I have led destination marketing at national level across the Pacific and Oceania, working in North America, Europe, Oceania, the Pacific and China. I spent the past several months looking closely at how AI is reshaping travel discovery, expecting a technical story. What I found was a leadership one: the technical readiness most organisations are racing toward is becoming table stakes. What will actually separate them is whether they have a North Star clear enough, and a culture and product strong enough, that there is nothing left to dress up.
Fifteen years of senior leadership across national tourism organisations, retail travel and commercial platform development in the Pacific, Oceania and Asia.
The most consequential challenges in destination marketing are not campaign problems. They are structural and cultural ones. This is the thread running through my current work.
I spent months looking closely at AI discoverability in tourism, expecting the answer to be technical. It wasn't. AI systems are converging on ground truth faster than most people expect, which means the schema and structured data layer is becoming commoditised. What does not get fixed by better tooling is whether an organisation has a North Star clear enough that everyone in it, and everything that observes it, tells the same story. Could everyone in your organisation say what your North Star is? Would the answer be the same from the board to the frontline?
Most destinations do not have a brand problem. They have a coordination problem. A compelling destination narrative at the national or regional level delivers nothing if it is not coherently reflected by the operators, councils and agencies that a traveller actually encounters. The brand only works when the whole system is telling the same story.
Destination marketing organisations almost universally treat residents as a cost or a constraint rather than an asset. The evidence points the other way. Destinations whose residents are proud advocates produce better visitor experiences, generate more authentic word of mouth and are materially more resilient to the reputation risks that every destination faces eventually.
I write when there is something genuinely worth talking about and adding value to our industry. The pieces below represent examples of recent thinking.
All articles published on LinkedIn. More at linkedin.com/in/kenfreer
If you would like to discuss destination strategy, tourism business marketing, AI discoverability, or anything else in this space, I would welcome the conversation.
I am based in Auckland, New Zealand, and work across the Pacific and Oceania.