an expat, an explorer, and a traveler. A guest and a host. Avoiding potholes in business. And about life held together with duct tape.

If you are a already a subscriber, there will be some nuggets of knowledge still. You may not recognize the tone. It’s the real me. No workflows or frameworks. Gritty details of boots-on-the-ground, bruises, and scars from witnessing a civilization grow from the end of a dirt road.

And if you unsubscribe, I understand. There are lots of consultants and people teaching how to promote your property on TikTok. But that person won’t be me.

Buckle up, because sometimes you can’t make this shit up.

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The corner where a lovely bakery used to be is empty now.

I’ve been to Villefranche-sur-Mer three times in the past year. I’m here now. The boulangerie is gone. So is a bank. So is the post office. The town sits on the French Riviera, outside of Nice tucked into limestone cliffs.

A long-time resident called it morte.

Dead.

More homes sit empty most of the year than are lived in full time. The people who keep a town alive, the ones who need a bakery on Tuesday morning, who cash a check at the bank, who mail something at the post office, don’t live here anymore. The people who own here now show up for July and August.

A bakery can’t survive on July and August.

This past week, Villefranche elected a new mayor. Robert Capelier won in a tight second-round vote on March 22. There was a party on Friday night down by the harbour. Anyone was welcome. People showed up hoping he could bring the town back. Housing is his mission.

My rented apartment was a block from the party.

Villefranche isn’t drowning in visitors. Well, at the moment. It’s not on the cover of a travel magazine killing it with foot traffic. It’s not Dubrovnik in July or Amsterdam on any given Tuesday. The boulangerie didn’t close because 400 people showed up and bought out the croissants. It closed because not enough people live there to need it every morning.

That’s a different problem. And it requires a different conversation.

I wrote about destinations becoming more valuable as images than as places, last Sunday. The photo economy. The destination that exists to be photographed rather than lived in. This week is the same root, different wound. When real estate replaces residents, you don’t just lose housing. You lose the daily life that made the housing worth buying.

The people who bought those properties fell in love with the pastries or, the park with an open-air market, the blue of the sea, the way the woman at the post office knew everyone’s name. Then they bought a piece of it. And replaced someone who needed it year-round with a key lockbox and two weeks in July.

They didn’t kill the town on purpose. They hollowed out the exact thing they paid to be near.

Other towns have tried to stop this. None have figured it out.

In 2016, St Ives in Cornwall held a vote. Over three-quarters of voters said yes: stop new homes from being sold as second residences.

The problem is, new builds were only a tiny fraction of the housing stock. The existing homes kept selling to outsiders. Prices kept climbing. Whether the policy failed or was just too small to matter depends on who you ask. Cornwall has since added a 100% council tax premium on second homes. No I did not add an extra zero, 100%.

It took effect last year. Nobody knows yet if it changes anything.

Wales went further. The law now allows council tax premiums on second homes up to an eye-popping 300%. Some counties hit 150% - 200%. House prices dropped. Second homes went on the market.

The bakery didn’t come back.

On the north coast of Northern Ireland, the same thing is happening. In Portstewart, as many as one in four properties are second homes. A lawmaker said what everyone already knew: the towns are dying. Empty streets. No children. No policy yet.

They’re still in the naming-the-problem phase.

And in Provincetown, Massachusetts. The year-round population is roughly 3,500. In summer, it swells to tens of thousands. In Provincetown and on Martha’s Vineyard, workers cycle through partial-year leases because they can’t afford year-round housing. On the Vineyard they call it the Shuffle.

Every destination tried something different.

None of them got the bakery back.

Here’s the bitch.

Some of you reading this are in the tourism industry in a town like this. You run the guesthouse or inn. You take the bookings. You pay attention to your reviews, and you do your job well. And you watch the post office close. You know the family that had to leave. You wave at neighbors you no longer have.

You’re on both sides of this, and you know it.

I’m not telling you to stop. I love tourism; it’s been my career. I’m asking you to count what you’re losing before it shows up in shuttered windows. The thing people come to your destination or town for is the thing that’s leaving. The people are the one thing you can’t replace.

Because the moment worth paying attention to isn’t when the mayor gives a speech, it’s before that, before the bakery closes. Before the post office goes. When you still have something left to fight for instead of something left to eulogize.

I want that corner near the park open again, with pâtisseries in the window.

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Scroll your profile the way someone would who has never heard of your place and is deciding whether to book. One question: what kind of guest do these posts actually attract? Compare that to who you want as guests.

Most places worry about what the internet says about them. The bigger problem is what their own social media is saying, and nobody is checking.

How it happens

You hosted a birthday dinner last spring. Great night, good energy, beautiful photos. You posted them. No caption explaining it was a private event.

Your property bio still says “a peaceful place to disconnect.”

Someone planning a quiet anniversary trip sees the party photos and either books somewhere else, or books with you and arrives expecting a party. They check in. You or your front desk spends the first twenty minutes walking back what your posts promised. That shows up in the review.

I have been doing this since 2007. The party post with no context. That one is mine.

Here is another one. The renovation progress photo you posted because you were proud of it. No context, no dates. A guest booked two weeks later thinking it was finished. It’s not. Or the photo from the local market you sponsored. It looked community-minded. Your bio says serene and private. Now you have a family of six asking about the weekly schedule of events.

You know your property. The guest does not. They are reading your feed like a brochure, taking everything at face value, and drawing conclusions you never intended.

What this costs you

The guest who arrives with the wrong expectation is not just a hard check-in.

They leave a review that describes their version of the experience. That review becomes the script the next guest arrives with, before they ever find your website. They show up already certain about what to expect, based on someone else’s bad stay.

Season after season, the wrong guest trains the next wrong guest. You deal with it every time. Or your front desk does. Either way, it is the same conversation, over and over.

This is not a content problem. It is a trust problem that started the moment you posted without thinking about who was watching.

This week, do this

Spend 15 minutes scrolling your own profile as a stranger. Go to your account. Scroll slowly. Pretend you have never heard of this place and you are deciding whether it is right for your trip.

Look at every post and ask whether it attracts the guest you actually want.

When you sit down to write the confirmation message, add one line that tells them something your social media feed did not. That is it. One line before they arrive is worth more than three conversations at check-in.

Properties that do not post often have the same problem, just concentrated. Ten posts a year means each one carries more weight, not less.

FAQs

A few things you might be thinking

Should I delete the posts that do not fit? Probably not. Post something that adds context to what people already saw. Deleting a post does not undo the impression it made on people who already saw it. Let the feed tell a fuller story rather than hiding the one already out there.

What do you do when your property has multiple vibes, restful during the week and lively on weekends? Say it out loud in your bio. “Weekdays are for people who want to switch off. Weekends we host events. Check our calendar before you book.” A feed that silently shows both without explanation misleads everyone.

What do you do when the confusion is coming from guest tags, content you did not create? You cannot control what guests post, but you control what you amplify. Every time you reshare a tagged post, you endorse that version of your property. Be selective. You can like a photo without sharing it.

Copy-paste AI prompt help

Paste this into whatever AI tool you already use. Add your property description and your last 10 social media posts. For each post, write one line describing what the photo or video shows, then paste the caption.

You are a hospitality consultant who has seen small properties lose bookings because their social media trained the wrong guest to show up.

I will give you two things:

1. A one or two-sentence description of my property and the guest I am trying to attract.

2. My last 10 social media posts. For each one I will write one line describing what the photo or video shows, then paste the caption.

Do three things:

First, describe the guest who would feel most confirmed by this feed. The person who sees these posts and thinks “yes, this place is for me.”

Second, tell me whether that guest matches the property I described. Do not soften this. Name the disconnect.

Third, list any posts that are sending the wrong signal. For each one, write one sentence on what expectation it sets and one sentence on what to post instead.

Output: two short paragraphs for the first two, then a numbered list for the third.

Every mismatched guest leaves a review. That review trains the next one. You wrote the first draft of that problem yourself, which means you can also rewrite it.

This is not just a property-level problem.

It is happening across entire destinations too.

Your visitors arrive pre-trained. Someone else did the training and you had no say in it. They do not show up unsure. They show up certain, and often wrong

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If you stand by the lake in Hallstatt, Austria for a few minutes, you see it play out in real time.

Sightseers move toward the same stretch of waterfront, pause, and raise their phones toward the church steeple and pastel houses reflected in the water. Some scroll first. Checking the angle they saved earlier, then step forward to recreate it.

Hallstatt has fewer than 750 residents, yet millions of people recognize that single view.

People don’t arrive curious anymore. They arrive already decided on what it’s supposed to be.

By the time tourists arrive, they are not discovering the destination. They are confirming the version they saw online.

If you have ever had a guest say, “this isn’t what I expected,” you are already dealing with this.

Expectation is the product now. The experience just delivers on it.

This isn’t a trend. It’s a shift in how travel actually works now.
Travel starts long before booking. What’s changed is who shapes that early experience and what it costs when they get it wrong.

Your visitors arrive pre-trained. Someone else did the training, and you had no say in it.
Guests don’t show up unsure. They show up certain, and often wrong.

Tourism marketing didn’t just miss this. It accelerated it. Destinations have always shown their best side, but those images are now amplified by millions of travelers sharing their own versions of the same place.

Most destinations are still marketing what a place looks like instead of what it’s actually like once you’re there. That’s the problem.

This is a shift from promotion to preparation.
Promotion attracts attention. Preparation shapes behavior.

Most destinations now have two versions: the place itself, and the one people saw online.

Visitors arrive with both in their head.

When Everyone Shows Up for the Same Shot

Hallstatt is one of the clearest examples of this shift. Over the past decade it has become a global social media icon. A small town attracting millions each year. At times the crowds became so intense that officials installed barriers to block the most photographed viewpoint and began limiting tour buses entering the town.

A similar pattern appeared in Roccaraso, a mountain ski resort in Italy’s Abruzzo region. After a TikTok influencer posted videos of the snow-covered slopes, over 10,000 visitors descended on a town of 1,600 residents in a single day. Roads clogged and slopes overcrowded. Day trippers who had paid $20 USD for a tour arrived with no knowledge of ski etiquette, local norms, or the limits of the place they were visiting.

In the United States, the National Park Service has repeatedly reported visitors leaving marked trails to reach photo angles they saw on social media, particularly at places like Horseshoe Bend and Glacier Point in Yosemite. Rangers say most visitors are not trying to cause problems. They are following what they saw online.

What people see online does not just shape where they go. It shapes how they behave when they get there.

Visitors are not exploring. They’re reenacting what they saw, down to where to stand and what to touch. Cues written by someone who was never responsible for the place.

Sometimes those cues ignore boundaries, safety, or local norms. In many cases, visitors arrive having already learned how to behave somewhere from someone who didn’t live there.

They’re not just managing crowds. They’re dealing with behavior that was learned somewhere else, and every viral post trains the next wave before they arrive.

You don’t get a say in what they learned.

The industry spent years optimizing for visibility. Now it’s dealing with the consequences of it.

Where This Hits First: Operators on the Ground

This does not show up first in strategy decks. It shows up in operations.

Hotels, hosts, guides, and tour operators are downstream of content they didn’t create, written by people who don’t run the place, and believed by guests who think they already know what to expect.

Guests arrive expecting walkable distances that aren’t walkable. Quiet viewpoints that are crowded by noon. Access to places that are private, protected, or seasonal.
Staff end up resetting expectations in real time.

You and your team are cleaning up expectations set by people who don’t run the place.

You don’t control what the guest believes. They’re certain they’re right. By the time you step in, the experience is already going off the rails.

When expectations are off, reviews drop, and teams burn out. You see it quickly.

If you don’t shape expectations before arrival, you will spend your entire operation managing the consequences after. The destination story is already breaking before the guest arrives. Local businesses are just the ones absorbing it.

This Changes the Job

Social media has also created real opportunity. Small destinations now have visibility that once required significant budgets, and remote regions can reach global audiences in ways that weren’t possible a decade ago.

But visibility moves faster than infrastructure, planning, or visitor education. That changes what this job actually is.

Marketing is now behavior design, whether you signed up for that job or not. Every piece of content you publish is either teaching people how to behave or letting someone else do it for you.

Marketing, owners, and operators need to be aligned on what the experience actually is before the guest arrives.

Most destinations are still chasing attention. That’s what created the problem. The ones that win shape behavior.

Start with a simple review.

Look at your top-performing content. What is it actually teaching people to do when they arrive? Stand here? Crowd here? Skip everything else?

Show how to experience a place, not just what it looks like on a good day. Point out the local rhythms, boundaries, and tradeoffs before they arrive. Broaden the story beyond one iconic viewpoint, or everyone ends up in the same place.

If this isn’t addressed, the first thing that breaks is the review score. The second is your team. And the local community feels it not long after.

It’s Not Just the Crowds

This goes beyond demand. It’s the gap between the version of the place people see online and the one people actually live in.

Residents aren’t just reacting to crowds. They’re reacting to behavior that doesn’t fit the place, and to a version of their town that no longer feels like theirs. That runs deeper than the crowds, and it doesn’t go away when the season ends.

The Story Is Already Out There

For decades, destinations controlled how their story was told.

Back in 2009, during the economic crisis and swine flu in Mexico, I organized a conference in Cancún. A small group of us were already using early social platforms to show what was actually happening on the ground and push back on travel fears. We wanted to show others what social media could do, and how to use it to show what was really happening.

I told a room full of hotel operators that social media would matter. One woman said her property would never be on Facebook.
Same goal then as now. Get to people before someone else does.

What’s changed is who controls that perception. In the past, destinations shaped how they were seen. Today, that’s often set before they even enter the conversation.

Destinations used to own the story. Now they inherit someone else’s version and try to operate inside it.

The goal isn’t to take control of the story again. It’s to get there earlier.

A single video can introduce millions of people to a place overnight. One angle becomes the angle. One moment becomes the expectation.

So Now What

Social media didn’t change why people travel. It changed where the trip actually begins.

The experience doesn’t start at arrival. It starts the moment someone sees your destination online. People show up with a picture in their head and a way of being there they picked up somewhere else. Sometimes it doesn’t fit at all.

Destinations, hotels, and other businesses are all dealing with the same reality now.

You can shape expectations before people arrive.
Or you can manage the consequences after they do.

Those are the only two options. And one of them compounds the problem every season, because every visitor becomes the next piece of content.

If you’re seeing this play out where you are, I’d love to hear it.
What’s one place where the version online doesn’t match the one on the ground?

Leave a comment

Most of the time, it’s not a price problem.
It happens at the exact moment they were about to trust you.

This week is about fixing that moment, even if your bookings are non‑refundable and your tools are basic.

The second guests decide your site is “the risky option”

A guest:

• Finds you on an OTA

• Clicks through to your website

• Looks at photos and rates, maybe even starts a booking

• Disappears and books on the OTA instead

That’s commission you didn’t have to pay for a guest you already convinced.

It comes down to a pause right before they hit “Pay,” when they think:

“Okay, but what happens if my plans change?”
“And who is actually going to help me if they do?”

On the OTA, the answers are big and loud:

• Clear “non‑refundable” or “flexible” labels

• “Secure payment” badges

• “We’re here 24/7” beside the price

On many small sites, those answers are buried in fine print or not shown at all.

Guests trust OTAs to fix problems.
They’re not sure you will, because you haven’t shown them how.

Why do guests leave a hotel or rental website and book through an OTA instead?

• Because the OTA clearly shows what happens if something goes wrong.

• Most independent sites hide that information or make it hard to find.

• When guests don’t see clear answers, they choose the option that feels safer.

You can’t copy their call centre.
You don’t need to. Guests aren’t looking for a big team. They just want to know a real person will answer.

This week, do this: paste a 3‑line safety block above “Book now”

Goal: finish this in under 5 minutes. If it takes longer, you’re overthinking it.

Step 1 – pick one spot you can actually edit:

• A room page on your site, or

• The short text area right above your booking button, or

• A “Why book direct” block beside your own booking link

Step 2 – if you don’t want to think, use this exactly as it is right above “Book now”:

• Most bookings are non‑refundable once confirmed

• If plans change, tell us early – we’ll do what we can to help

• Direct contact with us – real replies, usually within a few hours

No design. No boxes. No images. Just text.

If you have different seasons and rate types, don’t let that stop you.
Write this for your most common booking, and keep it simple. If you need to, add:

“Some special offers have stricter rules – full details are shown before you pay.”

You have not promised refunds.
You have promised clarity and a human.

If‑then trigger:

If a guest can click “Book,” they should see these 3 lines without scrolling. If they can’t, move the block until they do.

If you haven’t pasted this yet, do it now before you read on.

What makes a direct booking feel safe to a guest?

Three things:

• Clear rules about changes or cancellations

• Clear timing for when payment is taken

• A clear way to contact a real person if something goes wrong

Fix the one email every guest reads (highest‑ROI move)

If you only do one thing from this newsletter, do this.

Open your confirmation email. The first screen on a phone should say:

“Your stay with us on [dates] is confirmed. We’re expecting you.

Most bookings are non‑refundable once confirmed. If your plans change, tell us as early as you can. We can’t promise a refund, but we’ll do what we can to help with new dates or options.

If anything comes up, reply to this email or message us at [channel]. A real person on site replies, usually within a few hours.”

If guests often ask about payment timing, swap in this line:

“Payment is taken at [booking / before arrival], you’ll see this clearly before you pay.”

Clear rules don’t just help guests feel safer.
They protect your time, your team, and your sanity when something goes wrong.

Ten‑minute upgrade: borrow the words, not the badges, from your OTA page

If you have 10 more minutes, do this next.

Look at your OTA page for one reason: it shows safety clearly where guests decide.

1. Open your main OTA listing in one tab and your own site in another.

2. On the OTA, note the words near the price that calm people down:

   • “Non‑refundable” / “Free cancellation”

   • “Secure payment”

   • Any short line about help if things go wrong

3. Ask: “Which of these do I also offer, but never say on my own site?”

Don’t worry about badges, icons, or layout.
Just focus on clear words next to the price.

Add one or two simple lines under your 3‑line block, for example:

• “Secure card payment processed by [provider].”

• “We’ve hosted [X] stays since [year].”

• A short review line: “Guests say: ‘Exactly as described, no surprises.’”

You’re showing you’re not a gamble.

Use AI to tighten your wording

If you don’t want to reword this yourself, use AI:

“You are helping a small short‑term rental, B&B, or hotel make its direct booking feel safe by clearly explaining:
– what happens if plans change
– when payment is taken
– how a guest can contact a real person for help

I will paste:
– the text from my booking page
– my current confirmation email

Step 1: Extract the exact sentences that explain:
– what happens if plans change
– when the card is charged
– how guests can contact us

Step 2: Rewrite the content into:

A 3‑line safety block to place above a ‘Book now’ button
– exactly 3 lines
– each line under 15 words
– clear, plain language
– no promises beyond what is stated

A new opening paragraph for the confirmation email
– fits on the first screen of a phone
– clearly confirms the booking
– clearly explains rules and contact method

Writing rules:
– use simple, direct language
– avoid marketing phrases, filler words, or generic reassurance
– do not sound like a corporate hotel brand
– only include statements the operator can realistically deliver

Output format:
– ‘Safety block:’ followed by the 3 ready‑to‑paste lines
– ‘Confirmation email opening:’ followed by the ready‑to‑paste paragraph

If key details are missing, ask one clarifying question before writing.”

Let it draft, then adjust the wording so it sounds like you and matches your real rules.

What happens if you actually do this

Over the next 2–3 weeks, you should see:

• Fewer confused messages: less “I didn’t know it was non‑refundable” and “Just checking my booking…”

• Fewer refund fights, because guests saw the rules and a human promise in plain language up front.

• More guests who start a booking on your site actually finishing it there, instead of bouncing back to an OTA tab.

That means fewer 15–25% commission hits on bookings you could have kept,
and more control of the guest relationship from the start.

You don’t need a spreadsheet. Just notice for two weeks:

• How often do you hear “I didn’t know…”

• How often does someone who starts on your site ends up booking on an OTA

If both start to drop, this is working.

Guests book where fear is removed fastest.
In practice, that means showing clear rules, clear payment timing, and a clear human contact before they pay.

If this way of thinking about direct bookings resonates, I’m working on a broader initiative with others in the industry focused on making direct booking the default.

Happy to share more if you’re interested.

In a remote village in Greenland, polar bear skins hang over porch railings. A small building doubles as passport control and gift shop, selling seal and bear-hide mittens among some postcards. The only grocery store receives deliveries twice a year.

Moments like this attest a problem in tourism. Visitors often arrive before they understand the place they’re visiting.

I did. My mental picture of Greenland came almost entirely from photographs of glaciers, icebergs, an polar bears. Not from understanding how people actually live there.

Many problems with visitor behavior are not attitude problems. They are explanation problems.

Places that welcome visitors often expect respectful behavior from people who arrive without much understanding of how the place works. Greenland shows what can happen when a place takes that void seriously.

Ilulissat and the question of preparation

Ilulissat sits on Greenland’s west coast beside the Ilulissat Icefjord. One of the most active glacier systems in the world and a UNESCO World Heritage Site. It is also one of the country’s main tourism gateways. Welcoming travelers on expedition ships and small adventure tours.

Tourism in Greenland is growing. But the way people talk about tourism there feels different from many other places. The issue is not only how many people arrive. It is whether visitors actually understand the environment and culture once they get there.

Greenland watched what happened in places like Iceland, where tourism expanded quickly and communities struggled to keep up. The response here has been slower. More deliberate. More attention is placed on how visitors are prepared for the place they are arriving in.

The Ilulissat Icefjord Centre helps visitors understand the landscape as both cultural and natural heritage before they head out to explore. Exhibits explain hunting traditions, climate change, and how local communities depend on the fjord.

Visitors are often briefed before they start exploring.

When rules appear without context

Many places respond by adding rules as tourism grows. Signs appear along trails. Drone bans are introduced. Visitor codes of conduct are posted at visitor centers.

Those tools help, but they rarely explain what the rules protect and why.

When visitors see rules without understanding what those rules protect, the restrictions can feel hasty. A boardwalk through fragile vegetation becomes an inconvenience instead of a safeguard. A drone ban feels bureaucratic rather than protective. A local tradition may look shocking rather than part of everyday life.

Visitors may follow the rule without ever really understanding why it exists.

Tourism often focuses on moving visitors through places.

Orientation asks a different question.

Do visitors understand the place they just entered?

Explaining the place first

Many guides and locally run tourism businesses in Greenland start somewhere else. They explain the place before presenting the rules that apply within it.

When visitors understand how people live with wildlife, why some seasons matter for nesting birds, and how hunting traditions developed, the rules they encounter later make a lot more sense.

Stories do not replace rules. Stories explain them.

In smaller communities such as Ilimanaq or Kapisillit, local guides explain how people live with the seasons, the land they depend on, and the traditions that shape daily life. Visitors begin to see the landscape as something people live with, not just scenery.

Moments of doubt become moments to explain the place.

In several Greenlandic towns, residents have helped shape visitor guidelines. They include simple things like asking before photographing people and respecting private spaces.

Field Notes: Greenland

While traveling in Greenland, a few observations made differences especially clear.

In some villages, polar bear pelts hang over porch railings or appear in local shops. Without context, visitors are not quite sure what they are looking at. Some may even be surprised to learn that animals considered protected elsewhere are hunted here.

Sled dogs are often kept outdoors along the edges of settlements. For travelers used to seeing dogs as household pets, the scene can feel harsh until the role of working dogs in Arctic travel and hunting is explained.

None of this comes from disrespect.

More often, it reflects expectations people bring with them from somewhere else.

Every place that welcomes visitors has its own version of this moment. It is when visitor expectations meet the reality of how the place works.

Working fishing docks, livestock pastures, sacred sites, alpine meadows, coral reefs, ski trails, sand dunes, and farms all mean something to the people who live there. Without context, visitors may not realize what they are looking at.

The details differ everywhere. In a ski town it’s trail etiquette. In a beach community it’s dune protection. In a historic city it’s noise and neighborhood life. In rural areas it’s private land and working farms.

But the pattern is the same.

Visitors arrive with expectations shaped in other places. But every place works by its own rules.

Preparation before visitors arrive

Some of that preparation starts before visitors ever set foot in Greenland.

Visit Greenland even published an article called Why Greenland May Not Be for You. It asks travelers to think carefully about their expectations and explains what visiting remote Arctic communities is really like.

Expedition cruise companies visiting Greenland follow guidelines from the Association of Arctic Expedition Cruise Operators (AECO). Before passengers go ashore, they are usually briefed about wildlife, local culture, and how to behave in fragile environments.

Visitors are encouraged to understand the place before they start exploring.

What understanding changes

People working closest to visitors notice the same pattern. Guides, tour companies, small hotels, and local hosts see behavior change once people understand the place they are in.

When travelers understand why fragile vegetation is protected, they stay on designated paths. Once they learn why wildlife areas are sensitive during nesting season, drone bans start to make sense. And when they hear how communities depend on surrounding ecosystems, people keep more distance from wildlife.

Preparation shapes behavior. It also changes who decides to come in the first place.

People working in tourism in Greenland often say the same thing: visitors who come with context stay longer, spend more in local communities, and ask better questions.

They are not different people.

They were simply prepared differently.

Where understanding still falls short

Not everyone in tourism believes that explaining the place will solve visitor behavior problems.

Some destination managers say the information is already there, in signs, visitor centers, and tour briefings, yet people still ignore basic guidelines. Others point out that many travelers are only there for a few hours or never read the information before arriving.

Residents in busy places raise another concern: sometimes there are simply too many visitors.

Even respectful visitors can change daily life when large numbers arrive at once.

Short cruise visits can make this harder. Passengers may only spend a few hours on land, leaving little time to really understand the place.

Social media is also changing how people behave when they travel. Dramatic photos and unusual experiences get attention online. Visitors may know a cliff edge is dangerous or a wildlife area is sensitive, yet still step closer for a photo that will stand out.

So, good preparation cannot eliminate every problem.

It reduces the chances that confusion turns into conflict between visitors and the places they came to see.

Questions places might ask

Every destination eventually runs into the same moment. It is worth asking:

• What assumptions do visitors arrive with?

• Where do those expectations collide with local reality?

• Are visitors encountering rules before they understand what those rules protect?

• Where should understanding begin, before visitors arrive or after problems start?

A pattern worth noticing

The pattern visible in Greenland appears in many places. Most visitors do not arrive intending to disrespect a place. More often they arrive carrying expectations from somewhere else about what is normal and how a place works.

Greenland itself has often been marketed through dramatic images of icebergs, glaciers, and adventure. Those images start shaping expectations long before travelers arrive.

When those expectations run into a different way of living, confusion usually comes first. Behavior follows. Places often respond with more rules. The harder work is helping visitors understand the place before expecting them to behave differently.

Responsible tourism often begins with orientation, helping visitors understand the place before they start moving through it.

In that light, the way a place is introduced to visitors, from website text to arrival briefings, becomes part of tourism design rather than an afterthought.

Frequently Asked Questions

Isn’t this just a Greenland thing? Our destination is completely different.

Greenland is a clear example, but the pattern appears in many places. Visitors arrive carrying expectations from somewhere else about what is normal and how a place works.

In a wine region, it may show up when travelers wander into working vineyards. In a fishing harbor, it appears when tourists walk onto active docks. In a desert park, it happens when visitors underestimate heat and distance.

The landscape changes. The moment when expectations meet reality does not.

We already explain the rules through signs, websites, and visitor centers. Why would more explanation make a difference?

Many destinations do provide plenty of information. The issue is often timing.

Rules land differently when people understand what those rules protect. When visitors first hear how a place functions. How land is used, how wildlife behaves, and how people live there. The rules that follow tend to make more sense.

That does not solve every problem. But it reduces the number of conflicts that start with simple confusion.

Most of our visitors are only here for a few hours or a weekend. Are they really going to read orientation materials?

Short visits do make this harder. Many travelers move quickly through a destination and absorb only bits and pieces of information.

Some places are experimenting with quick orientation moments: a short explanation from a guide, a story shared at a trailhead, a simple introduction at a harbor, ferry dock, or visitor center. Even a few minutes of context can change how people interpret what they see.

Understanding does not always require a long briefing. Sometimes it begins with a single clear explanation.

Isn’t the real issue too many visitors, not misunderstanding?

In some destinations, that is absolutely true. Large numbers of visitors can change the pace of daily life even when people behave respectfully.

Preparation cannot solve structural issues like crowding or infrastructure limits. But it can reduce the number of moments where confusion turns into unnecessary conflict between visitors and residents.

It is not a complete solution. It is one piece of a larger puzzle.

Doesn’t tourism marketing create unrealistic expectations in the first place?

Marketing naturally focuses on the most striking images of a place. Those images shape expectations long before visitors arrive.

The challenge is making sure the story does not stop with the photograph. When destinations also explain how people live in that landscape. How the land is used, and what matters to the community. Visitors arrive with a fuller picture.

Images attract attention. Context helps people understand what they are seeing.

Some visitors simply don’t care. Can preparation really change behavior?

There will always be a small number of visitors who ignore guidance. Preparation will never reach everyone.

But many travelers do respond once they understand the place they are visiting. Guides, small hotels, and local hosts often notice the same pattern. Visitors who arrive with context tend to ask better questions, move more thoughtfully, and stay longer.

Preparation does not change everyone. Often it changes enough people to make a difference.

Residents often feel tourism disrupts daily life. Can visitor orientation actually help with that?

In many places, the frustration appears in small moments. Someone blocks a narrow street to take photos. A visitor wanders onto private farmland. A drone appears over a quiet neighborhood. None of it may be intentional.

But those moments accumulate.

When visitors understand how a place functions, where people live, work, and draw boundaries, they move through it with more awareness. Orientation will not remove every tension, but it can ease many of the everyday friction points between residents and visitors.

Leave a comment

Sources and Further Reading

• Visit Greenland tourism strategy and visitor expectations guidance

• Ilulissat Icefjord Centre interpretation and visitor orientation initiatives

• Arctic Expedition Cruise Operators (AECO) visitor guidelines and community collaboration

• Research on tourist behavior in Greenland, including work on encouraging sustainable tourist behavior (Copenhagen Business School)

• Responsible tourism and community-based tourism initiatives in Greenland

Open your last 10 pre-arrival guest messages and look for repeated questions about parking, directions, or amenities.

Those questions reveal expectation problems. Places where guests misunderstood the stay before they even packed their bags.

Close those gaps and check-ins move faster, guest questions drop, and reviews get easier.

Do This First (5 Minutes)

Open your last 10 guest messages sent before arrival.

Highlight any question that appears twice.

When the same question shows up twice, it’s not random.

It’s a signal your listing or pre-arrival message didn’t shape expectations clearly enough.

You’ll probably notice the same two or three questions showing up again and again.

Fix that once and you often remove the same confusion for dozens of future guests.

Small trick that helps hosts actually do this:
Next time you open your guest inbox, scroll back through the last ten messages before replying to anything new.

You’ll start spotting patterns immediately.

A Small Example

One mountain lodge added a short section in their confirmation email called “Before You Drive Up.”

It explained two things:

• the final road to the lodge is gravel
• cell service disappears about ten minutes before arrival

Guest messages about directions dropped.

The property didn’t change.

Only the expectations changed.

A Simple Reality Most Hosts Miss

Most guest problems are not caused by bad guests.

They happen when guests arrive with the wrong picture of the property and the place they’re entering.

After decades in hospitality, you start seeing this pattern again and again.

You recognize the moment.

• Where do we park?

• Is there air conditioning?

• Why is the road dirt?

• Can we bring two extra friends?

Sometimes the information exists in the listing. But guests missed it. So they still show up surprised.

When that expectation is wrong, the problems start immediately:

• more guest questions

• slower check-ins

• rule violations

• staff frustration

• reviews that say “we didn’t realize…”

Three Reasons Guests Show Up Confused

After years of watching guest messages pile up, the confusion usually falls into a few patterns.

1. The guest who didn’t read

This happens.

(Okay… realistically, it’s closer to every third guest.)

2. The guest who read but pictured something different

Example:

A listing says “cozy studio.” The guest arrives expecting a one-bedroom apartment. The listing may be accurate.

But the picture in the guest’s head was completely different.

3. The guest who built expectations somewhere else

Travel blogs, Instagram posts, and past trips shape expectations long before someone books.

Examples hosts and hoteliers see all the time:

• expecting beach access that doesn’t exist

• assuming there’s a grocery store nearby

• expecting hotel service in a private rental

The listing never corrected the assumption. So the guest arrives expecting something else.

Guests Don’t Just Arrive at a Property

They Arrive in a Place

Guests don’t just arrive at a property.

They arrive in a place, a destination, city, town, or village.

The road.
The neighborhood.
The landscape.
The pace of life.

Visitors have no idea about most of this stuff.

Examples operators see constantly:

• rural properties where the nearest grocery store is 25–30 minutes away

• historic buildings with steep stairs and no elevator

• beach towns where parking is tight

• mountain areas with gravel roads and limited cell service

None of this surprises locals. For visitors, it absolutely does. When the place isn’t explained clearly, guests start guessing. And they’re usually wrong.

That’s where most check-in problems begin.

Most guest problems are not caused by bad guests.

They happen when guests arrive with the wrong picture of the property and the place they’re entering.

Three Small Rewrite Examples

One sentence can fix the whole problem.

Example 1

Before: Parking available behind the building.

After: Parking is behind the building. Street parking is reserved for residents and may result in a ticket.

Example 2

Before: Check-in after 4 PM.

After: Check-in begins at 4 PM because housekeeping needs time to prepare the property. Guests arriving earlier may find the unit still being cleaned.

Example 3

Before: Quiet neighborhood.

After: This is a quiet residential neighborhood. Guests should expect normal neighborhood noise limits after 10 PM.

The second versions explain the context, not just the rule.

Guests follow rules more easily when they understand why.

Otherwise, it just feels like someone made up the rule.

Two Fixes Most Properties Can Make

After running the confusion audit, these two adjustments solve a surprising number of problems.

Add a “First-Time Guests Should Know” section

Place it in your confirmation email or pre-arrival message.

Explain the three things that surprise guests most.

Examples:

• wildlife around the property

• gravel driveways

• shared parking

• rural location details

This helps guests picture what arrival will actually be like.

Replace one FAQ with a short explanation about the property or the place.

Many FAQs list rules. They rarely explain the situation behind the rule.

A little context prevents a lot of confusion.

Operator Field Notes

If guests repeatedly ask about something before arrival, expectations were never shaped clearly.

When reviewing messages, look for patterns like:

• parking confusion

• location misunderstandings

• amenity assumptions

• rules that surprise guests

• details about the surrounding area locals take for granted

When the same question appears twice, update the message guests see before arrival.

That one small change often prevents dozens of future questions.

If you manage a team, ask your front desk or guest communication staff which questions they answer most often.

They usually know exactly where the confusion starts.

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Optional: Use AI to Spot Expectation Issues

If you already use ChatGPT or another AI, this can speed up the audit. If not, the manual audit above works perfectly fine. You can try these AI instructions, just copy and paste:

Analyze these guest messages sent before arrival.

Identify the questions guests repeat most often.

For each question, suggest how the listing description or pre-arrival message could clarify expectations earlier so guests understand the property and surrounding place before traveling.

Focus on preventing confusion rather than answering questions faster.

Look for patterns, not perfect wording.

Run the 5-Minute Confusion Audit This Week

Open your last 10 pre-arrival guest messages and look for repeated questions. If the same question appears twice, you’ve found a pattern.

Fix that message once and you prevent the same issue for dozens of future guests.

Confused arrivals cost real time and energy:

• extra guest messages

• longer check-ins

• repeated explanations

• staff fatigue

• preventable reviews

When guests arrive with the right picture of the stay, operations run more smoothly.

For your guest.
For your team.
For your property.

Quick question for you.

What’s the one guest question that keeps showing up before arrival at your place?

If one comes to mind, hit reply or leave it in the comments.
I read every one.

Leave a comment

If You Missed It

The other day we explored the idea that tourists are not always the problem.

Often visitors arrive without context about the place they’re entering.

We also looked at something experienced hosts do instinctively: shaping expectations before the booking even happens.

Because by the time the guest arrives, the expectations are already set.

An inflatable carried us from the schooner to shore in a remote part of Greenland. We were heading for a hike toward the glacier. The landscape was covered in thick moss and small Arctic flowers growing from the rock itself.

Before anyone began walking, our guide stopped the group and pointed toward the ground beneath our feet. Some of the moss we were looking at, she explained, can take decades to recover once it is damaged. When possible, step on the rock rather than the moss.

Another day in the small village of Ittoqqortoormiit, a pair of sled dog puppies tumbled over each other in the dirt. Cameras came out and a couple of people instinctively moved closer.

The guide stopped us again.

These are working dogs, she explained. If we touched them, the locals might have to put them down.

After that people stepped carefully across the rock rather than the moss, and the puppies were admired from a respectful distance.

Visitors respect the rules of a place once they understand what the place protects.

The Reality of How Visitors Arrive

Greenland works in part because the experience is guided. Someone designed the moment where visitors learn how the place works before they move through it.

Most destinations do not operate that way.

Visitors arrive from many directions. They come through a highway exit, a trailhead pinned on social media, a short-term rental tucked into a neighborhood, or a café. Places where no one pauses to explain how the place works.

No single organization controls the visitor experience. The place itself still teaches visitors how it works. Sometimes the lesson is intentional. Other times it is accidental.

The Industry’s Favorite Explanation: Bad Tourists

When visitor behavior becomes a problem, the conversation usually turns toward the visitors themselves.

Tourists are rude.

Tourists are entitled.

Tourists are the problem.

We hear the same explanations every season. Travelers who do not understand the place. Visitors who fail to respect fragile landscapes or local culture.

Destinations respond with what they can control most easily. Rules. Visitor fees. Warning signs. More enforcement.

The moment on that Greenland hike showed something different.

Why a Sign Is Easier

Explaining a place takes effort.

A sign is easier.

Most places involve land managers, business owners, tourism offices, chambers of commerce, and local governments that rarely sit at the same table. When that happens, a sign goes up instead of anyone just explaining how the place works.

Where Behavior Changes

When visitors are shown how a place works, something different happens.

Visitors do not arrive understanding a place. They learn it on site, or they guess. Sometimes a guide or host explains what the landscape or community protects.

Infrastructure teaches as well. Paths show where to walk and where fragile ground should be avoided. Garbage cans placed where people naturally stop prevent littering.

Culture teaches too. Visitors watch how locals move through markets, harbors, temples, or town squares and begin doing the same.

Visitors quickly notice how locals dress and behave in public spaces and adjust accordingly.

A Place That Teaches the Rules

At Antelope Canyon in Arizona, visitors walk through the narrow sandstone canyon on guided paths with carefully planned stops.

Visitors stop where the guides stop. They photograph the formations from the same spots and move through the canyon at the same pace. The structure protects the canyon and keeps people safe.

The structure of the visit shapes people’s behavior long before enforcement becomes necessary.

You can see smaller versions of this approach elsewhere. In the Faroe Islands, residents periodically close fragile landscapes for restoration and explain why. Visitors usually cooperate once they understand what the place protects.

What Happens When Visitors Have to Guess

When no one explains how the place works, visitors improvise. People step off trails for photographs, wander into sensitive areas without realizing it, or walk into places the community protects.

Over time, the costs add up. Fragile landscapes are damaged. Residents lose patience with visitors. Staff spend their time correcting the same mistakes instead of welcoming people. Trust between visitors and the community begins to erode.

Locals grow frustrated, and staff or guides correct the same mistakes over and over. More signs appear, and more rules follow. Yet earlier no one explained how the place works.

The same pattern appears in destinations everywhere. Once you start looking for it.

People respect the rules once they understand what the place protects.

Where Do Visitors First Learn the Place?

Start with one exercise.

Walk the first hour of a visit.

Notice where visitors first learn what matters. Where do they learn what the place protects and how it works? Where do they watch how locals behave?

Then look closely at the moments when visitors guess.

Also consider the complaints you hear from residents. Those frustrations often reveal where visitors were never oriented to the place.

In some places, a DMO notices this. In others, it is a chamber of commerce, a land or property manager, or a few operators comparing notes. Who starts does not matter.

Someone simply needs to notice where visitors guess. Those moments often lead to the problems that appear later.

Where Do Visitors First Learn Your Place?

Think back to the hike in Greenland. The guide explained why the moss mattered and why the sled dogs were there to work.

There were no fences and no enforcement. Once people understood the place, their behavior changed.

Most places do not have guides at every trailhead or street corner. The question still stands.

Where do visitors first understand your place?

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Most behavior problems do not start with visitors.

They start where no one explains what the place protects.

When people understand what a place protects, they rarely need to be told how to behave.

Hospitality has always worked both ways. Guests have expectations of the host or the place, and the place has expectations of its guests. That understanding has faded as some destinations are treated more like entertainment than places with their own way of life.

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If this made you think about where visitors first understand your place, you might also enjoy:

The Places That Feel Like They Were Expecting You

Why the first fifteen minutes of arrival quietly shape visitor trust.

Pull 15 returning guests from last year and look at them one by one. Ask yourself two simple questions: Did this guest pay at today’s rates? And did it make the week easier or harder?

You already know the names.

Some returning guests book at your current rates and follow your policies. Others expect old pricing and extra flexibility. When you do not separate them, you end up discounting peak inventory out of habit and flexing policies more than you would for someone new.

Where Loyalty Starts to Cost You

You know this guest.

They have stayed every year since 2019. They reference what they paid back then. They expect the same peak dates and the same flexibility because “we have always done it this way.”

Because they have been loyal, you make exceptions.

You hold peak dates longer than you would for someone new. You hesitate to raise the rate to match your current pricing. You approve a late checkout without stepping back to consider the tradeoff.

High effort usually looks ordinary:

• Several pre-arrival emails about small details

• Pushback on updated cancellation terms

• Room changes after assignment

• Extra coordination with housekeeping or breakfast service

• A review that compares this stay to how it used to be

None of it feels like a big deal.

Over time, it reduces what you earn per stay and increases back-and-forth for you or your team. It also trains you to treat premium dates as negotiable.

You still made money.

The question is whether it was worth the energy.

The Returning Guests Who Make You Stronger

There is another kind of returning guest.

They book at your current rates without negotiation. They understand how you operate. They do not need every policy explained again. They may not always pay your highest rate, but they book fairly and follow your systems.

In seasonal markets, some returning guests are the reason you survive November. They are steady midweek or shoulder-season bookings that bring stability when things slow down.

Not every guest who paid less is a problem.

The point is not to clamp down on everything. The point is to see where you are bending and why.

This Week’s Action

Pull 15 returning guests and sort them in your mind:

• Paid well and low effort

• Paid well but high effort

• Paid less and low effort

• Paid less and high effort

For example:

Paid less and high effort might look like a discounted peak weekend, six pre-arrival emails, a late checkout request, and housekeeping juggling room changes.

Paid well and low effort might look like a fair midweek booking, two emails total, no exceptions, and a smooth departure.

When “paid well” feels unclear, compare the rate to what a new guest would have paid for the same stay. When you discounted a peak date out of habit, that tells you something. When someone filled a quiet midweek at a fair rate and followed your policies, that tells you something too.

Then ask one simple question:

When this name shows up, do you think “great” or “here we go”?

That answer will tell you more than your repeat percentage ever will.

What To Do With What You See

When you notice that a meaningful share of your returning guests are low money and high effort, you do not need a new loyalty program.

You may need firmer boundaries.

Start by removing automatic peak discounts for returning guests. When someone wants a peak weekend, they pay the current rate.

History is not a discount code.

Look at where peak pricing has become negotiable. Look at where exceptions are automatic instead of considered. Look at whether returning guests are being held to the same policies as new ones.

At the same time, protect the guests who pay fair rates, follow your systems, and stabilize your low periods. Those are the returning guests worth designing around.

Sunday challenged the idea that arrivals are the main signal of growth. Monday focused on increasing repeat. This is the hotel and host layer underneath both.

Repeat rate is not the strategy.

Loyalty that lowers your standards is not loyalty.

Over the years, I’ve turned away repeat guests. It’s uncomfortable. But I learned that loyalty only works when it respects the current standards of the business. When it doesn’t, you start paying for familiarity in ways you may not notice at first.

Audit your returning guests this week. Then decide who your business is built to support.

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If you want to dig deeper into what actually keeps guests from coming back in the first place, I wrote about it here.

Most destinations are built around being recommended.

We track how many people saw the ad, clicked, and booked a room, and when numbers dip, we spend more to bring in new people. That makes sense. It’s easier to count arrivals and bookings than it is to explain loyalty.

But the places that actually last are not always the ones getting the most attention. They’re the ones people choose to return to, again and again.

Going back isn’t the same decision as trying a place for the first time.

When someone is heading back for a second or third visit, they’re not scrolling through “Top 10” lists. They type the name straight into Google, check if their favorite restaurant is still open, look at where they stayed last time, and text a friend to see if they want to go back. At that point, they’re not comparing options or responding to a campaign because they already know what they want.

That kind of decision doesn’t show up in ad reports or even occupancy reports, which is why it’s so easy to overlook.

Repeat Visits Fall Through the Cracks

Here’s the catch.

In most towns, the person who comes back doesn’t really belong to anyone. They don’t fit neatly into a box.

Marketing is trying to get more eyeballs. Partnerships are juggling platforms and distribution. Hoteliers and hosts are just trying to keep rooms and tables full. And somewhere in the middle of all that is the guest who liked the place enough to return.

That guest doesn’t get ignored on purpose. It just isn’t clearly anyone’s job to grow that number. We assume they’ll come once, have a good time, and move on.

That’s the mistake. And it’s an expensive one.

So we default to what we can measure. We spend money to find new people because that’s what shows up on the dashboard. Over time, we get very efficient at replacing first-time visitors instead of building on the ones who already trust us.

That’s not momentum. That’s churn.

If that number isn’t visible, the answer is usually more marketing. That’s not because towns don’t care about loyalty. It’s because loyalty is harder to measure and harder to defend in a board meeting.

The most profitable booking is usually the one from a guest who has already stayed. Ignore that, and the cost starts creeping up in ways you don’t immediately see.

Here’s Where the Math Kicks In

It costs more to convince a stranger than it does to welcome someone back.

When someone returns, you’re not starting from zero. They already trust the place and understand how it works. They have a memory attached, which means your marketing does not have to work as hard and your message does not have to reintroduce the basics all over again.

When people come back, you’re not rebuilding demand from zero every season. Planning feels less volatile, and word of mouth carries more weight because it’s grounded in lived experience.

And yet most places can tell you exactly how many people arrived last year, but hesitate when you ask how many of them had been there before.

Over time, you end up paying to replace people who already liked you, and the town starts needing constant promotion just to stay upright. It looks like growth on paper, but it’s really being held up by spending instead of people choosing to come back.

If you’re not tracking who comes back, whether you run a destination, a hotel, or a vacation rental, you’re probably paying to replace people who would have come back anyway.

Why Some Places Are Easy to Return To

You don’t earn return visits by pushing volume. You earn them by keeping the promise people experienced the first time.

People come back when what they loved is still there. The shuttle runs when it says it will, the hours are accurate, and the experience still works the way they remember it.

The second visit feels easier because they already know the rhythm of the place.

There are smaller signals too, like a street that feels familiar, a breakfast table you recognize, or a staff member who remembers you without making it awkward. It’s not dramatic, but it’s what makes coming back feel easy.

You can see this at scale in places that protected what made them distinctive instead of reshaping everything to attract the next wave. Savannah didn’t invent walkability for a campaign. It kept the structure that already made the area easy to move through and easy to live in, and people return because that foundation is still there.

When discovery becomes the only goal, the pressure shifts. Cities and towns start optimizing for turnover, filling the calendar with events and promotions because busy is easier to measure than loyalty. Over time the place can start to feel less like itself and more like something built to handle volume.

Growth matters, and so do jobs and occupancy. But when arrivals are the only number driving decisions, we slowly design for turnover instead of return.

What Happens When You Track Return

If you want to see whether this applies to your town or destination, start by asking a few simple questions.

How many of last year’s visitors had been there before?

Do you track that consistently with your lodging partners?

And who is actually responsible for increasing that number over time, not just watching it but moving it?

You do not need a new slogan. You need another number sitting next to arrivals in the same report, and someone who wakes up thinking about how to improve it.

Start simple. Ask your lodging partners to track how many check-ins are returning guests. That alone changes the conversation.

Because when repeat guests are invisible, spending to attract new people becomes the default response to every slowdown. Over time, you end up replacing people who already trusted you, and that isn’t growth. It’s a loop.

The places that last aren’t the ones that win the recommendation game every quarter. They’re the ones people think about when planning a trip and realize they don’t need to be convinced again.

Repeat visitors don’t come from pricing or promotions alone. They come from coordination. Visitors can feel when a place works together, when businesses know what’s happening, when locals aren’t resentful, and when the experience works without explanation.

That piece, how a town actually operates behind the scenes, is a bigger conversation. I wrote more about that here.

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At the same time, you’re still getting calls where guests say, “I saw you on Booking.com but couldn’t find your website,” and you end up paying commission on people who clearly wanted you anyway. That stings when margins are already thin.

If you’re running a 10–20‑room place with a tiny team and a never‑ending to‑do list, this feels like one more thing you don’t have time for. You still have rooms to turn, staff to schedule, and guests who want extra pillows.

This isn’t a trend report. It’s just what I’m seeing. And it made me ask one question: What’s the least I can do this year to stay visible?

This is what protecting direct bookings looks like now.

TL;DR:

Clean your facts. Turn extras into products. Make vendors prove they’re future-ready.

The line you need to sit with: The first thing you’ll notice isn’t fewer bookings. It’s more expensive bookings. That’s what happens when demand shifts to higher-commission channels. You’re just as busy, but keeping less.

This isn’t a crisis today. But the hotels that clean this up in 2026 will have a real edge by 2027. The ones that wait will pay to catch up.

Quick check: Open your Google listing and your website side by side. Do they describe parking, pets, and breakfast the same way? If not, start there.

If your own listings don’t agree, guests don’t know which one to trust.

Your 12-Month Survival Plan (The Short Version)

If you only do four things this year, make them these, especially if you have 10–20 rooms and a tiny team. One per quarter. Not all at once.

How to know if you’re already in decent shape: If your website, Google listing, and top OTA describe the same room the same way, you’re ahead of most independents.

If you’re running on fumes, screenshot that table and come back to the rest when you have more energy. Here’s why each one matters, and what to do when you sit down to actually fix it.

What Triggered This: The Marriott-Google Signal

For the first time, search, recommendation, and booking are happening in the same conversation. Marriott has begun piloting an integration with Google that lets selected properties be found and booked directly inside AI Mode. A guest describes what they want. The AI shows options and completes the booking. No website visit required.

Small pilot. Big signal. Where does your hotel show up in that conversation?

Why This Matters to Smaller Hotels

This isn’t mainly about Marriott. It’s about how AI tools are starting to see and choose places to stay.

Here’s what I keep seeing across vendors and client calls:

Structured data matters. Structured data simply means your hotel facts stored in specific fields in your systems: room type, view, bed type, balcony, breakfast, parking, pet policy, and so on. Not buried in long descriptions. Tools lean on clean facts, not your prettiest paragraph. You already have most of this. It’s just messy.

Consistency across sources matters. When your website, Google listing, and OTAs don’t tell the same story, you’re harder to trust and easier to skip.

Set up for AI means your rooms and offers are described so tools can read, compare, and book them through the connections your vendors already provide: your PMS (property management system), CRS (central reservation system), booking engine, channel manager, and Google.

AI isn’t reading your story. It’s checking your facts. If the facts are fuzzy, you don’t make the shortlist.

When an AI answers “Where should this person stay?”, it’s scanning for: room types and configurations, what’s included, price and restrictions, location and nearby points of interest, policies (cancellation, pets, parking), and perks or add-ons that create extra value.

If your info is thin, inconsistent, or scattered, you’re less likely to show up, even if guests love staying with you.

In real projects, I’ve watched small, well-run independents with strong content and clean data appear ahead of bigger brands. I’ve also seen good properties get buried simply because their information is messy or incomplete.

The math: If 10% of your bookings shift from direct to OTA, that’s thousands a year in commissions for the same rooms. Same guests. Less money kept.

The Big Idea: Your “Digital Shelf”

Across different tools and vendors, I keep seeing the same pattern: the hotels that do best in this new world treat their information like a product catalog, not an afterthought. Rooms and offers aren’t vibes. They’re items on a shelf.

“King Room” isn’t a product. “Top-floor king, balcony, harbor view, parking included” is.

In practice, this means one reliable source for: room types and configurations, rates and restrictions, photos, descriptions, amenities, policies (cancellation, pets, parking, etc.), and add-ons and experiences (breakfast, parking, tours, spa, etc.).

All of it feeding your website, booking engine, channel manager or CRS, Google Business Profile, OTAs, and the AI-driven features those platforms are rolling out.

The cleaner that shelf is, the easier it is for both human guests and AI-assisted tools to understand, compare, and present your property.

What’s Changing, and What’s Not

What’s shifting: More guests will use conversational tools (Google AI Mode, other AI assistants) to find places that match specific needs and budgets. Those tools act like a first filter, deciding which hotels to show based on the data they can access. A guest who types “pet-friendly hotel with parking near the waterfront” gets a shortlist built from organized facts, not from who has the best homepage copy. A family searching “two-bedroom suite with kitchen, walking distance to beach” will see whoever described that room type in their system, not whoever wrote the most persuasive paragraph. If you didn’t describe it, the AI assumes it isn’t there. Your content and data quality are becoming as important as your ad spend and website design.

What’s not changing: Guests still care about cleanliness, comfort, safety, and value. Independent hotel guests in particular say they value personalization, local character, and service. AI changes how guests find and evaluate you; it doesn’t replace the on-property experience you deliver.

Your 12–24 Month AI Action Plan (The Deep Dive)

Most hotels are experimenting with AI in limited ways but haven’t fully baked it into distribution and marketing yet. You don’t have to be ahead of the curve overnight.

Think of this as: one weekend task, a few vendor calls spread over the year, and a handful of small changes to how you set things up.

Step 1: Align Your Core Facts Everywhere

(Effort: one half-day with you and/or a trusted staff member)

Start with your basics. Not sexy. It works.

Make sure your website, Google Business Profile, and OTAs match on: name, address, phone, check-in and check-out times, parking, pets, Wi-Fi, and cancellation policy.

Clean up visuals and copy. Current, honest photos of rooms, bathrooms, public spaces, exterior. Simple, specific descriptions:

Before: “Nice king room with view.” After: “Top-floor king room with balcony and harbor view.”

Before: “Standard double.” After: “Ground-floor double room with step-free access from parking, good for limited mobility.”

You don’t need a new website to do this. A few focused edits to your existing pages often move the needle.

Step 2: Turn 3–5 Extras Into Real Products

(Effort: one working session with your PMS, CRS, or booking engine provider)

Many hotels already offer extras but don’t represent them as structured, bookable items. More and more tools are built around those extras being explicit products.

Here’s where this gets real: I’ve talked to hoteliers whose front desk answers the same parking question five times a day because the website says “parking available,” the OTA says nothing, and the booking confirmation doesn’t mention it.

That’s not just an information problem. It’s staff time, guest confusion, and bookings that almost happened but didn’t.

When information is broken, your team fills the gap with their voices.

Write down what guests already pay extra for or ask about: early check-in or late checkout, parking, breakfast, F&B credits, dining packages, romance or celebration touches, local experiences (tours, tickets, rentals), pet fees and amenities, workspace add-ons, meeting rooms, day-use offers.

Then, with your vendor, set up a few as bookable add-ons:

Before: “Romance package” mentioned in a paragraph. Guests must call or email.

After: “Romance Package” in your booking engine with:

• Name: Romance Package

• Inclusions: bottle of sparkling wine, late checkout, rose petals

• Price: defined per stay

• Availability: Friday–Sunday, select room types

Easier to book. Easier to upsell. Less back-and-forth. It also means your team stops answering the same questions manually.

Start with 3–5 things you already do that guests love.

If you’re a small inn or hotel property with a small team, Steps 1 and 2 are the moves that matter most right now. Do those two and you’re ahead of the majority of independents. Steps 3–5 are worth doing over the rest of the year, but they can wait until you’ve handled the foundation. Come back when you’re ready.

Step 3: Ask Vendors the AI Questions

(Effort: one call per vendor, spread over the next few months)

This is the line I keep coming back to: you don’t have to build the tech yourself, but you do have to ask better questions.

A note before you pick up the phone: Most vendors won’t have perfect answers yet. You’re not behind for asking. The point isn’t to quiz them. It’s to find out who’s thinking about this and who isn’t. That tells you a lot about where to invest your time and money over the next year. If your vendor answers with buzzwords and no examples, that’s your answer.

Talk to your booking engine provider, channel manager or CRS, PMS, and website or digital agency.

Ask them:

• “How are you preparing to connect my property to AI-driven search and booking (Google’s AI, other AI trip planners, etc.)?”

• “Can you give me one clean source of truth for my rooms, rates, content, and add-ons that all channels pull from?”

• “How do you keep my content structured and up to date across Google, OTAs, and my website?”

• “What should I do in the next 12 months to be more visible in AI-driven search using your tools?”

Listen for specifics. Roadmaps, existing integrations, and concrete recommended actions are positive signs. Vague answers with no timeline may indicate a vendor that is still catching up.

You don’t have to switch tomorrow. But this should shape who you renew with.

Step 4: Pilot 1–2 Practical AI Tools

(Effort: small tests you can turn off if they don’t help)

Here are a few realistic use cases other independents are exploring:

Rates and demand: A tool that suggests rate changes based on demand and events, while you retain final approval.

Direct bookings: A booking engine that helps guests narrow their choices and suggests upsells. A simple site assistant that answers common questions and keeps guests from leaving to “go compare.”

Start with free trials or short pilot periods and basic A/B comparisons where possible.

If it doesn’t help guests choose you or save your team time, drop it.

Step 5: Use Guest Data to Create Real Loyalty

(Effort: small ongoing habits)

Across reports and real-world case studies, one theme keeps repeating: first-party guest data and email relationships get more valuable as third-party channels and algorithms get more complex.

Keep guest emails, stay history, and simple notes (e.g., “anniversary,” “business,” “family”) in one place, even if it’s just a basic field or tag in your PMS.

Make it easy to spot repeat guests and high-value types (corporate, event, long-stay).

Then put that to work: make direct bookings better with preferred rooms, flexible check-in, small credits or perks. Match offers to what you know. A returning couple marked as “anniversary” gets a romance add-on offer. A repeat business guest gets an early check-in or workspace-related perk.

Now both guests and AI can see why booking direct makes sense.

What About Short-Term Rentals?

Here’s the good news first: hotels have built-in advantages that matter to both guests and AI tools. Daily housekeeping. 24/7 staffed front desk. Defined safety and security measures. Onsite food and beverage or guaranteed breakfast. If you state these in your descriptions and profiles, you differentiate yourself in mixed search results.

Now the context: one shift I keep noticing when I test these tools myself is that hotels aren’t just competing with other hotels anymore. Short-term rentals (STRs) are increasingly part of the same AI trip planning tools.

When someone asks, “Find me a place for 6 people with a kitchen and parking within walking distance of downtown,” those tools can show a hotel, an apartment, and a whole house side by side.

For you as a hotelier, this means your competition in AI-powered searches may include nearby homes and apartments. If their listing is more complete than yours, they may win the booking, especially for group and family stays. STR hosts are also adopting better tools, including AI-assisted pricing, messaging, and content optimization.

But the same work you’re doing on better descriptions, photos, and extras improves your position against STRs too. The clearer listing wins, not the category. AI doesn’t care what you meant. It cares what you wrote down. Highlighting your hotel-specific advantages is part of the job.

If you also manage STRs, applying the same content and data discipline to those listings will help them in AI-powered environments too.

What If You Do Nothing?

In the next few months, not much looks different. Your website stays up. OTAs still send bookings.

But over the next few years: more guests start trip planning inside AI tools, those tools get better at combining what they see across Google, OTAs, and your site, and hotels with richer, more complete information start appearing more often in recommendations.

Nothing breaks overnight. It just gets more expensive to stay visible.

Visibility isn’t a marketing trick. It’s operational hygiene.

These aren’t predictions. Just notes from what’s already happening. AI is becoming a new layer between you and your guests, and coherent, matching information is a lever you control for staying visible in that layer.

You don’t need to learn AI. You just need your hotel information to be easier to read.

Own that part, and Google finally has something real to work with.

Want a quick AI visibility check? Send me your hotel website and your Google listing. I’ll point out the first contradiction a guest would see, and that AI would amplify.

Quick FAQs

How will AI search affect my small hotel? AI tools are becoming the first gatekeeper between guests and your property. Accurate, complete information will matter more than ever for whether you show up in recommendations.

What is the minimum I should do in the next 12 months? Align your basics across channels, refresh room descriptions and photos, turn 3–5 extras into bookable add-ons, and ask your core vendors how they’re preparing you for AI-driven search.

Do I need new tech to prepare for AI search? Not right away. You can make meaningful progress by cleaning up your data and content, then using vendor conversations to decide when, or if, new tools are worth it.

Is my booking engine or PMS holding me back? Maybe. The vendor conversation in Step 3 is designed to answer exactly that. If your provider can’t explain how they’re preparing for AI-driven distribution, that’s useful information for your next renewal decision.

How do I know when my information is “clean enough”? If your website, Google listing, and top OTA describe the same room the same way, same bed type, view, and inclusions, you’re in better shape than most independents. Start there.

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Your team already knows what’s confusing your guests. The question is whether they’ll tell you the real list or the version that won’t get them in trouble.

Before you ask your team anything this week, try this:

Name one thing about your property that isn’t working, something you built or chose, and say it out loud to the person who’s at the property when you’re not.

Not in a meeting. In passing.

What they add to your observation is more honest than any survey you’ll ever run.

The Napkin Test isn’t the problem

Monday’s article introduced the Napkin Test: ask your staff what confuses guests, sort the answers into three columns (information problems, design problems, expectation problems), and you’ve got a priority list.

One reader nailed it: “The Napkin Test only works in places where people feel safe enough to answer. In some hotels, staff know what’s broken. They’ve learned not to say it.”

That’s the part nobody talks about. You can have the best tool in the world. If your team doesn’t feel safe answering honestly, it won’t work.

What holding back looks like

Your team isn’t lying to you. They’re picking and choosing. You do this too, by the way. We all do.

When you ask “what’s confusing guests?” someone on your team who doesn’t feel safe will still give you real answers. The parking sign. The wifi password confusion. The fact that breakfast hours aren’t on the website. All true, all fixable, all safe to name.

What they won’t mention is the listing description you wrote that doesn’t match reality. The pricing structure that confuses repeat guests. The process you built that creates more questions than it answers. Those stay in their head, because raising them feels like criticizing the person who asked.

Here’s the tell. You get a napkin full of real problems. It looks complete. It isn’t. Everything on it points outward: the OTA, the tourism board, the city’s parking. Nothing points inward at your own decisions. That’s not deflection. It’s self-protection.

This isn’t rare. Researchers found 85% of workers have held back something important from a boss. Not because they’d get fired. Because they’d get seen differently.

In a property where your team is three people, and you work side by side every day, the cost of being seen differently is real. It’s tomorrow’s shift. So people stay helpful, polite, and quiet.

Meanwhile, you’re promoting an experience that isn’t quite what guests are actually living.

Why going first works

People don’t speak up because you told them they could. They speak up because you went first.

You’re not asking them to be brave. You’re showing them what it looks like to name your own blind spot out loud.

“I’ve been thinking the check-in instructions I wrote are confusing people. You see it more than I do. What do you think?”

That tells your team more about what’s safe to say than telling them “you can always come to me” ever will.

And when the honest answer is “I can’t fix this yet, here’s why”? That still counts. What breaks trust isn’t the problem you can’t fix. It’s when something gets raised and disappears into silence.

This week, do this: Go first.

Then listen.

What they add to your observation is your first honest napkin item. Monday’s article shows you what to do with it.

Your trigger: The first time I see my team today, I’ll name one thing that might not be working before I ask what they’ve noticed.

Here's how AI could help you with this

Once you have the honest list, this helps you sort it.

Paste this into any AI tool:

“Here are the things my staff said confuse guests: [paste list]. How many point to problems I control (my processes, my messaging, my listing, my space) versus problems caused by outside forces (the destination, the OTA, the city)? If most point outward, suggest three inward-facing questions I could ask to surface the gaps they skipped.”

The person who knows where your guest experience breaks may not be here next season if they’ve decided it’s not worth raising.

Monday’s Napkin Test gives you the method. This week, find out whether the people closest to your guests feel safe telling you the truth.

If you missed Sunday’s piece on destination coordination or Monday’s Napkin Test article, both connect to this:

Parts of a Trip That Confuse Visitors

The Napkin Test

Try this once this week. You’ll surface one problem you didn’t know existed.

If you try this, hit reply and tell me what happened.

I didn't learn this from a book. I learned it from years of my staff telling me something wasn't working and me doing nothing, or being afraid to tell me because I'd get upset.

A hotel front desk agent in Kansas City’s Crossroads District fields the same question for the fourth time this hour: how do I get to the stadium? Outside, slow-smoked brisket and the sound of a dozen languages. It’s a Tuesday evening in late June, and the World Cup has turned a barbecue neighborhood into an international block party overnight.

The transit authority published a route map, but it doesn’t match what the FIFA app shows, and neither matches the directions a visitor assembled from ChatGPT that morning. Three organizations. Three different answers. Nobody wrong. The visitor still felt lost.

The parts of a trip that confuse visitors usually aren’t anyone’s job.

You’ve seen this in your own destination. The guest who booked based on a campaign that promised “walkable and vibrant,” then arrived to find the entertainment district closed on Mondays and the shuttle running on weekend hours. The hotel manager who apologizes six times a day for something they didn’t do, didn’t promise, and can’t fix. I’ve watched this play out more times than I can count. The apology isn’t for the property. The apology is never for the property. It's for everything around it that didn't show up the way the guest expected. The chamber director staring at a Google listing for the town that hasn’t been updated since 2019.

It’s not carelessness.

Coordination just isn’t in anyone’s job description.

The tourism board tracks reach. The city tracks permits. Hotels track occupancy. The chamber counts members. Nobody tracks the confusion.

The silence when a guest asks about a festival you just learned about from them.

The part that makes it expensive

Today’s visitor assembles a version of your destination before they arrive, from Google, Reddit, AI chatbots, or a group thread where someone’s cousin went last year. When the assembled version doesn’t match what visitors find on the ground, the gap shows up as a feeling: this place is harder than it should be, and nobody can tell you why.

Repeat visits stay flat. Word-of-mouth never forms. Campaigns get people curious, but bookings stall somewhere between “that looks great” and “I’ll book,” and then it never happens.

You end up paying for the same guest twice: once to attract them, again to replace them when they don’t come back. Not because they had a bad time, but because nothing about the stay created the absence that pulls someone back to a place. Bain’s research on retention puts a number on this: even a small lift in return visits compounds faster than any campaign.

A visitor in Onomichi, Japan follows a hillside temple trail and a local guide redirects them toward a lesser-known route with a view of the Inland Sea. The salt air, the surprise of the view, the feeling of being led somewhere worth going. That visit stays with you. Weeks later, the visitor misses that place and can’t say why.

In any destination where a visitor spends 20 minutes searching for parking the website called “convenient,” what sticks is the searching. Nothing worth remembering. Nothing pulling them back. Just a stay that fades by the time they unpack at home.

When a visit makes sense, it becomes a memory. When it becomes a memory, it pulls people back.

The person who ends up eating that cost is almost never the one who caused the gap in the first place. If you run a small hotel or a tour company, you know this in your bones. You’ve spent your own time printing directions the city should provide, explaining things the tourism board never communicated. Staying late to answer questions that aren’t about your property at all. Walking back promises a booking platform made without asking you.

You are already the informal coordinator. The question is whether anyone else in your destination knows you're doing it, and whether they ever show up to help.

What it looks like when a destination actually coordinates

The World Cup starting June 11 will make this impossible to miss. Sixteen cities, tens of millions of visitors, and in every one, the people shaping the trip never sit in the same meeting.

Kansas City’s KC2026 organizing committee launched the KC Game Plan, bringing small businesses, neighborhood councils, transit planners, and city government into the same picture. Check-ups for small businesses. Lending workshops. Vacant storefronts turned into pop-up experiences during the tournament. They’re not asking one person to own everything. They’re making sure everyone can see the same map.

But you don’t need a mega-event to build this.

That temple trail moment didn't happen by accident.

Onomichi is a port town of about 130,000 in Hiroshima Prefecture, Japan. Its waterfront smells of salt air and the pork-fat broth of its signature ramen, simmering in shopfront kitchens along steep hillside lanes. Visitors knew it as the starting point for the Shimanami Kaido cycling route. They passed through without engaging the town.

Then a handful of people decided the town mattered enough to coordinate, not because anyone told them to, but because the alternative was watching visitors pass straight through. They renovated a disused waterfront warehouse into Onomichi U2: a cyclist-friendly hotel, bakery, cafe, bar, and bike shop under one roof. The Onomichi Denim Project connected local fishermen, farmers, and shipbuilders with raw denim, then sold the naturally faded jeans. The wear patterns told you who made them. A guide network trained local residents to lead tours that spread visitors across the town’s 25-temple walking trail instead of piling them up at the two most popular spots.

No grand tourism structure. Just stubbornness and a shared bet.

Barcelona sits at the other end of the spectrum. After tourism grew from 1.7 million hotel visitors in 1990 to over 12 million by 2023, the city figured out it had to manage this on purpose. La Rambla in August tells you why: the press of bodies, the scent of churros and diesel and jasmine competing for the same air, rolling suitcases on stone. The city now publishes daily crowd forecasts. When numbers spike, the calendar turns red. Residents adjust their plans. Hotels adjust their staffing. Visitors arrive into a destination that anticipated them instead of reacting to them. Not perfect. Not universally loved. But visible enough that fewer surprises land on the front desk.

The scale is different. The principle is the same: the destination works because the people inside it can see what the people visiting it are about to experience.

Not a program or a budget. A question. Instead of “How do we get more visitors?” the room starts asking “What does a visitor think this place is going to be like before they get here, and does it match what they actually find? It doesn’t need a task force. It just needs a room: the tourism board, the chamber, a couple of hotel owners and tour guides, someone from the city. When those people look at the same picture, it gets harder to pretend the gaps aren’t there.

This week

The destinations I remember most aren’t perfect. They’re the ones that held together.

A destination that just makes sense is what creates the absence that brings people back. That’s not marketing. That’s coordination.

An ask you can bring to your team or use with AI.

“Map the first three decisions a visitor makes after arriving in our destination. For each one: who provides the information? Is it consistent everywhere a visitor looks? Where does the visitor have to guess, and who absorbs the cost when they guess wrong?”

• What would change if those three information sources were looking at the same data?

• Where is the cheapest, fastest coordination win hiding in those three moments?

• What information disappears between what your tourism board publishes and what your front desk actually says?

If you run a hotel, a rental, a tour company, or a restaurant: When your destination’s coordination breaks down, where does it show up first inside your property, and what are you already doing to fill that gap, whether it’s a fix you built or just you and your team are just dealing with every day?

And if you’re already doing coordination work in your destination, I want to hear about it. Reply to this email or leave a comment.

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AI treats all of it as current fact.

This week, do this: Pull up your Booking.com or Expedia description. Read it like a guest who has never heard of you. Count the lines that are wrong, outdated, or so generic they could describe any property in your area. That number is the reputation AI is repeating about you.

Before you check bookings this week, read your listing first.

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Where the wrong answer starts

When someone asks ChatGPT, Gemini, or Perplexity about your property, those tools don’t call you. They don’t check your website. They pull from whatever text is most available, most structured, and most repeated across the web.

It’s the OTA page. One description. One amenity list. One set of policies. Repeated across platforms, cached by search engines, scraped by AI.

That’s the source file.

Why this hits harder in spring

Spring is when you’re competing for guests who’ve never heard of you. They have no reviews from friends, no past stays to reference. The listing is the first impression. And sometimes the only one.

When someone asks “Is [your property] good for families?” or “Does it have a pool?” or “What’s the parking situation?” the AI answers from whatever it can find.

It’s that same listing. Not your website. Not your Instagram. The listing you set and forgot.

The guest who gets a wrong answer doesn’t complain to you. They book somewhere else. The guest who doesn’t book never tells you why.

The part that costs you

Here’s the part most operators don’t want to admit. You probably didn’t write that OTA description with much care. Most operators didn’t. You were filling in fields to get listed, not writing the script AI would repeat for years.

No one told you it would matter this much. Now it does.

And here’s the cost you’re already paying: every outdated line, every vague amenity tag, every “charming property in a great location” sentence is being served up as a confident answer to a guest with a real question. You never see the conversation. You never correct it. The booking disappears.

That’s not a visibility problem. That’s an accuracy problem. And it sits inside a listing you control.

What to do about it

Fast (10 minutes):

• Log into your top OTA platform. Read your description as a stranger. Mark anything wrong, missing, or generic enough to describe half the properties around you. Fix the three worst lines today. Start with anything that’s no longer true. Wrong beats vague.

You probably have this same stale listing on three or four platforms, not one. And most OTAs take days to reflect changes. The real time cost is closer to 45 minutes across all of them. Plus the wait. Start with the platform that sends you the most bookings. Get that one right first.

Deeper (30 minutes):

• Open ChatGPT or Perplexity and ask: “Tell me about [your property name + location].” Compare what comes back to what’s actually true right now. Note every gap. Those gaps trace back to what your OTA listing is feeding the AI. Or failing to feed it. This isn’t a content exercise. It’s how you see the version of your property already being sold without you.

Copy-paste prompt to run on your own listing:

You are a first-time guest who found this property through search. Based only on this description, rewrite the three weakest lines so each one could only describe this property and no other. Then list what you’d confidently tell a friend about the property, and what questions the description leaves unanswered. Flag anything generic enough to describe most properties in the area.

Paste your current OTA description above that prompt. You’ll get draft replacement lines you can copy straight back into your listing.

When you log into your OTA dashboard this week, don’t just check bookings. Read your listing as a stranger and fix the three lines that are no longer true.

You can’t edit the AI. You can edit what it reads. Start with the listing.

They don’t start on your website. They start on Google, an AI summary, and a Reddit thread from 2022. In 12 minutes, they build a version of your town from sources no one at the destination has reviewed.

That’s the version they’re deciding from. You’ve never seen it assembled.

The assumption that keeps this invisible

Most destinations assume: we have a brand, a website, a social presence. We’re managing our story.

Here’s where it breaks. Your published story is one input among dozens. For a growing share of travelers, it’s not even the first one they encounter. The AI summary, the cached blog post, the old listicle that still ranks on page one. That composite is the working draft of your destination’s identity for most people researching a trip.

Nobody at the destination has assembled it to see what it says. Not because anyone failed. Because this gap sits between job descriptions. And until recently, it wasn’t anyone’s job.

The research path has changed. Your site enters late.

Marriott Bonvoy’s 2026 travel research, drawn from over 22,000 consumers, found that half of all travelers surveyed have used AI to plan or research a trip. Up from 26% two years earlier.

And once they use it, they trust it. A TakeUp survey of U.S. leisure travelers found 94% of AI users trust the recommendations as much as search engines or travel sites, while 52% say inaccuracy is their top complaint.

They trust it. And it’s often wrong.

The cost of that isn’t dramatic. It’s the steady loss of bookings that never form. People who researched your town, built a picture that didn’t pull them in, and moved on without you knowing they looked. It shows up in destinations with full marketing teams. And in towns where tourism is one line on the chamber director’s job description.

How this shows up on the ground

Closed businesses still appearing in search results. Seasonal descriptions displayed as year-round. A blog post that calls your downtown a “thriving food scene.” Three restaurants, two of them seasonal.

The couple from the couch arrives carrying that version. They don’t complain. They recalibrate. The lunch spot the blog recommended is closed on Wednesdays. The walk to the waterfront takes longer than the map implied. Not angry. Adjusting. That adjustment is where your review score lives. In the distance between what they expected and what they found.

Last month in Tasmania, a tour company’s AI-generated blog sent visitors to a natural hot spring that doesn’t exist. That’s the extreme version. Yours will be smaller. A closed restaurant. Wrong hours. Same pattern. Information you didn’t write shaping visits you didn’t expect.

Your operators already know what visitors are confused about. The barista who gets asked three times a week where the trailhead is? She knows the Google Maps pin is off. Nobody’s collected that intelligence yet.

When you see it, you can work with it

The audit takes 20 minutes. Open an incognito browser window. Research your town the way someone who’s never been would. Begin with Google. Then an AI tool. Then Reddit or TripAdvisor. Write down what you find.

Some of it will be wrong. Some will be outdated. And some of it will be better than you expected. A review that says what you wish your tagline said.

You can fix what you can fix: Google listings, outdated hours, your own site. You can influence what feeds the AI, because AI answers are built from sources. Those sources are often the same outdated listings and blog posts you found in your search.

You can’t edit the AI. You can edit what it reads. Start there.

This works. When Tennessee’s tourism board audited rural businesses through a Destination Optimization Program, they found most profiles were incomplete. They fixed them. Visibility improved. Listings ranked better. Photos reached millions.

And you can talk to your operators. Not a briefing. A conversation. “Here’s what visitors are finding when they research us. What are you hearing from guests?” When your front-desk staff and your shop owners know what story the visitor arrived with, the first interaction stops being a correction and starts being a confirmation.

When the picture matches the place, the stay makes sense from the start. What makes sense sticks. And what sticks isn’t what they consumed. It’s the thing they carry home that makes them want to come back.

This week

Twenty minutes. Incognito window. No logins, no dashboards. Search your town the way they search it. Screenshot what’s wrong. That screenshot is your next board slide.

Then ask yourself:

When was the last time you researched your destination the way a stranger would? Not your website. The full path from search bar to booking decision.

Do you know what an AI tool says about your town right now? If you haven’t checked, that’s most destinations. It takes two minutes.

Which closed businesses, wrong hours, or stale descriptions are still circulating online and sending visitors to a version of your town that no longer exists?

If someone assembled everything they could find about your destination in fifteen minutes tonight, would you stand behind that picture?

You have a marketing strategy. You may not have an information strategy. The visitor doesn’t know the difference.

Orientation doesn’t begin at check-in. It begins at the search bar.

FAQs

How do travelers research destinations before booking?

Most travelers now research destinations through a combination of Google search, AI tools like ChatGPT, Reddit threads, TripAdvisor reviews, and cached blog posts. Marriott Bonvoy’s 2026 research found that 50% of travelers have used AI to plan or research a trip, up from 26% two years prior. Roughly 60% of Google searches end without a click to any external website, meaning many visitors form their impression of a destination entirely from search results and AI-generated summaries without ever visiting the official tourism site.

How accurate is AI-generated travel information?

AI-generated travel recommendations frequently contain errors. A TakeUp survey of U.S. leisure travelers found that while 94% of AI users trust the recommendations, 52% cite inaccuracy as their top complaint. A tourism researcher cited by CNN noted that roughly nine out of ten AI-generated travel itineraries contain mistakes, ranging from recommending closed businesses to fabricating attractions that don’t exist.

How can a destination audit its online information?

A destination information audit takes approximately 20 minutes. Open an incognito browser window and research your town as a first-time visitor would: start with Google, then an AI tool, then Reddit or TripAdvisor. Document what appears, noting outdated listings, closed businesses, wrong hours, and inaccurate descriptions. Fix what you can directly and influence what feeds AI answers by correcting information at the source.

What is a destination information landscape?

A destination’s information landscape is the complete set of online information a potential visitor encounters when researching a place, including search engine results, AI-generated summaries, social media posts, review sites, blog posts, and cached content. Unlike a destination’s brand or marketing, which the destination controls, this landscape is assembled from many sources and is often outdated, incomplete, or written by people with no connection to the community.

Guests are not just leaving.

They are deciding whether you become part of their routine or something they return to year after year.

Most businesses invest in acquisition before they invest in experience. They boost posts. They run ads. Meanwhile, the close of the visit is treated like an afterthought.

Experience becomes marketing.

When it is average, marketing gets expensive.

Every forgettable goodbye is a future acquisition cost.

Map the final five minutes.
How the bill is handled.
How delays are explained.
How staff make eye contact.
Whether the guest leaves feeling settled, appreciated, and clear about coming back.

Those last moments shape memory.
Memory shapes return.

Habits are built on consistency, not campaigns. When a guest leaves feeling good about how they were treated, the return becomes natural.

The most powerful marketing asset in hospitality is not your ad budget.

It is the moment right before the door closes.

Why do the last five minutes matter in hospitality?
Because final moments shape memory, and memory drives return behavior and referral decisions.