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Visit Lake Charles evolved from a traditional tourism marketer into the strategic marketing and communications arm for Just Imagine SWLA, proving how DMOs can support community-led initiatives without losing focus on visitation, brand, or mission. This session explores how DMOs can responsibly step into deeper community roles when the opportunity aligns.

Takeaways:

• Evaluate community initiatives using a practical decision framework to determine when deeper DMO involvement aligns with mission, brand, and visitation goals—and when to say no. 
• Implement governance and role-definition tools that establish clear boundaries, accountability, and expectations, protecting the DMO’s core   mission while supporting community-led efforts.
• Apply a scalable communications-first framework to support community initiatives through marketing, storytelling, and earned media without absorbing ownership or operational drift.

Convention center transformations represent once-in-a-generation opportunities for destinations. When managed strategically, they are more than capital projects—they become platforms to elevate a destination’s brand, attract meetings, business, and engage national media. This panel session with Visit Austin, Visit Cincy, and Visit Milwaukee will explore how destinations and agency partners harness PR to maximize visibility and reposition their cities during and after convention center transformations. Renovating or expanding a convention center is a complex, multi-year endeavor. But beyond the hard hats and construction fences lies a powerful PR opportunity: the chance to tell a story of innovation, resilience, and citywide growth.

Takeaways: 

• Leverage milestone storytelling—from groundbreaking to ribbon cutting—to generate   consistent coverage and media interest.
• Design curated media activations like familiarization tours, media dinners, and trade show press conferences to build buzz.
• Expand the narrative beyond the facility to encompass sustainability, walkability, diversity, and culinary culture.
• Integrated Approach of leveraging your paid media spend to help drive earned coverage in the meetings market. 
• Maintain competitive positioning by sustaining coverage after reopening and aligning with editorial calendars and industry event.
• Attendees will learn how to turn a construction project into a brand-defining communications moment for their destinations.

How do you evolve a legacy brand without losing what makes it iconic—especially when multiple destinations are involved? Using Route 66 as a case study, this session goes beyond campaign execution to explore how Oklahoma is navigating the complexity of modernizing a historic brand across state, city, and smaller destination partners. From aligning 11 smaller destinations around a shared vision (“The 100 Greatest Miles”) to balancing local priorities with statewide strategy, we’ll unpack the real challenges behind collaboration, brand consistency, and decision-making.

Takeaways:

Attendees will walk away with practical insight into how to:

• Align multiple stakeholders around a single brand vision.
• Balance legacy storytelling with modern traveler expectations.
• Manage tradeoffs between local control and regional impact.
• Execute a cohesive strategy across destinations of different sizes.

What does it take to get travelers to invest emotionally in a place— where being a “responsible guest” feels like insider access and naturally the thing to do? This session breaks down Look Out for ME, Maine’s visitor education initiative rooted in Leave No Trace principles and taking care of yourself, while going beyond just nature to being respectful of the culture, communities, people and working landscapes as well – the things that make Maine (or a place?) special. Learn about the evolution of the initiative, outreach to key partners and stakeholders and early campaign successes.

Takeaways:

• Develop a pre-arrival digital and social strategy that educates visitors early, aligning expectations, protecting local assets and reinforcing long-term destination stewardship.
• Strengthen cross-agency and partner collaboration to avoid duplication, amplify aligned initiatives to deliver clear, cohesive sustainability messaging.
• Develop communications plan to engage industry stakeholders. 
• Leverage PR and paid media to extend reach and drive measurable results.

In a follow-up to last year's popular session, Amir Eylon will return to the stage and seed the conversation with some timely leisure travel insights and travel trends facing DMO's and challenge the audience to discuss how they have been, are, or can apply these insights into their marketing efforts!

Takeaways: 

• Some quick and actionable insights about   American leisure travelers. 
• Actionable applied ideas from their peers.
• Inspired ideation of solutions   among the roundtables.

DMOs are under pressure to adopt AI, yet many lack a clear path from experimentation to operational impact. This peer-to-peer roundtable grounds the conversation in Visit Mesa’s AI roadmap, including what worked and what did not. Then the session shifts to facilitated discussion so attendees can compare approaches, address stakeholder expectations, connect AI efforts to ROI, and identify realistic next steps they can implement immediately.

Takeaways: 

• Evaluate where your DMO is on the AI adoption spectrum.
• Prioritize AI efforts based on organizational readiness, value, and capacity.
• Identify concrete next steps to advance AI adoption responsibly within your organization.