Schedule

In a world overflowing with AI generated information, trusted storytelling has never mattered more. Join us for an inspiring, hands on session with Smithsonian—America’s storyteller—to uncover how authoritative content can elevate your digital campaigns and spark deeper audience engagement. Whether you’re navigating tight budgets or striving to stand out in a crowded landscape, you’ll leave with actionable strategies, fresh ideas, and Smithsonian backed insights to strengthen your brand’s narrative. Following the success of our 250 Places to Celebrate America partnership, we’re offering an exclusive preview of Smithsonian’s new initiative for 2027—Hidden Natural Wonders— and concrete guidance on how to use this idea to amplify your destination’s visibility and impact.

Takeaways: 

• Elevate your narrative with actionable storytelling strategies designed to deepen audience engagement and strengthen the impact of your content.
• Make your brand unforgettable by harnessing the authenticity of your UNESCO sites, historic locations, iconic landmarks, and national parks to stand out in an increasingly crowded content landscape.
• Boost your visibility through proven approaches for structuring, positioning, and distributing stories so they are more likely to be surfaced and amplified among your target audience and summarized by generative AI systems.

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.

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.

If your community is asking, “Why are we doing another tourism plan?” or “Is this just going to collect dust?”, then it’s time to reset the conversation. Creating the plan matters, but implementation is what actually drives change. This roundtable session is infused with a panel to help participants focus on how to move beyond the document and use the strategic plan as a practical, everyday tool to align partners, guide decisions and actually get s**t done.

Takeaways:

• Apply best practices to build implementation steps into the strategic planning process.
• Institute steps to hold strategic planners, the destination organization, and community stakeholders accountable for delivering impactful results.
• Establish communication and follow-up to report success stories and challenges as part of the effort to strengthen community involvement and support.

AI has become the loudest word in travel marketing, but underneath the buzz, DMO leaders are wrestling with real questions that rarely get honest answers. What actually changes when a visitor types a question into ChatGPT or Perplexity instead of Google? Does your content structure matter to a language model? Can you influence how AI platforms answer questions about your destination? And is your agency actually equipped to help… or just repackaging old deliverables with an "AI" label?

This roundtable cuts through the hype. Facilitated as an open, practitioner-level discussion, we would tackle the myths DMO marketers hear most — in vendor pitches, conference keynotes, and board rooms — and replace them with ground-level clarity. The goal is for attendees to bring their skepticism, their unanswered questions, and their real experiences and leave with actual clarity. 

Takeaways: 

• A clearer framework for evaluating AI vendor claims.
• Practical content and GEO strategies grounded in what LLMs actually respond to.
• Peer perspectives on what other DMOs are testing, investing in, and walking away from.

Destination marketing is evolving rapidly — but many organizations are still investing time, budget and energy into tactics, channels and reporting practices that no longer drive meaningful value. As traveler behavior, technology and stakeholder expectations continue to shift, destination leaders are being forced to make harder decisions about where to focus, what to prioritize and what to leave behind. 

This peer-to-peer roundtable will bring destination leaders together for a candid discussion on the strategies, metrics and legacy practices that may no longer serve the industry. From outdated reporting habits and overused marketing tactics to channels losing effectiveness and investments that no longer differentiate destinations, attendees will openly discuss what they are rethinking, reducing or walking away from entirely.

Takeaways: 

• Identify outdated marketing tactics, reporting practices and investments that may no longer create meaningful value for destination organizations.
• Explore how destination leaders are reevaluating channels, content strategies and success metrics in response to changing traveler behavior and stakeholder expectations.
• Exchange candid peer-driven Data & Insights on what organizations are cutting, evolving or deprioritizing — and where they are choosing to reinvest instead.