The Audience DMOs Can't Market To Is Driving 55% of Their Visits

Our CEO Dustin Rowe recently joined Stuart Butler and Adam Stoker on the Destination Discourse Podcast. We've been working with Stuart and the team at Visit Myrtle Beach for a while now — but sitting down for an unfiltered conversation brought out some industry hot takes none of us were expecting.

The Paradox at the Heart of DMO Strategy

Here's the one that stopped the room: legislation in many markets prohibits DMOs from marketing directly to residents. Yet 50–55% of destination traffic comes from people visiting friends and relatives — VFR travel, in industry shorthand.

Do the math. The single biggest driver of tourism to your destination is an audience you're legally blocked from reaching through paid campaigns.

"Residents have a higher ability to drive visitation than the DMO does at scale." — Adam Stoker

Adam's point cuts deep. No DMO campaign — no matter how well targeted or well funded — can replicate the trust a local has when they tell a friend or family member: you have to come visit, there's so much going on right now.

Stuart's Answer: Stop Fighting It. Build Infrastructure Instead.

Rather than looking for legislative workarounds or clever campaign framing, Visit Myrtle Beach took a different approach — they invested in infrastructure that serves both residents and visitors equally.

That's where What's Good comes in. Our AI event calendar isn't marketed to locals. It's built for anyone looking for things to do — whether that's a tourist planning a trip or a resident figuring out what to do with family in town for the weekend.

When a resident opens the calendar to find something fun for their visiting cousin, that's not a campaign. There's no targeting, no pixel, no ad spend. That's infrastructure doing its job. And the downstream effect — a cousin who goes home raving about how much was going on — is word-of-mouth at its most authentic.

The result: residents become destination advocates without a single targeted ad.

Other Topics We Got Into

The residents paradox was just the beginning. The conversation also went deep on:

• Hunting vs. farming — why most DMO strategy is built around acquisition when retention and activation of existing audiences might be the bigger opportunity
• The existential crisis of the DMO — what does a destination marketing organization actually exist to do in 2026, and is the old model still fit for purpose?
• AI and event discovery — how automation is changing what's possible for under-resourced tourism teams

If any of these are topics your team is wrestling with heading into the rest of 2026, this episode is worth your hour. Hit play above — and follow Destination Discourse wherever you get your podcasts.