Destination Marketing Podcast

Shauna Stewart, CEO of Experience Olympia & Beyond, the Olympia-Lacey-Tumwater Visitor & Convention Bureau in Washington, joins Adam Stoker for a leadership conversation unlike any on the show yet. Shauna led the bureau from 2015 to 2020, stepped away after a nine-month illness, built a career as an intimacy coach, and returned as interim CEO in December 2025. She explains why she traded work-life...

Recorded live in July, CMO Jam 2026 put six destination marketing leaders at one virtual table with Adam Stoker: Joshua Albrecht of Visit Milwaukee, Allison Brown of Discover Long Island, Karina Anthony of Visit Atlantic City, Megan Buchbinder of Wilmington and Beaches, Christian Mengel of the St. Joseph CVB, and Kelli Steele of Putnam County Tourism. Part 1 of 4 is about AI inside the DMO. Josh e...

Adam Stoker opens with the conveyor belt of audience and visitation: the generation that grew up loving your destination is aging off it, and their kids are bored. Adam Stoker opens with the conveyor belt of audience and visitation: the generation that grew up loving your destination is aging off the end, and marketing can't refill the front. Then Michelle Guevara, Director of Destination Experien...

Shannon Carter, Executive Director of the Wayne County Tourism Bureau in Ohio, joins Adam Stoker to walk through a funding fight she may not win. Her operating contract with the county expired in 1991 and was never renewed — thirty years of handshake agreements that three new commissioners are now unwinding, with the bed tax likely headed to the chamber, Main Street, or the fairgrounds and the bur...

Adam Stoker opens with the numbers that should worry every destination: US fertility hit a record low under 1.6 in 2025, net immigration fell from 2.2 million to 410,000, and the places people most want to visit are the ones your staff can least afford to live in. Sixty-five percent of hotels already report staffing shortages. His argument is that the visitor you market to today is the workforce y...

Travis Scott, CEO of Visit Big Bear, joins Adam Stoker for a conversation about running a rural destination when everything is on the line. Travis tells the story behind Jackie, Big Bear's world-famous bald eagle, and how Visit Big Bear turned a small nonprofit's unwatched nest cam into a global phenomenon while agreeing to take zero branding in return. He explains how he rebuilt trust at Visit Me...

Adam Stoker opens with a hard look at why the industry plays it safe, and how that instinct produced both the sea of sameness and the funding fight that came with it. Then Jason Gamel, President and CEO of ARDA, shows what it costs in practice. The timeshare industry generates $3.3 billion in annual rental revenue, all taxed like any other stay, and the average family of four spends just under $5,...

Collin Norman sat through 4 interviews, a Zoom panel with more than 20 people, a request for his start date and a tour of the budget — then got rejected by email, with no call and no feedback. Today he's the Executive Director of Visit Clearfield County, Pennsylvania, and he's building a hiring process that looks nothing like it. Collin joins Adam Stoker to break down why DMO hiring is broken, why...

In a solo episode, Adam Stoker unpacks a shift he can't stop thinking about since the latest CMO Jam: the agency-of-record model in destination marketing is about to change — whether agencies drive it or clients do. Adam walks through the forces quietly reshaping the relationship — media commissions shrinking, AI erasing the knowledge gap that once justified agency premiums, and DMO teams pulling...

Travel Nevada CMO Keelie Cox joins the show to break down "Get a Little Out There," the destination's five-episode series with free solo climber Alex Honnold — from the initial pitch and contracting logistics to the numbers behind it: 1.75 billion earned media impressions and over four million hours watched. Keelie shares why owning the content rights mattered, how the project got approved on a ti...

Tori Davis, President & CEO of Experience Ruston, Louisiana, joins Adam Stoker to talk about her path from marketing intern to DMO CEO, and the "three I's" framework she's using to guide the destination — Impact, Investment, and Identity. She and Adam also dig into how Ruston is preparing for Louisiana's first Buc-ee's, using it as a gateway rather than a distraction from the rest of what the dest...

Adam sits down with Lance Fite, VP of Sports at Visit Mesa, to unpack how sports tourism became Mesa's biggest tourism driver, booking 60,000–80,000 room nights a year. Lance shares his path from pro basketball to DMO leadership, the story behind Arizona Athletic Grounds (a 280-acre sports complex years in the making), and why youth sports keep the lights on between marquee events. Adam opens with...

Adam Stoker talks with Will Wright, managing partner of UK-based Destination Core, about the content-centric, owned-media-first website platform they've quietly built together. They dig into why traditional destination websites function as glorified directories, how their first joint client, Play Golf Myrtle Beach, put the concept to the test, and why the best DMOs now win by answering travelers'...

Visit Voss, a Norwegian village of 15,000, is showing up in ChatGPT and Google AI Overviews without a big ad budget. Host Adam Stoker breaks down why attention + trust = action, then Visit Voss's Crister Aalberg Naess explains how reviews, Reddit, and a signature extreme sports festival built the trust that AI search now rewards. Subscribe to our ⁠⁠⁠⁠newsletter⁠⁠⁠⁠! The ⁠⁠⁠⁠Destination Marketing P...

Katie Conner, Director of Destination Development at Virginia Tourism Corporation, joins Adam to talk about how a team of six supports 133 localities across the state. They dig into what communities actually need from a state tourism office, why proactive outreach matters, and how authentic local assets — from trail towns to sunflower festivals — become the foundation for sustainable destination g...

In this episode, Adam Stoker sits down with Allison Brown of Discover Long Island to explore how a destination with 126 unique communities shifted from outbound tourism marketing to community-first advocacy. Allison shares the strategy behind Lily, their mobile activation truck, their award-winning Long Island Tea Podcast, and how they're using owned media to connect with residents just as intenti...

Adam Geller manages tourism for Page, Arizona — a city where Horseshoe Bend and Lake Powell are globally iconic but most visitors don't even make it up the hill to town. In this episode, he shares how he turned that challenge into a strategy: building an interactive Grand Circle map that made Page the authoritative center of one of the world's most famous road trip circuits, launching gamified Ban...

In this special live episode of Destination Discourse, recorded on stage at the Destinations International Marketing and Communications Summit in Cleveland, Ohio, Adam Stoker and Stuart Butler tackle the questions the industry keeps dancing around: Why does a DMO actually exist, who is its primary customer, and if funding disappeared tomorrow, who would fight to bring it back? With live audience p...

Megan Buchbinder, Director of Marketing at Wilmington and Beaches CVB, joins Adam to challenge how DMOs measure value, why Google Ads may be doing more harm than good, and how she redesigned her agency RFP process from scratch — and actually made it fun. Subscribe to our ⁠⁠⁠⁠newsletter⁠⁠⁠⁠! The ⁠⁠⁠⁠Destination Marketing Podcast⁠⁠⁠⁠ is a part of the ⁠⁠⁠⁠Destination Marketing Podcast Network⁠⁠⁠⁠. It...

Jesse Salazar, Video Production Manager at Visit Lodi, joins Adam to talk about why storytelling instinct matters more than gear, the case for in-house video production, and Visit Lodi's new partner video co-op program. Adam opens with a challenge to DMOs: if locals drive 50%+ of visitation through visiting friends and relatives, why aren't we treating them like a priority audience? Subscribe to o...

Adam Stoker sits down with Molly Castano, VP of Public Relations and Communications at the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority, for a candid conversation about what it takes to keep 150,000 hotel rooms full and the world's most-watched tourism brand on top. Molly shares how her team navigated a brutal summer news cycle, the unexpected strategy that flipped traditional media training on its...

The rules of owned content just flipped — short-form clips aren't driving traffic to your show anymore, they ARE the show. In this episode, Adam Stoker is joined by Brand Revolt's video and content lead Matt Henson to unpack why every podcast is really a "show" now, and how to structure episodes around five distinct interests instead of one long conversation. Matt also pulls back the curtain on Vi...

In episode 435, host Adam Stoker explores the critical intersection of AI strategy and creative community activation with Aaron Jumper from Visit Cumberland Valley. The conversation begins with a deep dive into the 2026 AI landscape, specifically why providing deep "contextual intelligence" to tools like Claude is the defining factor in shifting from a marketing tactician to a true strategist. Aar...

Adam Stoker and Caleb Sullivan tackle how AI is disrupting destination marketing—especially the value of vendor partnerships. They explore why traditional models (like media commissions and rigid RFPs) are breaking down, and call for a shift toward strategy, trust, and real collaboration. Caleb also shares ideas for rethinking the RFP process to focus on problem-solving and partnership, not just p...

Heritage tourism is one of the most powerful, and most underutilized, tools in a destination marketer's toolkit. Adam Stoker sits down with Jake Wynn, Senior Marketing and Communications Manager at Visit Frederick, and Heidi Schlag, founder of Heritage Tourism Studio, to unpack how DMOs and museums can work together to turn local history into compelling visitor experiences. The conversation covers...