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

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.

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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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?

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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.

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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

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.

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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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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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.

This week, a destination marketing director saw their destination on a major travel list. Screenshot to the board by lunch. Press release by three. LinkedIn post before dinner.

NatGeo. AFAR. CNN. The New York Times. Condé Nast. Over 200 destinations named in a two-week window. Some named on multiple lists at the same time.

I’ve seen the celebration.

Here’s the part nobody includes in the press release.

The lists know what they’re doing

The New York Times’ 2025 editorial brief to its “52 Places” contributors said this: “The word of the summer has been ‘overtourism,’ so in putting together the coming year’s list, please keep that in mind. Are there places we can suggest that might help mitigate the crowds? Can you, at the very least, do less harm?”

The list is aware it creates the problem it’s trying to solve.

Craig Mod, a regular NYT contributor who recommended Morioka (#2 in 2023), described what happened when the list dropped. Morioka is a mid-size Japanese city. Population around 290,000. Not a tourist hub. A regional capital that most international travelers hadn’t heard of.

The mayor told press they were “surprised.” The city hadn’t campaigned for inclusion. Journalists from nearly 20 outlets called Mod wanting to know why he’d suggested “just another midsize Japanese city.” Mod didn’t know whether his pick would be selected, or where it would rank, until publication day. Neither did Morioka.

That’s the pattern.

Your destination wakes up on a list it didn’t apply to, didn’t prepare for, and can’t control what it says.

A reader later pointed out that another city’s featured attraction on the same list was covered in scaffolding and wouldn’t be visible again until 2026. The contributor who nominated it had missed this. The visitors who booked because of the list would not.

Travel lists are traffic machines. The ranked, numbered, “best of” format is built to drive clicks, affiliate bookings, and revenue. The NYT’s “52 Places” is one of the publication’s biggest annual traffic generators. Every major list this cycle included some version of “we want to lessen overtourism” in its framing. Then they named 200+ destinations and hit publish.

What this looks like at your scale

You don’t need a hundred-fold increase for this to hurt. You need a 30-40% bump in a place already running at capacity on summer weekends.

Two stoplights. One public restroom downtown. Visitor center open four days a week. Your three most popular restaurants already have 45-minute waits on Saturdays. Your one scenic overlook has parking for 20 cars. Your chamber website still lists last season’s events.

A list sends new visitors next month. They don’t arrive in a spreadsheet. They arrive on a Tuesday, expecting the version of your town that the list described. The restaurant is closed Mondays. The “emerging food scene” has three places and two of them are seasonal. The photo was taken in October. They booked for March.

That disconnect is where repeat visitation dies. Someone drives through, doesn’t stop for lunch, doesn’t come back, and never writes a review explaining why.

You won’t see that visitor in your data. You’ll feel it in next year’s numbers.

I’ve watched a “win” like this stretch a small town thin.

Celebrate after you check whether you’re ready.

Mod defended the impact: “These recommendations are mostly positive. They bring attention and tourism dollars to off-the-map worthy locations.” He’s not wrong. But Morioka didn’t get to decide what to do with the attention before it arrived.

A local hiking spot in Norway went from 800 annual visitors to over 80,000 in less than a decade. Almost entirely social media. Unprepared tourists in wrong footwear triggered 42 rescue operations in a single year. The municipality raided other budgets for trail safety it never planned for. “International hiking destination” wasn’t in the budget spreadsheet.

Overtourism concerns don’t track with how many visitors a place gets. They track with how fast the number changes.

“Fast” is what list placement produces.

The destinations next door

There’s a version of the list hangover nobody talks about: spillover.

When the listed destination’s parking lots fill up and its restaurants hit two-hour waits, visitors don’t go home. They drive to the next town. Your town. Without any of the preparation, any of the context, and none of the economic benefit.

They get the headline. You get the parking problem.

If your region has a destination that made a list this cycle, the readiness question applies to you too.

48-hour readiness checklist for destinations named on best-of travel lists

If your destination appeared on a list this recently, or if one in your region did, here’s a response you can put on an agenda this week. Name it. Assign it. Run it before the visitors arrive.

Hour 1-8: Know what was promised

Read the full list entry. What did the publication say? What photos did they use? What season do the images suggest? What did they name? Print it. That’s the promise your visitors are carrying.

Some entries name specific places. Others sell a vibe: “a food scene on the rise” or “an outdoor paradise worth the detour.” When the entry is impressionistic, figure out which real places will absorb that vibe. Where will someone who read “food scene on the rise” try to eat? Where will “outdoor paradise” try to park?

If you’re the destination next door: Read the entry for the destination near you. Your version of this step is knowing what those visitors came for, so you recognize them when they end up with you instead.

Hour 8-24: Walk the promise

Visit every place the list mentioned or implied. As a first-time visitor would. On a weekday. Is it open? Do the hours match Google? Does it look like the photo? Can someone who doesn’t know the area find it without calling anyone?

Check what the list didn’t mention but visitors will need: the closest bathroom to the featured attraction. The parking. The two restaurants within walking distance. Are their listings accurate?

If you’re the destination next door: Drive the route a frustrated visitor would take from the listed destination to your town. What do they find first? A closed visitor center? A gas station with no signage? A charming downtown they don’t know exists?

Hour 24-36: Brief your business owners

Tell your top 20-25 businesses a list dropped. Share the entry. Most businesses won’t have seen it. The ones who interact with visitors first, the front desk, the coffee shop, the gas station, need to know what story the visitor arrived with.

If the list mentioned specific businesses, call them. Ask if their hours, menus, and availability match what the list implies.

If you’re the destination next door: Brief yours too. “The town 30 minutes east just made NatGeo’s list. When their parking fills up, some of those visitors end up here. Here’s what they were looking for. Here’s what we offer.”

Hour 36-48: Close what you can close

Update your website if the list drives visitors to outdated pages. Add a “Featured in [publication]” page that sets accurate expectations: what’s open, what’s seasonal, what to know before you visit. Not a press release. An arrival guide.

Fix the Google listings you can fix. Flag the ones you can’t. One-page handout for businesses: “We were featured in [list]. Here’s what visitors will expect. Here’s how to check your listings in 10 minutes.”

If you’re the destination next door: Make yourself findable on purpose. Update your listings. Make sure your website says what you are, not just what you’re near. If you have capacity when the listed destination doesn’t, say so. Not as competition. As hospitality.

After 48 hours: Assign the ongoing work

One person owns monitoring. Track what visitors ask about. Watch for reviews where expectation and experience don’t match. Report back in 30 days.

That window is your only shot at closing the distance between the story and the reality.

Why the mismatch matters more than the list

A study of 411 first-time visitors to a resort destination measured the gap between what they expected and what they found. If reality beats the hype, you win a repeat visitor. If it doesn’t, you lose both the return trip and the referral.

TikTok travel content views increased 410% from 2021 to 2024. Seventy-five percent of travelers say social media is their top influence on destination choice. The list is the match. Social media is the accelerant. The disconnect between promise and delivery is where the damage lands.

This stint, some destinations appeared on five or six lists at once. One Caribbean island of roughly 2,000 residents appeared on two major lists simultaneously. What could have handled 30% growth over six months now has to handle it in six weeks.

The destinations that handle this well built systems before the attention arrived: regional branding that spreads visitors across a corridor, arrival coordination that makes the whole route work instead of piling up at the three places everyone already knew. You don’t need a national program. You need to make sure the experience matches the story.

For the destinations that didn’t make a list

You just watched someone else get a free stress test. Use it.

Pick a destination similar to yours that appeared on a list this cycle. Watch what happens over the next six months. Then run the same audit on yourself. Not because a list is coming, but because the weaknesses are already there.

Run the check with AI

If you don't have a team to run this review, you still have 10 minutes and ChatGPT.
Copy, paste, and fill in the brackets. These are starter questions, not scripts. Let the conversation go where your destination needs it.

For destination leaders

Our destination: [name]
Featured on: [publication/list name]
Description used: [paste description]

Assume a first-time visitor arrives motivated specifically by that article.

1. Briefly describe what their first 2 hours likely look like step-by-step.

2. Then ask me 5–7 highly specific, operational questions about:

   • What’s actually open

   • What’s accessible without reservations

   • What requires advance planning

   • What may be seasonal, closed, or capacity-limited

   • Where signage, transportation, or staffing may break expectations

3. Identify where the largest expectation gap is likely to appear between the published description and on-the-ground reality.

Avoid generic strategy questions. Focus on friction a real visitor would encounter immediately.

For businesses in the region

A major publication featured: [destination]
We are: [distance/time away]

Assume some visitors will arrive disappointed, full, or unable to access what they expected there.

Ask me 5–7 practical questions about:

• What those visitors will immediately need

• Whether we are discoverable at the moment of frustration

• What signals we send that we can solve their problem

• What small adjustments would convert them from overflow to intentional guest

Focus on findability, clarity, and readiness in the first 24 hours.

For chambers

Our region includes: [listed destination] and surrounding communities.

Assume the feature increases demand unevenly.

Ask me 5–7 operational questions about:

• How overflow physically moves through the region

• Which communities absorb it without preparation

• Where infrastructure strain will show first

• What a shared readiness or communication protocol would need to include

Keep the questions grounded in traffic flow, hours, staffing, signage, booking systems, and public information accuracy.

If you want the board-ready version of this audit as a downloadable checklist, I’ve built one.

Download the 48-Hour Readiness Check

Lists don’t break destinations.

Unprepared ones break themselves.

Attention doesn’t build capacity. It exposes it.

If you can’t deliver the version of your town that a writer in New York just sold to a few million readers, the list isn’t the opportunity.

It’s the exposure.

If you celebrated this week, good. Now run the audit. The visitors are coming whether you do or not.

This is Destination Sunday. I write here every week for the people running DMOs, chambers, and destinations who want more visitors in town, and want those visitors to find what they came for.

If this would help a colleague who just celebrated a list placement, or one in the same region, send it to them.

Share

Meanwhile, someone just closed six tabs and decided to go somewhere else. You’ll never know why. If your conversion rate from “interested” to “booked” is flat while awareness is rising, this invisible inconsistency layer is a prime suspect.

There’s a layer underneath reviews where credibility lives.

The Ten Tabs

Someone is planning a trip to your destination this second. They don’t just search once and book. They open tabs.

Your official tourism site. Google Maps. An OTA listing. Instagram. A travel blog from 2019 that still ranks. Back to Google to check whether that attraction is still around.

Expedia tracked this behavior. Trip planning now spans hundreds of pages. Up from a few dozen a decade ago.

At each tab, one question: Is this really worth the effort to get there?

When your destination website says a café the visitor wants to check out opens at 8 am and Google says 9 am. They notice. When your event calendar lists a festival from last year. They notice. When accommodations, attractions, or neighborhoods look nothing like what your destination promises. They notice.

No complaints. They don’t leave a review. They vanish.

A Number Worth Knowing

Recent local search surveys from BrightLocal show that around two‑thirds of consumers say they would avoid or stop using a local business if they find incorrect information in its online listings.

Not a brutal review or public callout. Just hours that don’t match. A phone number that rings nowhere. Photos that predate the renovation. An address pin that drops them behind a dumpster.

You see small stuff. They see: What else will be wrong when I get there?

You’re Probably Thinking: “We Keep Our Info Updated”

Most destinations believe this. And for the things you directly control, your own website, your own social accounts, it’s probably true.

The problem is everything you don’t control. You don’t own OTA listings. You can’t edit private websites. You have no authority over a gallery’s Google hours.

But you can coordinate and make accuracy easier than neglect.

Google pulls from sources you don’t actively manage anymore. Old information sticks around far longer than anyone expects. The chamber site still shows last season’s hours. A travel blogger quoted your 2021 event schedule, and that post still ranks.

Nobody lied. The information changed. Just not everywhere. Six sources, three different answers, zero trust.

To make sense of it, break “inconsistency” into three buckets:

• Factual mismatches: hours, address, phone, price.

• Visual mismatches: photos, quality, and ambiance that don’t match reality.

• Promise mismatches: what your brand story says versus what Google, OTAs, and third‑party sites actually show.

This isn’t a PR issue. It’s a conversion issue. The people reading this are judged on heads in beds, tax receipts, and bookings. When travelers vanish between tabs, that’s lost room nights and ticket sales, not just hurt feelings.

If each invisible dropout is just one lost two‑night stay, and it happens 20 times a week across your partners, that’s hundreds of room nights a year you will never see in your reports.

This Hits Developing Destinations Harder

When a destination is growing fast, information breaks apart faster than anyone can track.

A new restaurant opens. Google doesn’t know it exists for months.

Seasonal hours change. Only one platform updates.

The tourism board refreshes its site. The regional one is stuck in last year.

An event gets added. The cancelled one never comes down.

The more your destination grows, the more sources exist. The more sources exist, the more the information varies.

The traveler checking tabs doesn’t see the complexity behind the scenes. They just see inconsistency. And inconsistency looks like indifference.

Sweden Decided to Fix This

Visit Sweden launched a national system in 2025. About 14,000 entries across 21 regions; hotels, restaurants, experiences, events. All following the same structure. When a business updates their hours, every platform pulling from the system shows the same hours. When a festival gets added, every site reflects the same dates. Update once, it shows everywhere.

What Sweden did with a national API is what your region can approximate with a shared spreadsheet and a quarterly check‑in.

It took years. They did it anyway, because trust breaks before booking, not after.

Sweden also talks about this unified database as a competitiveness and discoverability play: central, consistent data makes it easier for the world to actually find and trust all those entries.

Ireland Tried Something Similar

Wild Atlantic Way launched in 2014. 2,500 kilometers along Ireland’s west coast. The route made headlines. The real work was wrangling hundreds of businesses under one brand.

A decade later: roughly 29% more visitors, about 60% more revenue, and around €3 billion annually.

Consistency didn’t create demand. It made it easier for existing demand to actually reach your hotels, restaurants, and experiences.

“We’re Too Small for That”

You might be reading about Sweden’s national program or Ireland’s decade-long effort and thinking: That’s great for them. We don’t have those resources.

True. And the principle shrinks to fit.

Sweden and Ireland succeeded because they understood something simple: when information matches everywhere, trust builds. When it doesn’t, trust breaks.

You don’t need a national system to start. You need to look at what travelers actually see when they’re deciding whether you’re real.

A Simple Exercise

Try this. Pick one business. A café, a kayak outfitter, a guesthouse. Search for it the way a traveler would. Google, their website, TripAdvisor, an OTA. Do the hours match? The photos?

Five minutes. You’ll see it.

Now do nine more.

You’ll find cracks in most of them. Not because anyone is careless. Because nobody made it anyone’s job.

Now imagine a traveler doing the same exercise, except they don’t know your destination. They don’t know which source to trust. All they see is: it doesn’t match.

What you’re mapping isn’t mistakes. You’re mapping where people start to second-guess if they should visit.

The Real Reason This Gets Overlooked

Reviews feel urgent. A one-star rating lands and demands a response. You can see it. You can measure it. You can act on it.

Information accuracy doesn’t feel urgent. It’s invisible until interest fades and you’re left guessing why.

Where This Leaves You

Reviews are worth monitoring. Don’t stop.

But reviews are what happens after someone visits. Information accuracy determines whether they visit at all.

To make this something your board and members can grab onto, turn your “Simple Exercise” and what comes next into a named, repeatable program:

Quarterly Ten‑Tab Audit

Three steps you can put on an agenda:

1. Sample: Pick 20-25 high‑impact businesses and events (mix members and non‑members).

2. Compare: Look at their hours, contact info, and photos across Google, their own site, and one OTA.

3. Fix: Note every mismatch, show each business what travelers see, and support them in updating.

Audit the basics, including non-members. Pick 20 businesses. Mix members and non-members. Check their hours, contact info, and photos across Google, their own site, and one OTA. Write down every mismatch in a simple template: business name, link, platform, mismatch type, and who owns fixing it. When you show a non-member what travelers actually see, you’re not selling. You’re helping. That builds trust faster than any membership brochure.

Share what you find. Most businesses don’t know their listings are wrong. Show them the gaps, not as a criticism, but as a mirror. When they see what travelers see, they want to fix it.

Make it about sales or reservations, not admin. Nobody fixes their listing because the chamber asked. They fix it when they realize it’s costing them money. Accurate info isn’t paperwork. It’s the difference between a traveler calling or closing the tab.

Give someone ownership. Information consistency needs to be someone’s job. Not an afterthought. Even part-time works. What matters is that someone wakes up knowing this is theirs. In a small office, this often lives best with whoever already owns your website and email CRM. They’re already closest to your listings and digital touch-points.

Make updates easy. Small operators let listings rot because fixing them feels complicated. Clear instructions help. Direct support helps more. For example: create a one‑page “How to fix your Google listing” handout and walk it around Main Street once per quarter.

Treat seasonal changes like events. When summer hours start or winter hours end, that’s not trivia. Build a checklist that fires every time a season shifts.

Build the habit together. Travelers don’t blame one business. They just start doubting the whole place. Try pairing a hotel with a nearby restaurant. They share visitors. They’ll notice when the other’s info is off, and they’ll care.

Track the fixes. Report them quarterly. Small wins build momentum and make the case for more resources.

If you want a simple starting point, begin with your top 25 searched businesses and events. Aim for one clean, consistent record for each of them everywhere they appear online. That’s work a 2-3 person team can realistically take on.

Want a head start? I’ve put together AI prompts to help. One for auditing businesses, one for creating a handout, one for seasonal changeovers, and a few more. Email me or message by hitting the button below. I’ll send them over.

What This Really Comes Down To

Credibility isn’t built in a single moment. It accumulates across dozens of small moments. Every time a traveler checks a source and finds it matches, every time an answer comes without effort, every time a destination feels like it’s really worth the effort to get there.

Reviews matter. They come later.

The visitors you’re losing right now will never write one.

You’re not failing. You’re missing something invisible. Once you see it, you can assign it, track it, and fix it.

If you want more practical, no‑fluff ideas on how destinations actually earn trust before anyone books, subscribe below.

Visitors arrive disoriented. They spend the first hour figuring out what’s actually open. They ask area businesses questions that the destination should have answered. They leave without finding what would have made them stay, or return.

None of this shows up in your campaign metrics. But your operators feel it. Your frontline staff absorb it. And your repeat visitation numbers quietly reflect it.

The cost is real. It just doesn’t land where anyone’s measuring it.

What It Feels Like When A Place Is Ready

You pull into a coastal town you’ve never visited. Late afternoon, shoulder season. The light’s going gold over the harbour, salt and woodsmoke in the air. You’re tired. You haven’t eaten since breakfast. And you have no idea where anything is.

But the first thing you see when you step out of the car is a hand-painted sign at the edge of the lot. Not a billboard. Not a QR code. Just clear directions: town centre this way, public toilets there, the bakery closes at five but the pub kitchen opens at six.

No one asked you to scan anything. No one tried to sell you a tour. The sign answered the questions you hadn’t asked yet.

By the time you reach the pub, you’ve already decided you like this place.

That decision happened before anyone said a word to you.

The destination was “ready”. And you felt it.

The Problem No One Budgets For

Most destinations are built to generate awareness. The campaigns run, the beds fill, the restaurants get busy. Success.

But awareness isn’t the same as “welcome”. And marketing a destination isn’t the same as preparing for the people who actually arrive.

What’s Actually Happening

Visitors show up with expectations shaped by your website, your social content, your partner listings. When reality doesn’t match, when the hours are wrong, the attraction is closed, the parking situation is nothing like what they read, that frustration doesn’t disappear. It lands somewhere.

It gets absorbed. By someone.

That info gap gets pushed downstream, onto the staff and margins of local businesses.

A trust problem with a very specific cost:

• fewer repeat visits

• more OTA dependence

• more staff burnout

All of it invisible in your quarterly report.

How Trust Forms (and where it breaks)

Trust doesn’t start at the front desk. It starts in the parking lot. At the trailhead. In front of the closed restaurant with no sign explaining why.

When things are clear, guests relax. When they relax, the trip sticks. And weeks later, that’s what they miss, the ease of it. That missing feeling is what pulls people back.

When someone arrives at a place that was expecting them, they don’t have to figure anything out. They can just be there. That ease sticks. It becomes the story they tell.

When someone arrives at a place that wasn’t ready, where the signage contradicts the website, where no one seems sure what’s open, visitors spend their energy orienting instead of enjoying. That irritation sticks, too. They leave, saying the trip was “fine.” They don’t come back.

What does this mean Monday morning? Every out-of-date listing, every inconsistent hour, every unanswered arrival question is a small withdrawal from a trust account you can’t see, but your area businesses can feel.

The Bind You Are In

Here’s the part no one says out loud: most DMOs were built to market, not to coordinate.

You don’t control hours. You don’t control staffing. You don’t control signage, municipal infrastructure, or what private operators decide to do on a Tuesday. You’re funded to drive awareness, measured on hotel room nights, and evaluated by stakeholders who want more visibility, not fewer surprises at the trailhead.

And yes, members want visibility, whether they’re ready or not. That’s real pressure. But promoting what isn’t ready doesn’t make them ready. It just moves the disappointment downstream.

So when someone suggests “readiness,” the honest response is: “With what authority? With what budget? With what mandate?”

That’s a real bind. And this piece isn’t pretending you can dissolve it by thinking differently.

But here’s what’s also true: the visitor experience doesn’t care about your org chart. Guests don’t know the difference between “the DMO” and “the destination.” When arrival goes poorly, it all blurs into one feeling: this place wasn’t ready for me.

You may not control coordination. But you’re already paying for the lack of it, just through channels that don’t show up in your metrics.

What it looks like in practice

In 1994, a 900-person Alpine village near Salzburg made a decision.

Werfenweng was losing to bigger ski resorts. They couldn’t compete on scale or amenities. They were watching visitors drive past to somewhere shinier. They knew they had to do something different or disappear.

So instead of marketing harder, they chose a constraint: soft mobility. Car-free holidays. Arrival without issue.

They built every touchpoint around that decision. Guests who arrive by train, or who agree to park their car for at least four days, receive a mobility card. It includes free shuttles from the train station, electric vehicles, e-bikes, and even horse-drawn carriages.

The system answers every arrival question before the guest thinks to ask.

The result: visitor numbers increased by over 35 percent. Not because they marketed harder, but because the experience matched the promise.

This works because expectations are shaped before arrival. Not because it’s charming.

Someone, somewhere, decided what this destination was for. And made sure the first fifteen minutes reflected it.

That’s not control. That’s alignment. A shared understanding of what gets promoted and what visitors can actually expect.

You don’t need a new department. You don’t need a new budget. You need a different filter for deciding what gets marketed before it’s ready.

What This Doesn’t Require

This doesn’t mean saying no to every member who wants visibility. It doesn’t mean perfect coordination across every touchpoint. And it doesn’t mean waiting until everything is ready before you promote anything.

It means asking one question before something goes out: “If a guest shows up expecting this, will the experience match?” When the answer is no, that’s not a reason to block—it’s a reason to flag, to prepare, to align. The goal isn’t control. It’s reducing the gap between what you promise and what actually happens.

Alignment doesn’t require unanimity. It requires shared minimums.

This works best when destinations are willing to disappoint the wrong guests to serve the right ones.

What Happens When You Don’t

When readiness stays someone else’s problem, the pattern repeats:

More campaigns. More visitors. More operators absorbing the friction of arrival. The marketing gets louder. The experience stays uneven. And the guests who could have become regulars drift away without saying why.

Meanwhile, your best operators burn out. Not just running their business, but correcting misinformation they didn’t create, explaining closures no one told them about, apologising for a destination that promised something it couldn’t deliver.

That’s the bill. And it comes due in churn, in complaints, in the slow erosion of the trust that makes a destination worth returning to.

The Questions That Matter This Week

You don’t need to fix everything. You need to see it.

What does someone actually experience in the first fifteen minutes after they arrive? Not what you hope. What happens.

Where are the gaps between what you’re promoting. What’s actually true this week?

Who is currently absorbing the cost of those gaps, and how long have you let them carry it?

The Bottom Line

The places people remember weren’t trying to impress them. They were ready for them.

It’s a choice about what gets promoted before it’s coordinated. And who pays when it isn’t.

Right now, that cost is landing on your area businesses. On their staff. On their margins. On repeat visits that never happen.

The question isn’t whether you have the authority to fix this. It’s whether you’re willing to change what you reward. And what you’re willing to stop promoting until it’s ready.

For This Week

Paste this into a meeting agenda or share it with your team.

Map the first fifteen minutes of a visitor’s arrival in your destination.

• What questions do they have before anyone speaks to them?

• Where do they go for answers, and is that information current this week?

• At what point do they stop orienting and start enjoying?

• Where do confusion or friction usually show up?

• Who absorbs the cost when this breaks, and have you talked to them about it?

Then ask:

• What is one small thing we could change this week that would make those first fifteen minutes easier?

For Monday

Destinations shape arrival. Operators shape what happens next. Monday’s piece will look at the small signals guests notice before anyone’s said a word. And the moments where trust either builds or disappears.

He’s standing on his 80-acre property in Pomfret, Vermont, watching his tractor idle. He’ll use it again this afternoon. Not to work his land, but to haul another rental car out of a ditch along Cloudland Road. Behind him, more than a hundred vehicles line the narrow, unpaved lane, parked on lawns and in driveways. A woman has set up a portable changing booth, cycling through outfits for photos with Sleepy Hollow Farm in the background.

This is peak foliage season. Instagram and TikTok made this 900-person town one of Vermont’s most photographed locations.

But there’s no coordinated parking.
No visitor management.
No way finding.

Tourists swim in residents’ ponds, knock on doors asking for bathrooms, sit on front porches having picnics.

No one signed up for that. And yet it happened.

The town’s solution? Residents crowdfunded $22,000 to hire sheriff’s deputies and close their own roads for three weeks each fall.

No DMO stepped in. No tourism board coordinated the response. The destination’s busiest moment arrived, and the people who live there had to manage it themselves.

What you’ve been told

Most destinations don’t build their entire year around six weeks on purpose.

Over time, those peaks become the anchor for nearly every decision.

Across the EU, July and August account for nearly a third of all tourism nights. In Greece, more than 56% of annual tourism occurs in those two months alone.

When a destination lives or dies by a six-week window, it’s no surprise that everything else fades into the background.

Where It Starts To Break Down

The issue isn’t that destinations focus on peak season. It’s that, over time, peak becomes the plan. Everything else gets treated like filler.

The destination’s public-facing presence gets stuck in one mode. A guest landing in October finds messaging designed for someone who came in July.

Operators who try to extend their season find themselves working against the destination’s own systems. The basics: signs, hours, events, who’s open, haven’t caught up. So the operator spends their time answering questions the destination should have answered first.

You’ve seen this if you’ve traveled in shoulder season. The bakery that Google says closes at 6pm closed at 3. The walking tour listed on the visitor site stopped running two weeks ago. You’re standing outside a museum at 4:30 on a Tuesday, and there’s a handwritten sign taped to the glass: Back in spring.

Nobody planned for you to be here.

And the destination loses control of its own calendar. The busy weeks get busier. The slow ones get harder to survive.

Whistler’s tourism research panel documented this a few years ago; 53% of shoulder-season visitors said their trip exceeded expectations, 11% below peak-season visitors. Fall and spring visitors were less likely to say the activities they wanted were actually available.

For the visitor, this shows up as confusion, closed doors, and a vague sense of having come at the wrong time.

That’s not a marketing failure. That’s a planning problem someone hoped would fix itself.

What This Costs

Seasonality has a way of holding local economies in place. Money sits unused, income stays uncertain, and when something breaks, everything feels more fragile than it should.

The workforce feels it too. Across the EU, tourism relies far more on temporary jobs than the rest of the economy. And nearly a quarter of those workers haven’t even been in their role for a year.

None of this feels like a big deal when it’s happening.

It just feels harder than it should. And everyone’s exhausted, pretending this is normal.

Sometimes the collapse is public. In October 2024, Visit Cornwall, the official tourism board for one of England’s most visited coastal regions, shut down due to financial problems. Operators who had stayed open past peak suddenly lost their coordinating organization just as shoulder season arrived. As Kelly Grigg of Cornish Bird of Prey Centre put it: “Half term is really important. It’s the last bit of money we’ll get before we close for the winter.”

These aren’t separate problems. They’re what shows up when planning only accounts for limits, not what’s possible.

What some destinations are doing differently

A few destinations have stopped treating shoulder season as an afterthought and started planning for it on purpose.

In 2024, Tourism New Zealand made a clear call: NZ$5 billion in international tourism growth, with 70% of it coming from off-peak visitors arriving between March and November. Their CEO, René de Monchy, didn’t sugarcoat why. Without deliberate action, he said, growth would keep piling into peak season. Straining infrastructure, wearing down communities, and leaving businesses with deeper off-season gaps.

People will show up. What matters is whether anything’s ready for them.

Iceland didn’t try to “fix” tourism after the 2010 volcano by selling harder. They went the other way.

Honorary Icelander invited visitors to step into everyday life. Real homes. Real people. Even the President opened his door. Pancakes included.

It worked. Within two years, most of Iceland’s tourism growth was happening outside peak season.

VisitScotland doesn’t wait until people are packing their bags to show up.

They focus ad spend in the months when trips are being planned, not taken.
Fall. Late winter. The quiet decision months.

One campaign returned £35 for every £1 invested.

That didn’t happen because Scotland is special.
It happened because they stopped treating peak season like the only season that mattered.

One Place Chose a Longer View

One region shows what this looks like when it’s taken seriously: the Thompson Okanagan Tourism Association.

Ten years ago, nearly 80% of the region’s tourism revenue landed in a 45-day stretch.
High summer. Full wineries. Busy lake towns. And then… nothing.

The rest of the year, operators scraped by. Some closed early. Some never reopened. Everyone planned around the same narrow window and hoped it would carry them through.

The region didn’t respond with a new campaign or bigger ads.

Instead, they committed to a 10-year regional strategy built the slow way. Through 90 communities and more than 1,800 stakeholder conversations.

The goal was simple, and ambitious: turn 45 usable days into 200.

By 2019, they had stretched the season to 110 days.

September, once written off, started to matter.
Wine and culinary tourism gave people a reason to come after summer.
Rail trails pulled visitors inland instead of bottlenecking lake towns.
Indigenous cultural experiences created reasons to visit that weren’t tied to weather.

Glenn Mandziuk, the CEO put it simply:

“We didn’t want to sell our souls for tourism just for the sake of tourism.”

Nothing flashy. No silver bullet.
Just a long decision to stop treating those 45 days as inevitable.

Planning for Peak vs. Planning for the Year

When the old lens holds, peak season gets more crowded, more expensive to serve, and more fragile. Everything depends on the same high-demand visitors showing up at the same time.

Operators sprint through the busy months, then limp through the slow ones. Staff burn out. Shoulder-season visitors feel like an afterthought, and they talk about it that way.

Research backs this up. What brings people back isn’t a high satisfaction score. It’s whether the experience feels intentional. Whether what they find matches what they were promised. Whether it makes sense for that moment.

That’s what sticks.

When the lens shifts, something else becomes possible.

Dennis Buurman runs Encounter Kaikoura, a whale-watching operation in New Zealand. Planning for year-round visitors—not just the summer rush—let him expand the business, keep people employed longer, fund trail development, and support the local playcentre.

As he put it:

“The expansion of the business has enabled us to do so much more to help the community.”

For the traveler, the difference is simpler: They arrive and find a place that expected them.

The Decision That Gets Made Too Late

The core constraint isn’t budget. It isn’t staffing. It isn’t even marketing.

It’s timing.

Specifically: when shoulder season actually comes up, and whether it’s already too late.

In most destinations, shoulder season enters the conversation after the money’s spent, the calendar’s full, and the team’s already hired or let go. By the time it comes up, the decisions that matter are done. You’re not planning. You’re scrambling.

And improvising has a cost. You see it in the employee who never gets the call back. In the café owner who stayed open one more month and watched the destination sell a season that was already gone. In the guide who built something good and couldn’t get anyone to list it.

When a destination manages to stretch its season by even a month or two, things start to ease. Fewer layoffs. Fewer frustrated locals. Less panic every year. But that only happens when shoulder season is part of the plan from the start. Not something you scramble to fix once peak is over.

Most destinations don’t skip shoulder season on purpose. It just doesn’t come up until after the decisions are already made.

A Moment for Destination Leaders

You don’t need to overhaul everything.

But you might start to notice where the peak-only lens still shows up in your planning.

When was the last time you looked at your destination’s public materials through the eyes of a shoulder-season visitor? Where would they go for information? And how clear would it be? Which operators are already extending their season, and how much of that work are they carrying alone?

What story does your destination tell when it isn’t busy?

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This week, one move

Before your next planning cycle begins:

Pick one non-peak month and plan it as if it were peak.

Not with the same budget. Not with the same intensity. But with the same intentionality.

Ask the same basic questions: where visitors get information, how operators are supported, and whether your public-facing messaging actually matches what’s happening on the ground.

If September or October had a seat at the table in January, what would you do differently?

That’s the conversation worth starting.

For Monday: This lens raises a practical question for operators: When your destination’s coordination doesn’t match your operating window, where do you spend the most time filling the gaps?

That’s where the real costs live, and where the next conversation starts.

Pomfret didn’t fail because it was popular. It failed because popularity arrived without planning.

A destination’s reputation isn’t written during its busiest weeks. It’s written when nothing is staged.

A Walk Through Tulum Today

On Reading Between the Lines

This wasn’t about marketing fatigue or changing travel trends.

It was about trust eroding before arrival. About a destination losing bookings quietly, long before price ever entered the conversation.

I lived in the region for over 20 years. Back when the highway to the beach was a narrow lane-and-a-half road with more bikes than cars. What’s happening now isn’t a surprise. It’s the bill that comes due when the experience stops matching what’s sold.

The New Airport, the First Signal

Tulum International Airport opened in December 2023 with fanfare. Direct flights. Headlines. A signal that growth was coming.

By late 2025, airlines were cutting service. December 2025 scheduled capacity was down more than 20% versus the year before. International arrivals fell 43.7%. Five major U.S. carriers reduced service or pulled out entirely.

For a first-time visitor booking a trip in early 2026, this doesn’t look like a crisis. It looks like friction.

Once doubt enters the booking decision, the booking often goes somewhere else.

The Taxi: Where the Contract Breaks

The first real interaction in Tulum isn’t a welcome. It’s a negotiation.

No rideshare. Little transparency. A 30‑minute taxi from the Tulum airport often starts at a quoted fare of $60–80 USD. The guest suspects it’s inflated, haggles down to about $40 USD, and still walks away feeling taken advantage of.

This isn’t about the money. It’s about what the money taught them: nothing here will be straightforward.

From this point on, the guest isn’t relaxed. They’re alert.

What They See on the Way In

The drive to the hotel passes unpaved roads, abandoned builds beside new ones, streets designed for cars but not people. No sidewalks. No safe pedestrian space.

Not a deal-breaker on its own. But it confirms what the taxi already taught them.

This place is being built for transactions, not for people moving through it.

Infrastructure doesn’t have to be perfect. But it has to feel like someone’s responsible for it. When it doesn’t, guests infer that no one is responsible for the experience end to end.

Once that assumption sets in, every inconvenience feels intentional.

The Beach: When Belonging Is Unclear

Guests arrive at the beach and encounter gates, minimum spends, and entry fees. Jaguar Park charges $415 pesos for foreigners (about $22 USD), and confusion about what’s public.

The right to access exists. In practice, it’s negotiated.

Protests throughout late 2025 made that negotiation visible. Highways blocked. Concessions forced. Conflict out in the open. By October, 16 hotels and beach clubs agreed to grant free access. But the month-long fight sent a signal to every guest considering a booking: this is not a peaceful place.

For guests, this isn’t a political issue. It’s a signal that the destination hasn’t resolved its own rules.

Guests shorten stays. They skip return trips. They stop recommending.

Service Under Pressure

Service interactions aren’t hostile. They’re strained.

Auto-added tips. Hints that it’s not enough. Charges that need correcting. A feeling that every exchange comes with pressure attached.

None of this ruins a trip outright. But it adds up.

Guests don’t experience generosity when every interaction feels conditional. They may empathize, but empathy doesn’t translate into loyalty.

What Residents Carry

Booking metrics miss this entirely.

A taxi driver in Tulum in January 2026 is probably earning less than they were in 2023, despite higher prices. Housing took a bigger bite of income. Traffic got worse. Competition for fares increased. And they’re carrying the weight of every negotiation, every guest who arrives skeptical, every moment where they have to convince someone they’re not scamming them.

A resident who grew up here is watching their hometown gentrified beyond recognition. The poverty rate jumped from 32% in 2015 to 62% by 2020. The highest increase of any city in Mexico during that period. Beaches they used freely are now paywalled. Housing they could afford is now owned by investors who will never set foot there.

These people are not the problem. They’re carrying the consequences of decisions they didn’t make.

But guests don’t know that. They just feel the strain.

How the Day Adds Up

By evening, the guest understands how the place works.

The room was fine. The beach was beautiful.

But the effort required to navigate the stay doesn’t match the price point.

At $450 a night, guests expect ease. What they experienced was vigilance.

So they make a decision that never appears in a review and never triggers a complaint:

I won’t come back.

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Then You See the Data

Hotel occupancy in Tulum’s town center hit 15% in summer 2025. The beach zone: 30%. Year-over-year, occupancy fell 17.5 percentage points. The worst tourism season in a decade.

Hotels that charged $450 in 2024 struggled to fill rooms at $250 by low season 2025.

Prices cut, occupancy falling, airlines leaving. This doesn’t happen because marketing isn’t loud enough. It happens because operational confidence eroded while marketing kept running.

What Doesn't Come Back

When that decision repeats enough times, the damage becomes structural.

In 2025, airline routes were reduced. Some were eliminated entirely. Those routes don’t come back easily. Hotels dropped rates but still struggled to fill rooms. Workers who’d built careers in hospitality left for Cancún, Playa, or quit the industry entirely.

Once demand becomes brittle, recovery costs more than prevention ever would have.

This is the point of no return most destinations miss while still debating messaging.

How This Happens

Tulum was marketed as low-density, natural, and intentional.

What followed was development without proportional investment in infrastructure, housing, or public access. Tourism revenue surged. Resident costs surged faster.

No single actor caused it. But no one stopped it while they were still profiting.

And no one stepped in when the gap became obvious.

This Isn't Just Tulum

Tulum isn’t an anomaly. It’s a preview.

This same sequence is playing out in destinations where demand outpaces management. Where marketing accelerates faster than operations can follow.

If any part of this walk feels familiar, it’s because the same conditions are already in place.

What Marketing Can't Solve

Guests don’t need more inspiration.

They need fewer questions.

When guests don’t know what’s free, they assume nothing is.

When prices require negotiation, trust never recovers.

When residents don’t benefit, guests eventually notice.

These are the things that break a place. And by the time you’re measuring the damage, you’re already too late.

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The ferry pulls into a harbor town somewhere in the Mediterranean. Late-shoulder season. Morning light cuts across the water. A couple steps off with their bags, following the trickle of passengers toward the old town.

They pass the taxi stand. The drivers are clustered together, scrolling phones, not looking up. A shopkeeper adjusts a display with her back turned. At the café terrace overlooking the quay, a server clears plates and sets down a folded menu without a word.

Nothing is rude. Nothing is wrong.

But nothing welcomes them either.

Now picture a different arrival. A nod from a fisherman. A warm word they don’t understand. A half-smile at a café table. Same infrastructure. Different climate.

That feeling will shape everything that follows. How long they stay, how much they explore, and whether they come back.

Here’s what’s actually happening:

• Guests decide trust before check-in

• Trust is borrowed from locals

• When residents withdraw, loyalty collapses quietly

• Destinations pay to replace guests they already earned, in ad spend and incentives

You don’t see it in arrivals. You see it in how often you have to replace the same guest.

This is the first audit. Because it sets the emotional weather, everything else operates inside.

What you’ve probably been told

Most destination strategies treat residents as stakeholders.

They appear in the strategy deck. They get a slide. They’re consulted, surveyed, occasionally addressed with policy. When tensions rise, they become a communications problem to contain.

This framing makes sense on paper. Residents are one group among many. Alongside visitors, businesses, and government, whose interests must be balanced.

But there’s a problem with this framing.

It treats residents as adjacent to the guest experience. A concern to manage. A variable to optimize around. Not the thing itself.

What’s actually happening underneath

Residents aren’t adjacent to the experience. They are the experience.

Guests don’t arrive into a vacuum. They arrive into a place already full of people who belong there. And from the first moment, visitors are reading signals they can’t name:

• Does this place feel at ease with itself?

• Do the people here seem like they want me here?

• Is this somewhere real or just a surface?

Those signals don’t come from your website. They come from residents. The taxi driver. The shopkeeper. The person walking their dog who makes eye contact… or doesn’t.

Guests borrow their sense of trust from the people who already belong.

This is the atmosphere visitors read before they evaluate anything. Residents set that atmosphere. They always have. And most destination strategies treat that like a footnote.

When residents are aligned, when tourism feels like something that benefits them, when they want visitors there, guests absorb that. The welcome is ambient. The place feels alive.

When residents withdraw, stop recommending, stop engaging, answer questions with the minimum required, guests absorb that too. They can’t articulate it. But they feel it.

You can think of it this way: Signal → Encoding → Memory → Pull.
A warm local interaction becomes the story guests tell later. A thin interaction becomes nothing to repeat.

Not a complaint. Not a bad review. Just the quiet absence of a reason to return.

Every weak signal increases reacquisition pressure. Misaligned destinations pay for the same visitor twice: once to acquire them, again to replace them when they don’t come back.

How to know it’s happening

You won’t find this in your arrivals dashboard. But the signals are already visible.

Three observable signals:

1. Guided vs. self-directed behavior. Do guests ask locals and staff for recommendations? Or do they default to Google and OTA lists? When visitors stop asking, it often means they’ve stopped expecting useful answers.

2. Referral behaviour. How often do residents recommend non-obvious places? The local who sends visitors to the tourist trap instead of the good restaurant isn’t being rude. They’ve just stopped investing.

3. Repeat visitation language. Look at reviews and direct booking notes from returning guests. “I came back because...” tells you what encoded. If that language is absent or purely transactional, the pull isn’t forming.

None of these require a survey. Just attention.

How this plays out across a destination

The real cost starts before anyone marches.

It starts when resentment leaks instead of protests.

This might look like: the local who used to recommend the good restaurant now sends visitors to the tourist trap. The taxi driver who used to chat gives one-word answers. The bartender who used to linger over a recommendation moves straight to the next order.

Guests feel this. Not as hostility, just as an absence. The place stops inviting them deeper. They leave satisfied on paper. But they leave with nothing to miss.

By the time it reaches the streets, tens of thousands marching with “Canarias tiene un límite” banners across the Canary Islands, protesters in Barcelona firing water pistols at diners. The damage has been compounding quietly for years. The protests made headlines. The leak is what actually costs those destinations.

Economic dependence and emotional alignment aren’t the same thing.

A resident can understand that tourism matters and still feel like the costs land on them while the gains flow elsewhere. They know the industry pays their wages. They’re still exhausted, still priced out, still watching their town become a backdrop for someone else’s holiday.

This is where “stakeholder engagement” falls flattest. Surveying people who depend on you for work doesn’t surface honest sentiment. It surfaces what they think you want to hear.

Resident buy-in isn’t about liking tourism. It’s about whether people still feel at home in the place visitors are borrowing.

For individual operators, this hits closer to home.

You can’t script your way past it.

If your staff are locals who feel squeezed by tourism. Priced out of housing. Exhausted by peak season. Watching their neighborhood turn into scenery for other people’s holidays. That tension will leak. Not through what they say to guests. Through how they carry themselves. The energy in the room.

Even well-run businesses can inherit this. If your operation is seen as part of the pressure rather than the community, you absorb that ambient signal whether you caused it or not.

Operators feel resident alignment first. But destinations decide whether alignment is possible at all.

There’s a useful contrast in Bhutan.

The national philosophy of Gross National Happiness shapes how hospitality feels across the country. Travel accounts and Bhutanese operators often describe guides as genuinely warm and compassionate, with interactions that feel more like connection than transaction.

The underlying climate — created by decades of GNH policy and community norms — is what makes the warmth feel natural rather than scripted.

You don’t need Bhutan’s policy stack to borrow the principle.

Resident dignity is downstream of practical decisions: housing, congestion, wages, and visitor mix.

When the people who belong feel aligned with tourism, guests feel welcomed. When they don’t, guests feel tolerated. That difference doesn’t show up in your arrival numbers. It shows up in your replacement costs.

Closer to home, some destinations are testing similar ideas with different tools.

In Amsterdam, the city has actively discouraged certain visitor segments — launching a “Stay Away” campaign and tightening rules in the Red Light District to deter rowdy party tourism that residents find most disruptive, while emphasising visitors who treat the city as more than a nightlife playground. The goal isn’t fewer tourists. It’s different tourists, ones residents are more willing to welcome.

In Palma de Mallorca, the local government has moved to ban new tourist-rental licences city-wide and to clamp down on party boats and new hostels in saturated areas, framing these measures as a way to restore balance between residents’ housing needs and tourism. These changes sit on top of zoning and impact studies that look at how tourist housing affects specific neighbourhoods, giving local authorities more leverage to respond before pressure becomes unmanageable.

The specifics vary. The principle doesn’t: resident alignment is something you design for upstream, not something you repair after the protests start.

When you keep the old lens

Residents stay in the stakeholder column. Their concerns get surveyed, consulted, occasionally addressed with policy. When tensions rise, you manage the communications.

Meanwhile, guests arrive into an ambient climate you’re not tracking.

Repeat visitation flattens, even while headline arrival numbers hold for a while. Marketing works harder to replace visitors who should already be returning. The drag on your budget keeps climbing.

You keep asking how to bring more people in. You stop noticing that the people who live there have quietly left the room.

Many destinations struggle to fix this because they’re measuring the wrong thing.

When you see it clearly

Resident alignment becomes product design, not public relations.

You can market a destination into demand. You cannot market a destination into welcome.

You start asking different questions.

• Where do residents and visitors actually overlap? Where do they clash?

• What would it look like if residents wanted visitors here — not tolerated them, not depended on them, but genuinely welcomed them?

• What are residents saying about tourism when they’re not being formally consulted?

You start protecting the moments where visitors and locals actually meet. Not to stage authenticity. But to make sure the authentic parts of your destination haven’t withdrawn.

This isn’t an argument against growth. It’s an argument about where growth actually comes from.

Destinations with aligned residents don’t just feel warmer. They convert visitors into return guests and word-of-mouth at higher rates. The replacement cost drops. The marketing budget stops refilling a leaky bucket.

The protests in Spain didn’t just generate bad press. They signalled to potential visitors that they might not be welcome, a perception that’s expensive to reverse. The cost of resident misalignment isn’t just ethical. It shows up in reacquisition pressure, in seasonal volatility, in the gap between strong arrival numbers and flat revenue.

The destinations that compound loyalty over time aren’t the ones with the best attractions. They’re the ones where guests feel like they’ve stepped into something real.

And the people who live there haven’t left the room.

What this looks like in practice

Resident alignment isn’t a program you launch. It’s a lens you apply to decisions you’re already making.

Three levers destinations are already testing:

1. Revenue visibility. Ring-fencing bed taxes for resident-facing infrastructure — parking, parks, housing funds — so locals see tangible return, not just congestion.

2. Visitor flow. Redistributing presence so tourists don’t cluster in one neighborhood while locals avoid it entirely.

3. Dual metrics. Tracking resident sentiment alongside visitor satisfaction and tying staff performance to both.

None of these requires a philosophical overhaul. They require asking, before each decision: does this make residents more likely to welcome visitors, or less?

This week’s thinking prompt

If you don’t know how residents talk about tourism when you’re not in the room, you are already operating blind.

The first audit:

When did you last walk your destination as a visitor, arriving by the same route, moving through the same spaces, without announcing who you were, and pay attention to how locals responded to you?

If you haven’t done this recently, that’s your Monday morning move. Everything else follows from what you notice.

For destination leaders — paste this into an AI assistant or bring it to your next strategy meeting:

I lead tourism strategy for [destination/region].

Context: Residents aren’t just stakeholders — they shape the ambient welcome guests feel before any service interaction happens. When residents are aligned with tourism, guests absorb that warmth. When residents withdraw — even silently — guests feel tolerated, not welcomed. This affects repeat visitation and replacement costs more than most dashboards track.

I want to audit whether resident alignment is supporting or undermining guest experience here.

Ask me 5–7 diagnostic questions that help me uncover:

1. Where visitors and residents physically encounter each other (not just in formal settings)

2. What the ambient tone feels like in those moments — welcoming, neutral, or withdrawn

3. Where quiet resentment might be leaking into guest experience (before it becomes protest)

4. What residents say about tourism when they’re not being formally consulted

5. Whether we’re measuring resident sentiment or just assuming it

Keep questions concrete and observational — things I could answer by walking the destination or talking to frontline staff. Avoid abstract policy questions.

For operators:

I run a [hotel / restaurant / tour company] in [location].

Context: Even well-run businesses can inherit tension from the destination around them. If locals feel squeezed by tourism — priced out, exhausted, or displaced — that affects how staff carry themselves and how neighbours perceive the business. Guests sense this as atmosphere, not service failure.

I want to understand whether my business is seen as part of the local welcome or part of the tourism pressure.

Ask me 5–7 diagnostic questions that help me uncover:

1. How my business is perceived by immediate neighbours and local community

2. Whether my staff (if local) are carrying tension from housing, wages, or seasonal burnout

3. Where my operations might be contributing to friction locals feel — even unintentionally

4. What I could do to strengthen alignment with the community around me

5. Whether guests are picking up on any ambient tension I might not see

Keep questions concrete and specific to my operation — things I could observe, ask staff about, or test this week. Avoid generic “community engagement” framing.

Monday’s question for operators:

• Is your business seen as part of the welcome or part of the pressure?

• How would your neighbors answer that?

This isn't about being liked.

It's about being welcomed. And welcome is the most expensive thing to fake and the cheapest thing to lose.

If you missed last week’s Destination Sunday:

The Stay They Remembered Six Months Later

The café sits three streets back from the harbor in a small Portuguese fishing town, somewhere south of Lisbon. At 7:30 in the morning, the bread has just come out. You can smell it from the square; yeast and char and something faintly sweet…before you round the corner and see the queue.

The line is short but deliberate. Locals, mostly. A few visitors who’ve been here before and know the drill. No one is looking at their phones.

At the front of the queue, a woman takes an order without writing it down. She gestures toward the courtyard. A visitor from Copenhagen sits at a wooden table with cracked blue paint, waiting for coffee that arrives in a cup she didn’t choose.

Her toast comes with jam she didn’t order. The view: fog lifting off the rooftops, bells from the church on the hill, fishing boats returning with the night’s catch, does the rest.

Three weeks later, when she smells fresh bread somewhere else, that town surfaces. Not the hotel. Not the rental car desk. The café. The line. That feeling of being briefly inside something real.

In her review, she mentions none of this. She gives four stars for “cleanliness” and “value.”

She rebooks the following spring.

The Pattern You’re Standing In

Look at your own numbers.

Satisfaction scores hold. Reviews stay positive. First‑time visits look healthy. But repeat rates flatten, and nobody on the team can quite explain why.

The quiet assumption is simple: satisfaction creates loyalty. Deliver a good experience, people return. High scores equal future visits. Smooth experiences equal loyalty. Remove friction, hit your service benchmarks, and the economic flywheel spins.

It’s an attractive story. Satisfaction is measurable. It’s surveyable. It lands in reports that boards and councils can understand.

Here’s the problem: satisfaction is the lowest bar you can clear without failing. It tells you only that you didn’t mess up. It does not mean you left a mark.

Research by Reichheld and colleagues found that 60 to 80 percent of customers who defected from brands said they were satisfied or very satisfied with their former suppliers. That means satisfaction is not a retention metric. It’s a failure‑detection metric. A large review of satisfaction studies in service businesses shows that satisfaction explains only a modest share of repeat behaviour, far less than managers tend to assume.​

Satisfaction clears the bar for “nothing went wrong.” It does not clear the bar for “I need to go back.”

Across many destinations, there’s almost no reliable link between guests saying they’ll be back and actually coming back. Satisfaction closes the loop. Closed loops don’t pull people back; they just reset the clock, so you have to work just as hard next season.

If you run a bar, a small hotel, a tour, or a café, you already feel this. The room is full, reviews are kind, but the faces keep changing. You’re busy, not compounding.

Underneath, the mechanism is simple:

• Clarity creates encoding.

• Encoding, those little hooks that make a moment stick in someone’s head—creates memory.

• Memory creates pull.

Break any part of that chain, make the experience confusing, fragmented, or generic. Nothing sticks.

If guests don’t talk about your place after they leave, you’re not competing on experience. You’re competing on price. And when you end up competing on price, you’re basically paying for the same guest twice.

Nothing broke. Nothing stuck.

Here’s the uncomfortable part.
Satisfaction optimisation cannot create leverage. It just keeps you from failing. For independents and destinations without infinite budgets, memory is the only scalable advantage left. Everything else, price, amenities, features, even convenience, gets competed away or copied.​

Meanwhile, you’re looking at payroll, open shifts, and rising costs. You don’t have time for another clever framework that ignores how thin the team is already stretched.

What Actually Pulls People Back

Memory doesn’t work the way satisfaction surveys assume.

Kahneman and Fredrickson’s work on the peak‑end rule showed that people evaluate experiences based on how they felt at the most intense moment and at the ending, not on the sum of every minute. A large review of peak‑end research found the same pattern over and over: peaks matter a lot, endings matter some, and how long the experience lasted often matters very little.​

Translation: a flawlessly average stay. Nothing remarkable, nothing broken, gets filed under “fine” and quietly forgotten.

The stays that linger. The ones that surface six months later when a friend asks where to go, tend to have texture. A moment that felt like stepping inside the place, not just passing through it. Something unresolved. A sense you hadn’t quite finished.

In the 1920s, psychologist Bluma Zeigarnik noticed that waiters remembered unfinished orders better than completed ones. Once the bill was paid, the details dropped away. Unfinished things keep a small tension alive in memory. Finished things release that tension and fade.​

This is where the clarity → encoding → memory → pull chain begins to matter:

• Clarity makes a stay legible.

• Encoding makes it stick.

• Memory creates absence, the specific thing someone finds themselves missing when they’re back home.

• Absence creates pull.

Satisfaction resets. Memory compounds.

Places people return to often leave something open. Not through failure, but through richness. There was more to explore, more to notice, more that didn’t fit into one trip.

That quiet “not done yet” feeling is free marketing. Kill it, and you go back to buying attention.

Why Sensory Details Matter

Smell has a direct line into memory. Studies on odour‑evoked memories suggest that scent‑triggered memories are often more emotional and vivid than those triggered by sight or sound because smell connects directly into the brain’s emotional and memory centres.​

Your destination is already full of sensory signatures: the quality of light at a certain hour, the sound of a morning market, the smell of rain on local stone, the texture of quiet in shoulder season.

But if guests never encounter those clearly, they might as well not exist.

A scattered itinerary doesn’t leave sensory hooks. It leaves nothing.

Every forgettable stay increases your dependency on ads, discounts, or OTAs. That’s not a marketing problem. That’s a margin leak.

Every time memory fails, you pay full acquisition cost for a visit, even from someone who has already been. You are paying retail for guests you’ve already had.​

If they don’t miss you, they won’t return.

You form emotional bonds with places through feeling connected to them, depending on them for certain experiences, and building memories there.

How This Plays Out Across a Destination

For destination organizations, DMOs, chambers, tourism boards, the pattern shows up in strategy meetings that optimize for the wrong signal.

The goal becomes “increase satisfaction scores” rather than “increase memorable encoding.” Campaigns smooth friction rather than create contrast. Wayfinding is clarified, signage is improved, and queues are managed. And all of it is valuable.

None of it, on its own, creates pull.

What gets left unprotected are the moments that actually stick.

• The unexpected view from the wrong turn

• The taste of something local you didn’t know existed

• The conversation with a shopkeeper who noticed you’d been there twice

These are the sensory anchors that encode.

Research on memorable tourism experiences indicates that tourists with positive memorable experiences are more likely to revisit the destination and develop an attachment toward it, often through nostalgia and place attachment.​

Memory is not a nice‑to‑have. It is the input to revisit intention.

For individual operators: lodging, tours, attractions, restaurants. The pattern shows up in staff rotas and bank accounts, not just dashboards. You do the work, guests leave happy, and you still start every season at zero.

A four‑star review with “nice room, clean, would recommend” tells you someone left satisfied. It doesn’t tell you whether they’ll come back. It doesn’t tell you what, if anything, will follow them home.

The operator who hears “I can still smell the rosemary from the garden” or “I keep thinking about that walk to the lighthouse” has something different.

They have evidence that an experience encoded. That memory is doing its work.

Most destinations don’t fail at clarity. They fail at encoding. Everything works, nothing sticks.

The difference isn’t polish. The difference is whether something unfinished,some absence remains.

When You Keep the Old Lens vs. When You See It Clearly

Keep optimising for satisfaction alone, and a few things happen.

Marketing spend climbs to acquire guests who should already be returning. You pay full acquisition cost for every visit, even from people who’ve been through your doors before. You are paying for the same guest twice.

Tourism research repeatedly notes that attracting repeat visitors costs less than acquiring first‑time visitors, and that loyal visitors often spend more and generate word‑of‑mouth you don’t have to buy. When memory fails, you lose the compounding effect and go back to refilling a leaky bucket.​

More downstream fixes get funded—recovery programmes, review management, loyalty schemes—while the upstream moment where memory forms goes unprotected. Operators absorb the cost in the form of harder acquisition, shorter seasons, and dependence on platforms that take a cut of every booking.

Now imagine a different lens.

Instead of asking “did they leave satisfied?”, you ask “did they leave with something unfinished?”

What sensory signatures are unique to this place? What moments create contrast, not just smoothness? Where do you leave texture instead of removing it?

Italy’s Albergo Diffuso model emerged in the 1980s as a way to revive small historic villages by distributing guest rooms across existing buildings, weaving visitors into the life of the town instead of isolating them in a conventional hotel.​

In Maranzanis in Friuli, after the 1976 earthquake, abandoned stone houses were rehabilitated instead of demolished. Guests stay in homes along narrow alleys, walk to breakfast under laundry lines, and cross the piazza. The town’s living room on the way “back” to their room.​

The smell of coffee from a neighbor’s window becomes part of the stay.

Giancarlo Dall’Ara describes the model as bringing guests into a story so they can understand a way of life, not just sleep somewhere different. That’s clarity and encoding working together. Memory and pull follow.​

In Japan, projects like Satoyama Experience in Hida offer cycling tours and stays in renovated traditional houses that connect visitors to rural life. Visitors bathe in cypress‑wood tubs with mountain views, eat dishes made from ingredients grown by villagers, fall asleep to the sound of crickets rather than traffic, and wake up to mist in the rice fields.​

There is no sense that you “did” Hida in one visit. You started something you might want to continue.

These aren’t just distribution strategies. They’re bets on memory.

They win without scale, without discounts, and without buying attention every quarter—while many well‑funded destinations with better amenities still have to buy back guests who were already satisfied.​

They’re not out‑spending you. They’re out‑encoding you.

If your main retention levers are discounts, packages, and points, you’re trying to compete with their memory advantage using tools they don’t even need. That’s not a fair fight—and you’re the one funding the difference.

Guests don’t leave with the feeling of a completed checklist. They leave with the feeling of a story they’ve only started.

Why Most Loyalty Programs Don’t Work

Most loyalty programs try to buy behavior without building memory.

Discounts and points can bring people back once. They don’t make anyone miss you.

You can’t incentivize absence. A 10% off code doesn’t create a smell, a rhythm, or a story that surfaces uninvited six months later.

As long as the experience itself doesn’t encode, every “loyalty” dollar is just another acquisition cost in disguise.

What This Looks Like on the Ground

In places that create lasting pull, you tend to see:

• A feel people can describe. Your destination has recognisable texture: light, sound, smell, and pace that feels distinct. Guests may not remember your slogan, but they can explain how it felt—the weight of the air, the way sound carried, the way evenings landed on the street.

• Clarity that lets people go deeper. Visitors understand how your place works quickly. Their energy goes into experiencing, not decoding logistics. Confusion is expensive; clarity is free fuel.

• Richness that stays open. The place doesn’t feel “done” after one visit. Neighbourhoods, seasons, and local rhythms would genuinely reward another trip. Guests leave with a mental “next‑time” list.

• People who help decode it. Hosts, guides, and frontline staff act as translators, not just service providers. When someone helps a guest understand “how this place works,” they change how the whole destination sits in memory.​

None of this needs a huge budget. It needs you to decide that “lingers after they leave” is as real a goal as “arrives in the first place.”

For You as a Destination Leader or Host

You might be nodding along and also thinking, “Fine, but I have payroll Friday and three open shifts.”

Fair.

This isn’t about layering on programmes. It’s about noticing and protecting what already makes your place itself.

• The moment a guest smells coffee before they reach the lobby.

• The bartender who remembers a name without making a show of it.

• The one room or corner table where people always pause.

• The sound of the courtyard at night.

You already have these. If they’re buried under efficiency, they might as well not exist.

Ask your next few repeat guests not what they enjoyed, but what kept coming back to them after they left.

If you can’t hear a clear pattern, you’re not building loyalty. You’re rolling the dice.

This Week’s Thinking Prompt

Use this with your team or paste it into an AI tool to audit your destination’s memory potential:

“I run a [hotel/destination/downtown district] in [location]. I’m trying to identify what guests might genuinely miss after they leave—the sensory details, rhythms, and moments that create emotional memory and drive return visits.

Ask me 10 probing questions to help uncover:

• What’s distinctive about the experience we offer (especially in terms of smell, light, sound, and pace).

• Whether guests actually encounter those moments clearly enough for them to encode.

• Where we might be hiding or undermining them through standardisation, efficiency, or neglect.”

It’s not a full strategy. It’s a starting point.

If guests can’t describe what they’d miss about your place, they won’t miss it.
And if they don’t miss it, you’ll keep buying them back at full price.

Satisfaction closes loops. Absence opens them. Closed loops fade. Open loops pull.

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Most destinations won’t fail fast. They’ll erode slowly.

Bookings will still come in. Campaigns will still run. Dashboards will still light up.
But underneath all of that, something will feel off.
Not broken. Not dramatic. Just less reliable than it used to be.

That’s usually how real change starts.

The Tension Beneath “Everything’s Fine”

Across the U.S., most residents still say tourism is good for their communities. Support remains strong. People see the jobs, the spending, the energy visitors bring.

But at the same time, something else is happening.
Fewer people feel meaningfully involved in the decisions shaping tourism where they live. Fewer feel confident that growth is actually improving daily life.

Support is still there, but it’s conditional now, and that distinction matters.

Because when people say tourism is “good” but hesitate to say it’s working, they’re not being negative. They’re being precise.

And that kind of precision tends to show up before anything visibly breaks.

Where Cracks Start to Show

This is where things get harder to explain.

Destinations say bookings are fine, but can’t clearly explain where momentum is coming from.
Teams stay busy, yet confidence doesn’t rise with the workload.
Plans move forward, but the conviction behind them feels thinner than before.

Nothing is broken enough to trigger alarm.
But nothing feels solid enough to lean on either.

That in-between space is where momentum quietly starts to leak away.

This isn’t a crisis. It’s a line in the sand.
The industry isn’t collapsing. It’s being tested.

People still want to travel. They still care about place, experience, and meaning.
But they’re paying closer attention now — to whether promises match reality, and whether effort actually leads somewhere.

They notice when activity replaces clarity.
They notice when motion stands in for direction.
They notice when things look busy but don’t feel grounded.

And once that awareness sets in, it doesn’t fade easily.

The Part That Matters Most

This moment isn’t about doing more.
It’s about understanding what no longer works the way it used to.

Every era has this moment, when the metrics still cooperate, but the meaning behind them starts to shift.

Because the real risk isn’t making the wrong move.
It’s continuing to optimize a version of success that no longer fits how people decide, trust, or commit.

That’s the line many destinations are standing on right now.

If you can’t clearly explain what’s driving your momentum, you’re probably not in control of it.

And that’s where the risk begins.

Further Reading

For readers who want to explore the research behind this perspective, the following resources provide deeper context:

Destinations International & Longwoods International
National tracking of how residents view tourism’s benefits, tradeoffs, and role in community life.

Longwoods International
Long-term research showing sustained support for tourism alongside growing

Word of Mouth and Revisit Intention Research
Studies connecting trust, satisfaction, and perceived value to repeat visitation and advocacy.

Global Travel Trend Reports (2024–2025)
Insights highlighting the global shift toward intentional, value-driven, and purpose-led travel.

Mastercard – Travel Trends 2025: Purpose-driven Journeys
American Express – 2025 Global Travel Trends Report
Remarkable Global – Travel Trends 2025

Most destinations are doing a lot right.

Campaigns go out on time. Content lands. Partners stay engaged. From the outside, things look steady.

And yet, the results don’t line up with the effort.

Not panic. Just things not lining up.

That quiet question that shows up in planning meetings and late-day conversations:
Why does this still feel harder than it needs to be?

The belief we inherited

Most destination strategies still rely on a familiar equation.

Market better, get better results.
Get more visibility, create more impact.
Bring in more visitors, and the community benefits.

That belief made sense when discovery was the hard part.

Today, discovery is easier than it used to be. People can find you in seconds. What they decide next is whether they trust the place once they arrive, and that choice shapes how money actually moves through it.

Where things start to get stuck

Destinations carry responsibility for what actually happens, even when they don’t fully control it.

You’re responsible for whether tourism helps or hurts the local economy and how residents feel about it. But many of the pieces that shape the experience aren’t really in your hands.

So when results disappoint, the instinct is to promote harder: more campaigns, more storytelling, more messaging.

But the issue rarely sits in marketing.

It lives in the space between the promise and the experience.

When that space feels uncertain, people don’t explore. Money follows the safest path.

This isn’t really about bookings

Visitors aren’t only choosing where to stay. They’re deciding whether to explore beyond what feels obvious.

That single behavior matters more than most dashboards show.

When visitors feel confident, they wander more, try smaller local places, and stick around longer.

When confidence drops, people play it safe. They stick with what they recognize, which usually means chains. Local businesses don’t lose loudly. They just stop getting chosen, and the destination absorbs the cost without a clear signal that anything went wrong.

While marketing shapes the choice to visit, tourism often succeeds or fails in the days after arrival.

Why confidence matters

Confidence isn’t persuasion. It’s orientation.

Most visitors are quietly asking:

• Will this be easy to navigate?

• Will this match what I was expecting?

• Will I regret this choice?

When the answers feel clear, behavior opens up.

This isn’t just a hunch. You see the same pattern across research and real-world examples: when information is clear and consistent, people feel more confident once they arrive.

In Nepal, community-run homestays are a good example of this in practice. Travelers usually know what they’re signing up for. What the stay will be like. What’s included. How they fit into the place. That clarity makes it easier to go beyond the obvious, stay longer, and spend money directly in the community. Like anything, it works best when expectations are well managed and the structure is solid.

When confidence holds, people wander, trust the handwritten menu, and often book a second experience or add an extra night without overthinking it.

When confidence breaks, it’s usually small things. A confusing sign. A business that looked open online but isn’t. Something that doesn’t quite match what was promised. Those moments don’t cause a scene. They just shrink how far people go and where money ends up flowing.

Where destinations actually have muscle

Destinations rarely have full control. But they do have influence over the conditions that shape how people move and decide once they arrive.

That influence usually shows up in small, unglamorous places.
Whether information actually lines up across platforms.
Whether small businesses feel real and easy to choose on the ground.
And whether arrival helps people get their bearings or leaves them guessing.

Visitor centers are part of that, too.
Not as brochure racks, but as places that help people orient themselves, see what’s nearby, and figure out what feels worth trying.

Case examples and sector work keep pointing to the same thing: when those spaces do that job well, visitors move differently through a place.

Southern Indiana is a good example. When the visitor center stopped acting like a brochure rack and started feeling more like a shared community space, people stayed longer, wandered more, found local businesses without being pushed, and moved through the area with less hesitation.

You see versions of this in a handful of places. Instead of promoting harder, they put more energy into helping local businesses be ready and easy to choose once visitors arrive.

When visitor centers feel like places to get your bearings, people linger and spend locally. Small operators that are easier to understand and trust give visitors more confidence. And tracking resident sentiment alongside visitor data helps tough calls surface earlier, before they turn into bigger problems.

None of this requires owning the experience. It’s about reducing drag where decisions are actually made.

What success actually looks like

Success isn’t just volume.

It looks more like visitors who feel comfortable once they arrive. They move through the place with less effort, explore beyond the first block, spread their spending across more businesses, and make better decisions on day two than they did on day one.

Over time, case examples suggest that kind of behavior can soften seasonality.

That version of success is quieter.
It’s also more durable.

A few places to look next

Not a checklist. More something to sit with.

Where do visitors hesitate once they arrive?

Which local businesses never even get looked at, and why?

Where does misaligned information quietly push people to play it safe?

Where are you trying to control outcomes instead of shaping the conditions around them?

These questions don’t need quick answers. They’re useful because they help you see where you actually have muscle.

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Here’s the reality

Destinations aren’t failing at marketing.

They’re being asked to solve deeper problems with promotional tools.

When tourism really works for a place, it’s not because the story was louder. It’s because people felt confident once they arrived, and that confidence shaped how they moved and spent.

That doesn’t take reinvention. It takes things lining up. And when they do, value starts moving through the place differently.

Further reading

Expectation–experience alignment in tourism

Information quality and destination perception

Visitor centers and modern visitor services

Community-based tourism and homestays

Value over volume and destination stewardship

There’s a moment that happens before a guest ever reaches a front desk.

They’ve exited the highway, they’re circling for parking, and they’re squinting at signage that assumes they already know how things work here. Nothing has gone wrong yet, but nothing feels settled either.

That’s often the moment when a guest decides, consciously or not, whether this place feels easy… or like work.

Disorientation doesn’t start at check-in. It starts at the edge of a place.

(What follows reflects patterns seen repeatedly across destinations and operators. It’s grounded in practice, not lab-grade causality.)

This Isn’t a Guest Problem

Across destinations — large and small, urban and rural, seasonal and year-round — many operators are seeing the same pattern. Guests feel more on edge. Small issues escalate faster. Situations that used to be minor now feel charged.

Different settings. Similar behavior.

What’s changed isn’t that guests suddenly forgot how to behave, or that operators forgot how to do hospitality. A major part of what has changed is the runway. Booking windows are tighter. Trips are shorter. Arrivals are more compressed.

Layered on top of that are other pressures destinations recognize well: cost volatility, staffing constraints, infrastructure gaps, and a general rise in travel stress.

When that buffer shrinks, tolerance often shrinks with it. This isn’t entitlement. It’s pressure.

Why OTAs Feel Easier (And Why That Matters)

Let’s talk about the elephant in the room without throwing tomatoes.

For many guests, OTAs still feel safer at the moment of booking. Not because people love them, but because they reduce uncertainty. They standardize information, create predictable flows, and answer the “what happens next?” question quickly.

They aren’t warm or personal or particularly inspiring. They’re predictable.

And when people are already stressed, predictable often beats personal.

That doesn’t make OTAs villains. It makes them very effective billboards.

The problem isn’t that guests start there.
It’s what happens after.

Where the Handoff Breaks

A guest leaves an OTA environment feeling oriented enough to commit, then arrives in a destination that assumes local knowledge, spreads information across too many places, and shifts from guiding language to promotional language.

Welcome to town. Figure it out.

That gap is where trust starts to wobble.

In many places, when destinations don’t help hold that orientation moment, operators inherit it. Front desks become translators. Visitor centers field questions they didn’t create. Hosts become wayfinding systems.

Over time, reviews and complaints quietly reflect destination-level friction that had little to do with the room, the host, or the stay itself.

The billboard worked.
The hosting didn’t start.

A Shared Orientation Changes the Experience

We’ve seen this handled differently at the destination level.

New Zealand’s Tiaki Promise is a useful example. Rather than leaving orientation entirely to individual businesses, the destination established a shared set of expectations about how to travel responsibly, what’s valued, and how the place works.

It doesn’t guarantee perfect behavior. What it’s designed to do is reduce surprise and misaligned expectations before visitors arrive.

And when expectations are clearer, moments that escalate tend to become easier to manage.

A Reflection for Destination Leaders

This isn’t a task list.
It’s a lens.

You, as a destination organization or leadership team, are uniquely positioned to see where confusion originates, even when you don’t control every touchpoint.

Take a moment to consider:

Where are visitors being asked to figure things out on their own, and who absorbs that confusion downstream?

As you reflect, you may notice:

• Messaging that assumes local knowledge

• Information that exists, but not in the order visitors experience it

• Operators translating expectations the destination never clearly set

You don’t need to solve everything at once.

Even identifying one shared moment of uncertainty — arrival, parking, wayfinding, local norms, or “what happens next” — can shift how trust is experienced across the entire destination.

Alignment doesn’t require control.
It starts with awareness.

A Necessary Reality Check

Let’s be clear about what trust does and doesn’t do.

Building trust does not guarantee direct bookings. Anyone telling you otherwise is overselling or hasn’t worked in travel long enough.

What trust does create is permission: permission to explore beyond the OTA, permission to click through, and permission to believe that booking direct won’t be risky.

In practice, it often looks something like this:

Disorientation at arrival creates stress.
Stress pushes guests toward whatever feels most predictable.
Predictability pulls them back toward platforms and intermediaries that promise protection.

That’s not a moral failure. It’s human behavior.

Trust doesn’t interrupt that pattern overnight. But it does change where gravity starts to pull over time.

Some guests will always book on OTAs. Habit matters. Convenience matters. Loyalty programs matter.

That’s not failure. That’s reality.

What Destinations Can Influence (Without Controlling Everything)

This is where destination organizations often have more leverage than they realize.

Not because you control every experience, but because you convene the system.

Orientation lives in places DMOs touch every day:

• Arrival signage and wayfinding

• Parking explanations and transit guidance

• Pre-arrival emails, confirmation pages, and visitor FAQs

• Shared language operators reuse in their own messages

• Automated replies, chatbots, and after-hours scripts that speak before a human does

Increasingly, systems — including automation and AI — set expectations long before a human ever enters the picture.

Download the Reflection Tool

Most guests don’t need more scattered information. They need clearer context and sequence. They want to know what’s normal here, what won’t be a problem, and where a human fits when something goes sideways.

Price, convenience, and loyalty still matter. Direct begins to win when it also feels at least as safe and predictable.

That sense of safety comes from clarity, not charisma.

The Role Shift Destinations Are Being Nudged Into

Whether you asked for it or not, as a destination, you’re being nudged into a hosting role.

OTAs can bring people to the door. Destinations help decide whether guests feel held once they arrive.

That doesn’t mean you own every experience. It means you help align the moments that matter most, so operators aren’t absorbing confusion alone.

When that alignment exists, guests feel steadier, operators feel supported, and the destination earns trust without having to shout for it.

The Part That Shows Up Later

Trust isn’t a booking tactic. It’s a responsibility that has been quietly moving upstream.

Every confusing sign, vague instruction, or “check three different websites” moment nudges guests back toward whoever feels safest, even when the stay itself is excellent.

Right now, the destinations that understand this aren’t arguing about channels.

They’re investing in alignment, clarity, and shared expectations — the unglamorous work that makes everything else easier.

That’s where the real work usually starts.

Where does a first-time visitor to your destination have to guess instead of being guided?

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Further reading

For readers who want deeper context on some of the ideas referenced in this article, these resources provide useful background and industry perspectives:

Destination-level norms and visitor expectations

Tiaki Promise – official site (Tourism New Zealand)

Industry view on how the Tiaki Promise is used to engage visitors. Tiaki Promise – Industry perspective (TIA)

Information overload, confusion, and tourism behaviour

Information overload and tourism decisions: Study highlighting how excessive destination information can overwhelm travelers. Information Overload & Tourism Confusion (InformationR)

Effects of information overload on travelers: Research linking perceived risk and travel intention in tourism contexts. Tourism Intention, Information Overload, & Travel Risk (PMC)

OTA dynamics and booking behaviour

OTA role in travel demand: HospitalityNet viewpoint on how OTAs meet existing demand rather than create it. OTAs & Travel Demand (HospitalityNet)

OTA vs direct booking factors: Research exploring drivers of OTA use vs direct bookings (price, convenience, trust). OTA vs Direct Booking Preferences (IJFMR study)

They start the moment they feel your room: the energy, the tone, the way a destination hangs together (or doesn’t).

And they’re unbelievably good at sensing when something feels off.

A town can have stunning landscapes, Michelin dreams, and a perfectly polished Instagram grid…
and still feel disconnected the moment someone steps out of the car.

Destinations rarely lose visitors because of one big thing.
They lose them because of a hundred small signals that whisper:

• This place isn’t talking to itself.

• This place isn’t ready for me.

• This place doesn’t feel aligned.

Guests don’t say these words out loud, but they feel them.
And that feeling drives return visits, reviews, and word-of-mouth.

So let’s talk about why alignment matters. And what visitors are actually responding to long before they notice your “assets.”

What Visitors Actually Feel First

Most travelers don’t start their visit with a checklist.

They’re reading something softer:
Does this place feel friendly? Does it feel clear? Does it feel connected?

Tourism research consistently shows that visitors’ perceptions of residents. Friendliness, warmth, and emotional closeness shape satisfaction and willingness to return.

They respond to:

• Whether the community feels welcoming
Warmth is not a program. It’s a tone.
Visitors feel it instantly.

• Whether businesses seem prepared and aware
A restaurant blindsided by an event
A shop unaware of new hours
A trail system missing a sign

These small cracks quietly shape the visitor experience.

• Whether the destination’s “why” feels clear
When residents understand tourism’s role, and feel included. The whole destination carries a different energy.
Visitors feel that too.

Alignment isn’t soft.
Visitors reward it. In loyalty, in reviews, and in the stories they tell when they get home.

The “Wait… What?” Moments That Break Trust

Most visitor disappointment isn’t dramatic.
It’s subtle.

It sounds like:

“We didn’t know the event was this big.”
“Are the trails open or not?”
“Why are half the shops closed on a Saturday?”
“No one seemed to know what was happening this weekend.”

These are small moments for the destination…
but major signals for visitors.

To them, it feels like the place isn’t talking to itself.

That sideways feeling. The sense that the destination is a little out of kilter. Quiently pushes people toward “maybe we try somewhere else next year.”

What the Studies Say… Without the Snooze Factor

You don’t need academic language to understand the pattern.
Here’s the simple version of what researchers keep finding:

1. Friendly, cohesive destinations see more repeat visits.
Emotional comfort predicts whether people come back. Often as strongly as individual amenities.

2. Visitors recommend places that “feel good.”
Warmth, flow, clarity, and tone matter more than any single attraction.

3. Shared community values matter.
When visitors sense alignment, residents, businesses, and tourism moving in the same direction, they report higher satisfaction and stronger word-of-mouth.

4. Collaboration improves the visitor experience.
Destinations that talk to themselves make the trip smoother for everyone.

None of this is complicated.
But it is powerful.

The Three-Point “Don’t Make It Weird” Test

Every destination that feels good to visit has one thing in common:
nothing feels weird, hidden, or out of sync.

Visitors don’t need perfection.
They just need a place that doesn’t surprise them in the wrong way.

Here’s the simple test.

1. Do residents know why tourism matters?

People support what they understand.

When residents know the “why” behind events, promotions, and visitor volume, the tone of the whole community shifts.

That clarity shows up in friendliness, patience, and the overall feel of the place.

Visitors can’t name the reason.
But they feel the difference.

2. Are businesses looped in early enough to prepare?

This is where most destinations stumble.

Restaurants learning about events from guests.
Shops hearing about promotions after launch.
Guides unaware of new trails, tours, or hours.

That’s when a destination starts to feel… weird.

But when businesses are brought in early, before posters go up, and announcements go live, visitors feel the reward:

Menus adjusted.
Hours synced.
Teams prepared.
Everyone rowing the same direction.

That creates a sense of flow you can’t fake.

3. Does the community share progress and wins publicly?

Small updates create big trust.

Not glossy reports.
Not long presentations.

Just simple, visible updates like:

• “Here’s what we improved this month.”

• “Here’s who helped make it happen.”

• “Here’s what’s next.”

When people can see momentum, they join it.
When partners feel seen, they stay involved.
When residents feel informed, they welcome visitors differently.

That’s how destinations keep things from feeling weird —
and start feeling aligned.

Why This Matters Heading Into 2026

Budgets are tight.
Staffing is unpredictable.
Communities want more say in how tourism happens.
Visitors are more sensitive to tone than ever.

You can’t market your way out of a destination that doesn’t feel aligned.
But you can build alignment through clarity, communication, and small visible wins.

Destinations that do this earn:

• stronger visitor satisfaction

• better reviews

• healthier word-of-mouth

• more repeat visits

Not through perfection.
Through coherence.

Visitors feel that.
And they reward it.

Some Places Just Feel Good to Return To

When a place feels welcoming, prepared, and connected, visitors don’t describe it in strategic language.

They say:

“It just felt good to be there.”
“Everyone seemed on the same page.”
“We’re already planning our next trip.”

That’s the room they return to.

And that’s the room worth building.

Join the Conversation

What small signals do visitors feel first in your community?

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Further Reading (for the curious)

If you want to dig deeper into how community alignment, resident sentiment, and destination energy shape visitor behavior, here are a few clear, practitioner-friendly resources:

• Destinations International & Longwoods – National Resident Sentiment Study / White Paper
How residents actually feel about tourism, why it matters, and how DMOs are responding.
https://destinationsinternational.org/resident-sentiment-study
https://destinationsinternational.org/reports/national-resident-sentiment-white-paper

• WTTC – Towards Destination Stewardship
A practical framework for managing destinations with communities, not just for visitors.
https://researchhub.wttc.org/product/towards-destination-stewardship
https://wttc.org/news/new-wttc-report-provides-framework-for-achieving-destination-stewardship

• Clarity of Place – Why Resident Sentiment Matters
A plain-language look at how community attitudes, alignment, and trust shape the visitor experience.
https://www.clarityofplace.com/why-resident-sentiment-matters/