Schedule

When state tourism offices, destination organizations, and airports align around shared data, strategy, and storytelling, the impact extends far beyond visitation. It influences air service development, funding conversations, economic growth, and resident sentiment. This panel brings together executive leaders from Colorado Tourism Office, Visit Denver, and Denver International Airport to share how cross-entity collaboration drives measurable outcomes across a destination ecosystem.

Takeaways: 

• How coordinated messaging strengthens visitation and community support.
• Where brand alignment often breaks down and how to build a more unified approach.
• Real examples of collaboration that influenced growth, perception, and long term competitiveness.

When a global spotlight hits a host city—whether for the FIFA World Cup 26™ or a major political event—the pressure isn’t just on the stadium; it’s on the entire state ecosystem. The true test of a destination leader isn't just managing the logistics of a marquee event, but ensuring that momentum drives a measurable economic multiplier across the region.

This high-level panel pulls back the curtain on the "Host City vs. State" dynamic, featuring leaders from Pennsylvania, Philadelphia and more. We’re moving past the highlight reels to discuss the candid, "unfiltered" realities of cross-sector collaboration. Learn how state and local DMOs align their brand identities so a marquee moment in one city fuels discovery and visitor spend statewide. From auditing global brand assets to navigating the friction of working with transportation authorities and civic leaders, this session provides the blueprint for turning intense global scrutiny into a cohesive, lasting legacy for every partner involved.

Takeaways: 

• The Unified Brand Architecture: Learn how to audit and evolve your destination’s "digital DNA"—integrating legacy icons with modern event narratives to create a flexible global framework that resonates with international travelers across an entire region.
• The Host-to-State Partnership Blueprint: Identify the specific governance structures and communication workflows required to align state offices and local DMOs, ensuring that host city momentum translates into regional discovery and statewide economic lift.
• Navigating High-Stakes Stakeholder Friction: Gain candid, 301-level Data & Insights into managing complex relationships with municipalities, transit authorities, and civic leaders when the eyes of the world are on your destination.
• The Legacy Framework: Measuring Beyond the Visit: Move past short-term room nights to evaluate long-term success. We’ll break down strategies for measuring brand lift, resident benefit, and sustained demand—equipping you with a measurement narrative that justifies the investment to policymakers.

Every vendor claims to deliver the best performance, and every one of them has a deck that proves it. So how does a DMO know who's actually driving results?

This session walks through how to design an honest, head-to-head media test so you can evaluate partners based on performance instead of taking their word for it. It's practical, a little provocative and entirely on the side of the buyer. Best of all, you don't need to be a media buyer to use these principles. Whether you're a CEO, CMO, marketing manager or board member, you'll leave knowing the questions to ask and how to separate great storytelling from great performance.

Takeaways:

• A repeatable head-to-head testing blueprint you can apply with any vendor and at any budget level.
• How to identify attribution overlap and understand why two vendors can both claim to "win" the same campaign.
• A practical vendor audit checklist, including the questions every media partner should be prepared to answer.

The Matador AI Council is a forum for 50+ DMO CEOs to define AI leadership strategy through the lens of change management and organizational culture. This session begins with two Council members describing how they’re leading AI transformation across their organizations to drive new business outcomes. Then we’ll shift to a peer-to-peer roundtable conversation for participants to share their best practices for successfully implementing AI platforms and processes.  

Takeaways:

• How CEO and leadership AI fluency drive success more than anything.
• How agents increase the ROI for AI beyond micro-productivity hacks.
• How organization design is catching up to the technology.
• How to ensure governance overkill doesn’t suppress adoption.

This live, roundtable-style session brings the popular CMO Jam format to the ESTO stage. We'll tackle the most urgent challenges facing today’s tourism CMOs—sourced directly from the audience in advance and during the session. Expect candid conversation, tactical insight, and real-world examples. Attendees will walk away with peer-driven solutions, scalable strategies, and a pulse on what’s working across all destination sizes.

Takeaways:

• Proven Strategies From the Field: Learn what’s working (and what’s not) from real destination marketing leaders across the country.
• Solutions for Current Challenges: Walk away with relevant, peer-sourced insights on the most urgent issues facing marketers today.
• Scalable Ideas for Any DMO: Gain actionable takeaways that can be applied regardless of your destination’s size or structure.

Join Expedia Group Advertising to discover what resonates most with today’s travelers. Drawing on the Science of Wanderlust research, you’ll see how partners are creating content that inspires, builds trust, and drives bookings - from short-form videos to inclusive and authentic storytelling. Learn actionable strategies for leveraging AI, media networks, and creative partnerships to deliver measurable results across the entire traveler journey. 

Takeaways: 

• Learn how DMOs can create impactful, compelling content to reach travelers and drive bookings.
• Understand travelers’ attitudes and preferences to the role of AI in the travel booking journey to enhance campaigns while maintaining creativity.
• Explore new ways to build content through creative partnerships and leverage media networks to extend your reach even further.

Travel is constantly evolving & understanding where it’s headed requires more than surface level signals. We’ll introduce Tripadvisor Trendcast 2026, our latest look at the forces shaping how & why people travel. Featuring 10 emerging trends, this report draws on decades of traveler insight to spotlight what’s gaining momentum, what’s changing & what will influence travel decisions. We’ll break down each trend, why it matters now & how it’s already showing up in real travel experiences.

Takeaways: 

• Identify 2026's defining travel trends, backed by real-world consumer behavior.
• Examine the year-to-date trajectory of these trends.
• Discover how advertisers can outpace what's next.

Let’s be honest: most destination brands tend to be polite, predictable, and painfully interchangeable. This session unpacks how Choose Chicago broke from convention to create “Never Done. Never Outdone.”—a bold, research-driven brand platform built from real community voices, insights, and buy-in. Through fearless creativity and early stakeholder alignment, Chicago launched a brand that shows up with edge across leisure travel, meetings and conventions, and global markets.

Takeaways: 

• Turn research and community listening into creative fuel—not a constraint.   
• Build one brand that flexes across leisure, meetings, partners, and global markets without dilution. 
• Use stakeholder previews to sharpen the work, build ownership, and launch loud.

Do your DMO and state have a hard time winning together? Do you need to galvanize stakeholders behind you? Have you met the power of reality TV? What started with hope and a creative pitch turned into a powerful integrated marketing and PR campaign when we hosted Top Chef. This case study will spur tactical ideas and spew food puns. Learn how reach, impressions and heads in beds led to a bipartisan film tax credit. Get inspired to turn TV clicks into bookable trips.

Takeaways: 

• Marketing and PR practitioners will learn to implement integrated strategies that convert viewers into visitors and clicks into dollars. 
• Destination managers will be inspired to capitalize on mass media moments to strengthen their relationships with their partners and stakeholders. 
• States and destinations will be inspired to work together on any project to stretch their budgets and win bigger than they could on their own.

The transition from the Google digital ecosystem to Gen AI is well underway, and marketers need to adapt to rapidly changing consumer behavior. Join Carroll Rheem as she shares insights from iolite group's State of AI study, which focuses on how consumers use gen AI for travel - what situations they use it for, what they like/dislike about it, and what all this means for destination marketers.

Takeaways: 

• Understand the reach of Gen AI influence in consumer travel.
• Fresh perspective on what travelers want (and don't want) from AI.
• Key priorities for navigating the rise of consumer AI usage.

Destination marketing funnels haven’t disappeared...they’ve gone invisible. AI, algorithmic feeds, and zero-click discovery are shaping travel decisions long before (or if ever) websites or campaigns are engaged. This session reframes how destinations understand discovery, influence, and demand in a system-driven world, offering practical frameworks to adapt strategy, measurement, and content for what travelers actually experience today.

Takeaways: 

• A concrete set of moves they can run inside their own organization.
• Audit their AI presence before spending another dollar (run the 15-20 questions a visitor would actually ask an AI tool and see whether you appear, and whether it's accurate).
• Add brand visibility as a tracked KPI alongside room nights and economic impact, with a rehearsed answer for when a board member asks what a "citation" is worth.
• Structure content for citation, not just clicks (schema, named entities, attributed data, GEO fundamentals their web vendor should already be discussing).
• Stop treating AI search as an SEO hand-off and start treating it as the leadership-level brand problem it is.
• Do the culture work first, because none of the tactical work lands if the team isn't ready to execute it.

Many policymakers view tourism marketing claims with skepticism, shaped by inconsistent metrics and inflated success stories. This trust gap makes it harder for destinations to secure funding and long-term support. This session explores why the gap exists and how destinations can close it through transparency, independent data, and economic grounding—equipping attendees to communicate results in policy-relevant language and rebuild credibility with decision-makers.

Takeaways: 

• A communication framework for elected officials
• Common credibility traps to avoid
• Language for policy-aligned reporting
• Tools to restore trust in tourism outcomes