America's most independent voice in tourism
Most tourism problems are not marketing problems. They are conversations nobody has started yet. I write about them, I speak about them, and destinations hire me to run them.
Summit design
Most destination summits are a morning of presentations. Everyone claps, everyone leaves, and nothing is different on Monday. I build the other kind. A working day with a theme it can hang on, designed so the businesses in that room walk out with something they can use.
Most report-outs stop at the number. Here every meaningful data point gets one more slide, translating destination data into a decision for the businesses sitting in the room. A restaurant owner starts to understand why lodging data matters.
An arrival experience that makes the argument before anyone takes the stage. Breaks built on what people have and what they need. Mixed tables solving real visitor scenarios. Networking stops being small talk and becomes partnership.
Someone captures the room all day. Late in the program it comes back on stage and the DMO answers in real time. The summit becomes a conversation instead of a broadcast.
Start one experiment. Stop one habit. Connect with one business. Watch one signal. Measure one result. Plus one question back to the DMO about what could be made easier.
$7,500
The summit day
The full day, however you want to use me. Keynote, closing, panel moderation, facilitation, emcee, and every conversation leading up to it. That is the whole ask. Take one piece from the list, take two, or take none of it.
The pieces come to $25,200 on their own. All of it together: $20,000, before books and travel.
The column
Tourism has no shortage of best practices. Barbee v. Tourism is where I check whether any of them are still true. Every issue takes a piece of accepted tourism wisdom and asks whether it survives contact with how destinations actually operate.
It is free, it is not a newsletter about newsletters, and it is the reason most destinations end up on this page. Gulf Shores read it and booked a summit. Virginia read it and sent it to their regional partners.
The book
Everything nobody tells you when you take the job. Thirty years of boards, budgets, bad data, brilliant people, and the politics that eat all of it for breakfast.
Written for the person who just got handed a destination and a set of expectations that do not reconcile. Out February 2027. Signed copies for the whole room are an add-on at any summit, $20 a copy.
Everything else
Every engagement opens with a call and a round of destination research. Nothing here comes off a shelf, and the format follows the problem.
Destination research, behavior and experience design, and a team. The day is when it lands, not what it costs.
Stakeholders who are all working hard in different directions, pointed the same way, without pretending everyone agrees.
The Host Gap in one room. Hosts, DMO staff, city officials and industry voices, through four build rounds. Up to 100. Plus production.
A progressive day moving through your actual rentals, for destinations past first-generation STR work. Plus travel.
A takeover. Several days in your destination, in smaller rooms, wherever the stakeholders already are. Hands-on, not a stage. Three-day minimum.
Direct access, with nothing built around it. Same brain, no production.
Seventy-five minutes on a decision, a stuck initiative or a board fight, plus a written follow-up naming three to five things plainly.
Three hours live on Zoom, up to 25, on one hard question. Eight topics, or bring your own.
Ongoing work with a leadership team or a destination CEO. Three, six, twelve or eighteen month terms, depending on what you are trying to move.
One annual relationship with a trade association: strategic counsel through the year, board and committee time, and a hand in the programming, education and member research.
The frameworks
Short-term rental hosts operate the inventory, meet the visitor and shape the review. Most destinations have never spoken to them. The gap is structural, not attitudinal, and it has a price.
People do not choose destinations. They choose versions of themselves. The closer your destination sits to the identity someone is reaching for, the less you have to spend convincing them.
Field Labs, the Lodging Gap Report, and the research behind both. Built with Destination Innovate to close the gap in practice rather than describe it in a deck.
About
Long enough to have made most of the mistakes myself, which is the only reason I can spot them coming at somebody else.
I am a destination strategist and facilitator. I work with DMOs, boards, city leadership, trade associations and short-term rental hosts, mostly on the parts of the job that do not fit neatly into a marketing plan. I have plenty of relationships in this industry. None of them own an opinion of mine. Nothing to gain by telling anyone what they want to hear. That is the whole product.
Co-founder of Destination Innovate with Kristen Cruz, and creator of Hosts & Home Teams. Company work, Field Labs and research live at destinationinnovate.com and hostsandhometeams.com.