The best place to sit is in the back of the church. Closest to the center aisle. Someone told me that before my first Luminiscence show at the Basilica de Notre-Dame in Nice, and they were right. From back there, when the lights drop, the color comes down the whole length of the nave toward you, the kaleidoscope spreading across the vaults. I’ve queued up early every time to get my seat.

I love churches wherever I go. I like the history, the architecture, the hush of them. So the last time I sat there, watching it come apart in color, I thought: a building that usually only draws a crowd on Sunday mornings, full on a Thursday night. I meant it as a good thing. I’m still not sure it only is.

The Basilica de Notre Dame is the setting for a light show that runs three nights a week. On Fridays, you can hear it with a live choir; on other nights, it plays with digital music. I always choose the choir. To me, the difference is hardly worth arguing over, but the basilica feels more alive that way. I’ve seen three shows there, and each time the building became a stage.

Old churches are mysterious places full of tradition and ritual. The gold leaf, the candles, the heavy silence. Some old reflex still wants me to genuflect. This was nothing like that.

Since 2023, it’s spread from cathedral to cathedral, Nice, Bordeaux, Paris, London, Philadelphia, São Paulo. Each show is made for that church. The narration, music, and projections fit its history and architecture. In Bordeaux, dozens of hidden projectors are calibrated to the stone itself. You can’t see the Nice show anywhere else; different building, different story. The old masons shaped these vaults over centuries. Now programmers are measuring them to the millimeter so the light can follow the same surfaces. Maybe that’s not desecration. Maybe it’s just a modern spin on ancient architecture.

The experience is more than the arches and saints. It’s the building’s history, the music, and the light across the ceiling. You see angels and clouds like the Sistine Chapel, then the Milky Way, then an arboretum where raindrops hit the glass.

Compare it to the Rembrandt and Van Gogh immersive shows. Warehouse or simple box style rooms. No soul to sell. Impressive in their own right, the experience is different. It is sight and sound but without the depth of marred history, mystery, architecture, and reverence. The space itself was not sacrificed for the show.

Hall des Lumières in Manhattan is more of a middle ground between warehouse immersive art and the cathedrals. A former Beaux-Arts bank (the old Emigrant Savings Bank) built around 1909 is a temple of money reborn as a temple of art. The light show is still impressive, and with the building’s unique H design allows you to move about the room, different vantage points, alcoves, and cavernous ceilings.

The place that is not only a projection screen but the subject is the Basilica de Notre Dame, and the other churches. Still consecrated, still holds Mass, and the show often tells the basilica’s own story across its own vaults. The building is a living shrine of sorts. Alive because of its parishioners. What’s left of them, anyway.

Empty pews, the cost of keeping these buildings standing, tourism is survival. Cologne Cathedral now charges admission, money earmarked for the roof. The light show isn’t sacrilege, so much as a lifeline. In France, only about 2% of Catholics attend Mass every Sunday, and just 7–8% practice regularly. Otherwise its crickets, with the occasional visitor lighting a candle, or kneeling in worship. The collection plate can only do so much.

Where Istanbul Draws the Line

I took off my shoes, the borrowed scarf slipping, and stood at the back of the Blue Mosque while prayer kept moving up front. You feel right away it is still a working mosque. People coming and going, a rhythm you don’t want to be the one to break. So the light show, when they run it, stays outside. They throw it on the walls after dark and everyone watches from the square.

Across the plaza, Hagia Sophia has been everything. Cathedral, mosque, museum, mosque again. The layers are all still in there. But it prays again now, and you don’t run a spectacle through a room full of people on their knees.

Here they keep the show on the outside walls. The buildings that let it inside are the ones where almost no one kneels anymore. Like Nice.

What the lightshow does not buy, and what the Church keeps hoping it will, is faith. The pitch, especially in the American cathedrals, is that the awe is a doorway, get them in for the spectacle and maybe some of them stay for the God. Come for the lights, stay for the rest. Maybe. I’ve never seen anyone count the person who bought a ticket and came back for Mass. I didn’t.

In Paris, people have been ready to call in an exorcist over contemporary art in churches. Repeated traditionalist protest. Most recently as this month at an art installation in a Paris church during the Nuit Blanche festival. Despite the pushback, the show still went on.

They’re protesting a silent disco with drinks, an Eminem playlist, a provocative art installation. None of it has anything to do with the church it’s playing in. That’s what brings the petitions out. The light show is a different animal. It’s pulled from the church’s own history, built for that one room and useless anywhere else, which is maybe why nobody was protesting outside in Nice, at least not on the nights I was there. A disco just wants the walls. Luminescence wants the building.

What does the light show actually buy? All of this.

The answer starts with money, which the diocese is not talking about. These buildings are money pits. The roof, the stone, the heating bill in a room the size of a soccer pitch. The collection plate stopped covering that a long time ago. A show that sells out three nights a week gets closer than Sunday’s offerings do anymore. Some of the ticket money goes to a production company. This is a business, not a charity. A portion goes to the building’s own repairs, and the bigger money lands in the town. The people who come for the show fill the hotels and the restaurants and the trains. Looking at the numbers, they are boring in an accountant sort of way and staggering. England’s cathedrals put a couple hundred million into local economies in a year. That is what tourism is supposed to do. Benefit the people who live there.

Luminiscence and other similar shows have sold over 4 million tickets. You can have whatever feelings you want about that. The feelings don’t fix the roof.

I’ve stepped into churches throughout my travels. None were lit like this. This time I was inside, in the dark, looking nowhere else. Not taking in the statues, the crucifixes, not stopping to light a candle. The narration was in French. I don’t speak French, but I followed the story anyway, through color, light and sound. I kept going back, and I brought someone new each time. There was always something I had missed before. The building felt larger the longer I sat there.

Which leaves me about where I started. Back of the church, on the inside aisle, on a stranger’s tip, waiting for it to go dark. A building that sat empty six days out of seven, now full and paying for its own roof. I know some people would call that a step too far. Me, I think it’s a blessing.

What are your thoughts as to churches becoming an attraction beyond religion?

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For saints, sinners, and the just plain curious.

Answered prayers, the logistical kind.

Q: What is Luminiscence?
A: An immersive light-and-sound show projected inside historic cathedrals. It combines 360-degree video mapping with music, sometimes a live choir, to tell the story of the building. It’s produced by the French company LOTCHI, now part of Banijay Live.

Q: Where can I see Luminiscence shows?
A: The show tours cathedrals across Europe and beyond. Past and current cities include Nice, Bordeaux, Paris, Strasbourg, Reims, London, Brussels, Philadelphia, Minneapolis, and São Paulo. Locations rotate, so check the official site for what’s running now.

Q: Where can I buy tickets?
A: Through the official site, luminiscence.com, and ticketing platforms like Fever, Tiqets, and GetYourGuide.

Q: How much do tickets cost?
A: In Nice, prices start around 12 euros. Pricing varies by city and seating.

Q: How long is the show?
A: About 45 to 50 minutes.

Q: When does it run?
A: In Nice, three nights a week, typically Thursday through Saturday, with two showings a night. Schedules differ by city.

Q: Is it suitable for children?
A: Yes. In Nice there’s no minimum age, and small children are welcome on a lap.

Q: What’s the best seat?
A: Toward the back, on the center aisle. That’s where the projections converge and the color runs the full length of the nave toward you.

Q: Are there other cathedral light shows besides Luminiscence?
A: Yes, and it’s spreading fast. AURA runs in Montréal and at Grace Cathedral in San Francisco. Luxmuralis tours cathedrals across the UK. Hall des Lumières in New York does the same idea inside a former bank. Luminiscence is the biggest name, not the only one.

Q: What is AURA?
A: An immersive light-and-sound experience created by Montréal studio Moment Factory. The original runs inside Notre-Dame Basilica in Montréal, and a version plays at Grace Cathedral in San Francisco. It turns the architecture itself into the canvas, with orchestral music and projection mapping.

Q: What is Luxmuralis?
A: A British art collective, the artist Peter Walker and composer David Harper, that stages immersive light-and-sound shows inside cathedrals. It tours UK cathedrals and has appeared at Washington National Cathedral in the US, with themed installations like Space, Life, and Time.

Q: Is it disrespectful to hold a light show in a church?
A: Depends who you ask. The shows run outside of Mass, tell the building’s own story, and rarely draw protest. The objections tend to land on silent discos and Eminem playlists, not on a show pulled from the church’s own history. After three visits, my take: a full church beats an empty one. Yours may differ.

And if light and sound shows at a cathedral have you grabbing your rosary tighter, here is a video of a now famous Catholic priest DJ’s techno music. If you watch this, you may want to go to confession.

On the second floor of the Tourismuseum in Unterseen there is a display tracking the six-day hiking route Johann Wolfgang von Goethe took through the Bernese Oberland in 1779. They had his dates, his route, and even journal entries. I stood there a while, reading it all.

Switzerland was not on my list. My sister wanted to go. Once there, I was fascinated to learn about how long Interlaken has hosted guests and tourism. I have lived in or near tourism towns most of my life, and some in the mountain regions, but it never occurred to me that Interlaken was one of the first destinations to embrace Alpine tourism. Alpine tourism didn’t start with ski lifts or snowboards. For a long time, people saw the Alps as something to cross, not somewhere to vacation.

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Places like Interlaken, Grindelwald, and Lauterbrunnen were attracting Romantic-era travelers and artists. They came for the scenery. Really, it’s the cliffs, the waterfalls, and that almost unreal feeling you only get in the Alps.

Interlaken quickly became a place for wealthy visitors. People who’d come to “take the cure.” They’d stay for weeks, breathing the mountain air. Doctors back then prescribed goat’s whey for nerves, digestion, lung trouble, and just about every complaint blamed on city life. I learned that every morning before sunrise, local goat herders would hike down from the high pastures with wooden tubs of fresh, warm whey on their backs, so guests could have it at breakfast.

Local aristocrats staged the first festival at castle ruins outside town. Farmers performed stone-tossing, wrestling, and yodeling for European tourists. The start of Swiss cultural tourism. Traditions like yodeling are still part of the region’s folklore today.

Interlaken kept noticing what wealthy travelers would pay for, then shaping the next version of the experience to sell them.

The Tourismuseum is the only museum in Switzerland dedicated to the history of tourism. It’s in a clergy house built in 1640. Four floors full of history on the souvenir trade, transport, mountaineering, and hospitality. The displays go back to the 1770s. They show how locals decided what to protect (the landscape, the view, traditional practices) and what to sell to tourists (experiences, transport, hospitality, souvenirs).

The Höhematte Meadow is the best example. In the 1860s the Belle Époque, a period of prosperity and cultural growth was hitting Interlaken. Grand hotels going up.

The Grand Beau-Rivage opened in 1874. Steamships across Lake Thun and Lake Brienz. Speculators eyeing the unobstructed view of the Jungfrau, the most valuable open ground in the valley, for a hotel and casino zone.

Thirty-seven local landowners, farmers and local hoteliers watched developers circling the meadow. As a co-op they purchased the land. Nothing shall ever be built on the Höhematte, and the view of the mountains shall be preserved forever.

They understood the view was worth more empty than full of buildings.

The view is what people come for.

You can stand on the Höhematte now and look at the same mountain the British aristocrats saw in 1850. The view is not luck. It is a 160-year-old civic agreement. The farmers then could not have pictured what the meadow gets used for now. Paragliders. Lots of them. They launch off the cliffs above town in colored canopies and float down to the same field the speculators wanted to pave. The pact stands. The view stays. The field still belongs to everyone.

It’s deliberate.

Even the cows in the valleys are intentional. The country pays the farmers to keep them there. You hear the bells from across a field, ringing as the cows shift their feet. The bells are how the farmer knows where the cows are. The country decided a long time ago that what tourists were paying to see had to be real.

Protecting the view was one decision. Made it once, and it's held for 160 years. Keeping a town livable is the opposite kind of problem. There is no pact you sign and walk away from. It is a fight that resets every year, up against the same money that never really goes away.

I am not going to pretend Interlaken has solved the problems of tourism. It hasn’t. In the Lauterbrunnen valley buses run between the villages all day, every day, full of visitors on their way somewhere. The village priest, Markus Tschanz, told Swiss public broadcaster SRF that the people of Lauterbrunnen feel like employees in an amusement park. Even the carpenter, he said, has become a tourist employee. They cannot escape it, because they live there. I worked in an amusement park for years. He’s right.

I walked along the Lauterbrunnen valley trail JRR Tolkien walked at 19 years old. The trails in the valley felt close to sacred, mystical. Or maybe that was just me. Every so often a small sign asked visitors to keep their voices low, mind their dog, and to tread carefully. People did. I also found the modern day farm stands along the path.

Self-service cabinets sit at the end of farmer’s driveways in the Lauterbrunnen valley. Wooden, on legs, with glass-front refrigerators inside. Inside the fridge are wedges of cheese with handwritten paper labels, fresh veg, dried meats and jars of pickled things. A small painted cow on the side as the only signage.

There is a coin slot, and I actually saw one with a credit card swipe. No farmer in sight.

You open the door. You take what you want. You pay. You keep walking.

I bought cheese and meat sticks from no one, twice that week.

My friend Kashi lives in Interlaken. We worked together in Mexico thirty years ago. She runs vacation rentals here. We talked about the challenges of rentals and Airbnb, plus the community and similar stories I’ve heard from owners and managers wherever I’ve gone.

We talked about the town. Kashi told me that even kindergarteners are taught to walk to school on their own. The kids take the train alone. Her two boys have been riding up to the ski mountains by themselves since they were eight, putting their gear on at the platform, spending the day skiing, then coming home.

In a place that has been hosting strangers for 250 years, they have still built for their own kids, not just for the people with cameras. You see it in small things. An unwatched cheese fridge. The fact that Kashi didn’t even know there were Interlaken police.

This isn’t tourism done well. It’s what’s at stake.

During the years Kashi has been building her rental business, Interlaken has seen second homes rise by nearly 30%. The town also enacted a two-year building freeze while a group figures out how to slow the conversion of homes into rentals. The Lauterbrunnen council has proposed a 5 to 10 franc entry fee on day-trippers, exempting anyone who books local lodging or arrives by train. April is one of the months the tourism boards have been steering visitors toward, to take some of the July-August pressure off.

We came at the right time by accident.

Interlaken has had 250 years to figure this out. It still hasn't. Most places don't get that long.

“I prefer to go in at the seaside road,” Stefanos said, “to see the place where I give the ring.”

It was a small chapel above the sea in the settlement of Aeolos. “Panagia Katafygiotissa” on Katafygi Bay. The walls were painted by a man named Dimitris Mytaras, whose name I had not heard. But then again why would I. I knew nothing about Greece. Stefanos asked what we cared about and then he built our day together from that.

The only place my sister and I wanted to see, the must see, was the Temple of Poseidon. That was the whole list.

The white-washed chapel was not on any list. It was his. It was the place he proposed to his wife. He could only get in because friends lived in the village.

Mexico’s Riviera Maya, from 1992, with a boyfriend and two trucks of dive gear and $7000 USD. I know what it costs to give a stranger your day, your knowledge, your country. I know what gets traded when the price is money. And I know what the years do to the people who keep giving it away honestly.

A friend gave me his name before I flew over. She is American and Greek, and she hires Stefanos every time she lands in Athens.

He kept talking.

He had been talking all morning. The way someone talks who has things he wants you to know about the place he lives in, and about himself, because he can’t separate the two.

His daughter was nine. His wife was from Crete and owned a beauty salon in the neighborhood we drove through. He worked from before sunrise to past midnight, some days to two in the morning when the overnight flights came in.

Those are long-ass days.

But that’s high season anywhere. You work when there’s work.

He was not from Athens. Paros was home, his parents still there. He flies back often. The car comes by ferry. The long boat ride he can’t stand. One small island is his favorite though, and not a famous one. Schinoussa. Down past Naxos. Tiny, 229 people. The water he could not describe was that beautiful.

Taste tsipouro, not ouzo, he said. Ouzo gives you nothing but a headache. (Yes, I knew that from personal experience.) The best wine in Greece was Malagouzia. Then he spoke of a motorbike accident in 2010, the one that made him pray and keep praying. He went to church every Sunday now.

All day he showed us places and how to see them without the admission price or the queue. The back way to ruins and the photograph no one else had found.

Then he pulled the car over. “Get out,” he said, “I will stay with the car. Go watch, it’s very traditional.” It was a changing of the guard at the president's residence, on a side street, no crowd, just a handful of people.

We stood a few feet from the ceremony. A tour bus would never travel this side street. A regular taxi would have driven straight past, but not him.

At the Temple of Poseidon he told how the sea got its name. Aegeus's son Theseus went to Crete to kill the monster Minotaur. He promised his father he would come back under white sails if he lived. Theseus killed Minotaur, got drunk on the way home and forgot to change the sails. Aegeus saw black sails. He threw himself off the cliffs. That is the Aegean Sea.

Then, without changing tone, he said the average salary in Greece was 880 euros ($1020 USD) a month. Before the crisis, in 2004, 2005, if you didn't have coffee in your house you went next door and the neighbor gave you coffee. Now if you knock, the neighbor won’t open the door. He said it the same way he said his daughter was nine. The same way he said Malagouzia.

I knew this. I had told a version of it myself, in Mexico, by the end. The pressure of tourism shows up first in the smallest gestures, the ones that used to be free. But it shows up second in something harder to put your finger on: the willingness to give a stranger the inside of your life. He was still handing it over. He was driving us along the seaside instead of the highway so he could show us where he gave his wife the ring. He was nine years into the job and he had not yet learned to stop.

I can say this because I did the same thing. I whored out my whole life for the business, for the customers. It helped. The business worked. Was the price worth it, I still wonder. So I knew what I was watching when I watched him. I had been him.

But then he gave me what I used to give my guests. The day. The stories. The thing you cannot buy because it was never for sale. I had spent a career handing it to strangers. Now a stranger handed it back to me. The friends I made were never an accident. They were the selfish reason I kept going.

I should be honest. I am glad I went to Athens. I do not need to go back. Maybe I am too much of an outdoors or small town girl. It was congested and the noise did not stop.

The graffiti was everywhere. He drove through all of it. He still handed us his story. His daughter, his island, his wife’s ring, his Sunday church, his favorite wine. The city was wearing him down. He had not let it take the work.

He told me about the cruise ships. Three, four a day into Piraeus now. Two thousand people at a time. They walk off the boat for a few hours and walk back on. They do not sleep on the island. They do not eat a meal there. “They buy only one salad, and one ice cream, and one souvenir,” he said. “Only that.”

You cannot see a place that way, he said. You want minimum two days. One island, one place, something. I had one day. He told me you need two. The next morning I flew to Santorini like everyone else. He gave me a full day. I was already leaving.

But that was Santorini, the next day. Back in Athens, the driver still had hours to go.

His daughter was sick. The nine-year-old. She was home waiting for him to take her to the doctor while he drove us through Athens. He mentioned it once and kept driving. My sister and I both insisted he drop us off early and go take care of her.

He bought us souvenirs. He paid for them out of his own pocket, small things, before he left us at the Acropolis. A sick child waiting at home, the 880-euro month most Greeks live on, and he bought us souvenirs.

Then he came back. After we had walked the hill and seen the marble, he came back for us at the end of the day. The last thing he did was make us promise. “Do not take a taxi off the street, they cannot be trusted”.

This is how Stefanos lives. One person trusts him and hands him the next. My friend, then me, then whoever I tell. The cruise ship needs none of it. It does not need his name, it does not need to trust him, and it never comes back. Two thousand people, a salad, an ice cream, gone by dark.

I spent 27 years building the same thing he has, one guest at a time. Trust you cannot put on a brochure. It does not scale. It was never meant to.

That is what is worth flying for. Not the view. The man who takes the long way to show you where he gave his wife the ring.

If something I wrote made you think, laugh, or feel like someone finally said the thing — buy me a glass of Malagouzia wine. It keeps me something to sip after a long day of writing.

Buy Me A Glass of Wine

The promoted version is the coastline, the festival, the Michelin chef, the views. It’s the two sentences in the tourism brochure, the photo taken in October that brings visitors in March, the “emerging food scene” with three restaurants and two of them seasonal.

The other version is the woman who tells you to ignore the menu. The family that’s fed people at that crossroads for three centuries while the military took two-thirds of their village. The son who chose to come back. The lemon orchard that almost disappeared and came back because two people decided it was worth planting. The bakery that closed not because of too many tourists, but because not enough people live there anymore.

I’ve spent 35 years inside this industry. Business owner first, in Mexico’s Riviera Maya when there was one gas station in Playa. Then internet entrepreneur, professor, consultant. I’ve watched the official version get made. I know why it ends up as two sentences about Templar chapels and the rhythm of the seasons.

Destination Sunday is where I write about what gets left out. Some weeks it’s a field piece, a place I went, something I found, what it reveals about how destinations survive or don’t. Some weeks it’s a closer look at how the industry works: why landing on a travel list can break a small town before it helps it, why the repeat guest is invisible in most destination reports, why more marketing rarely fixes what’s broken.

You don’t need to work in hospitality or tourism to follow this.

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Most of the time the gap has a person standing in it.

The woman at the hotel in Comps-sur-Artuby told me to ignore the menu and look in the case instead. She waved off my spilled drink. She brought lavender ice cream I hadn’t ordered and didn’t charge me for the drink I’d knocked over.

The family has been doing that since 1737.

The tourism association gave the village two sentences.

If something I wrote made you think, laugh, or feel like someone finally said the thing — buy me a margarita. It keeps me on the road, at the bar, and writing.

Buy Me A Margarita

This week the patriarch of the hotel, Arnaud Bain, sent me an email. Three paragraphs of thanks. A paragraph about his son, who he is proud of, and an invitation to come back.

That folks, is hospitality.

It’s the same gesture of kindness and care. Once at the table, once at the keyboard.

The Bain family has been doing it that way for 297 years.

His son’s name is Clément.

He’s 24. He has worked in kitchens since hotel school.

I am not talking flipping burgers!

Clément has worked at the Provençal truffle institution, Chez Bruno in Lorgues. The Hostellerie des Gorges de Pennafort in Callas, a country hotel-restaurant with a Michelin star. And a medieval castle turned hotel, The Château de Trigance, twenty minutes from his home.

For those of you not fluent in Michelin stars, this is not a minor league resume.

Then Paris.

Le 114 Faubourg at Le Bristol, one of the city’s palace hotels. The kind of place chefs spend careers trying to reach!

This year, Nice. At Les Agitateurs, a Michelin-starred restaurant by the port.

And next, home.

Back to Comps-sur-Artuby population 346.

In Arnaud’s words:

Mon fils sera également très content de vous lire et est également très motivé pour reprendre la suite de notre maison familiale. Il sera la dixième génération !

Roughly translated: my son will be glad to read this, and is motivated to carry on our family house. He’ll be the tenth generation.

A 24-year-old with that resume could go anywhere!

He’s choosing a village of 346 people, a hotel his family has run since 1727, a kitchen that suggests lavender ice cream to people who spill their drinks, and the tenth generation of a story that has outlasted Louis XV, the French Revolution, two world wars, and an artillery camp.

The regional tourism page still mentions chapels and seasons. It still doesn’t mention him.

If you missed the original article…

Menton, France is known for lemons. Lemon soap, lemon tea towels, lemon-print dresses, lemon sorbet, limoncello, and lemon tarts in every café window.

A few weeks ago, I was wandering le vieux (old) village and popped into a boutique on Rue Saint-Michel. The shopkeeper handed me a slice of Menton lemon. Rind, pith, pulp. Eat the whole thing, she said. So I did. No bitterness. The peel and pith were almost sweet.

That’s the part most people throw away.

Most visitors to Menton never taste it.

I wanted to know how a lemon could taste like that. So I went looking for the origins of the Menton lemon and contacted Maison Gannac to make a reservation to visit their mountainside orchard.

The lemons at Maison Gannac are the size of grapefruits. A few are even bigger.

I walked steep dirt paths above Menton. The path was loose under my feet. I kept stopping, stunned that branches could hold fruit that big. Huge lemons with thick peel, slightly knobbed, a deep saturated yellow that made the Meyer lemons we get in the United States look small and inadequate. On the ground was a box of freshly hand-picked Menton lemons. The leaf and a bit of branch were still attached, by law. I folded a leaf between my fingers and smelled it. It smelled like the fruit.

The peel is where the flavor lives, Laurent Gannac will tell you. Having a peel you can eat is the entire reason this lemon exists.

Every February, Menton holds a festival celebrating the lemon. A quarter of a million people come from all over. The parade floats are made of real citrus — 140 tons of it. Most of those lemons are imported from Spain. Menton lemons are too rare and too expensive to build sculptures out of.

The fruit that comes off the floats afterward gets sorted and sold. Nothing wasted. The festival, the tourism office, and the farmers all work together.

Most of the festival goers never see a working orchard.

If you do, here’s what you find.

A working farm. Not a manicured tourist attraction. The paths along the restanques, or terraces. The dry stone retaining walls that turn a cliff into farmable terraces are steep and slick with loose dirt and stones. The men who pick the fruit carry 15-kilo boxes up the slope on their shoulders. The orchard sells trees to people who want to plant their own. There are bananas growing in a small grove. The micro subtropical climate exists because of the surrounding mountains, the winds come in from the sea, and sunshine.

The view is the Mediterranean to the south and Italy to the east.

A kilo of these lemons sells for €10.9, approximately $13 USD.

There are 56 producers left in Menton.

Trained in horticulture and landscape design, Laurent Gannac chose Menton for the subtropical climate. Citrus was at the center.

He had no idea what a Menton lemon was. He had never heard of it. He was building gardens for clients, and every time he brought a lemon tree to a property, the customer would ask the same question. Is that a Menton lemon?

The repeated question forced him to find out. That is how he discovered five hundred years of history.

Around that time, he met Vanessa Zeenni. In 1991, their son Adrien was born. Laurent planted his first lemon tree the same year. Laurent bought the hillside knowing he might lose every franc. Then more parcels. He laid them out as restanques. Every retaining wall on the property is one the family built.

There were no inherited terraces. There was no inherited orchard. Just a fallow hillside and two people who decided it was worth turning back into a farm.

A lemon tree takes three to four years to bear fruit. Vanessa watered trees six hours a day. To carry the family through the wait, she trained as a hotelier and worked as a concierge in Monaco.

Adrien grew up among the trees. He says it himself in a video from a few years back.

Other people are born in cabbages. I was born among the citronniers.

He went to business school in Nice, then got an agricultural diploma at the horticulture school in Antibes. Joining his father in 2015, he brought what his father didn’t have… The idea of building a brand that ran from the tree to the shelf.

The team grew from two has grown to 30. They make almost a hundred products now. Limoncello, jams, candied lemon in salt, lemon powder, a creamy spread called L’Onctueux that he developed with the chef Philippe Colinet. They work with brewers on citrus beers. With an olive oil couple, Anne and Erwan, who make a Nice olive paste they pair with Menton lemon. Mauro Colagreco at Mirazur, the three-Michelin-star restaurant on the Italian border, cooks with Gannac lemons.

So does ChefAlain Ducasse.

The orchard visits, the boutique, all of it is farm tourism. The visit isn’t an amenity. It’s part of how the farm survives.

When Adrien needed to plant 200 more trees and convert a building into a workshop, he raised €130,000 from people who wanted to support him. A regional youth-entrepreneur program, Initiative Menton, backed him on top of that. They said it themselves in their video:

We are aware of the difficulty of starting a business in agriculture.

On my visit, Céline was the guide.

A worker walked past us with a 15-kilo box of just-picked fruit balanced on his shoulder, headed up a path. A lemon Adrien grew last year took nine months to ripen and weighed over a kilo. It’s family lore now. I also saw a tree that produces lemons and oranges from the same trunk, grafted together. Two fruits, one root. After touring the orchard, I was treated to a tasting session. Jams, preserves, and liquors, from sweet to tart.

Menton is a town built by people from all over. The Grimaldis from Monaco. The Sardinians. The English in their winter villas. The Italians whose street names still run through the old town. Laurent from Occitanie. Vanessa from Beirut. Almost nothing in Menton was originally Menton.

Nothing continues by accident. Adrien chose to come back. His cousin works in the family’s logistics now too. Younger people are coming into horticulture and want to start their own orchards, Céline told me. The interest is there.

The land prices are the problem.

Menton got very good at turning the lemon into a destination. The festival, the producer network, the chefs, the guided tours. All of it works.

The same tourism economy that gave the Menton lemon an audience has driven the price of farmable terraces high enough that a young person without family money cannot start what Laurent started. The hillside he bought in 1988, with the risk of not getting it back, cannot be bought that way today.

The lemon survives. The next Laurent might not.

Menton hasn’t solved how to make room for the next one. Most destinations haven't started asking who gets to come next, or whether they can afford to stay.

The Menton lemon almost disappeared once. It came back because two people arrived in 1988 and decided to plant it. If they were 25 today and walked into the same town with the same idea, they could not afford the hillside.

Walking down from the orchard, I kept thinking about the kilo lemon. Nine months on a branch above the sea. Cut by hand. The whole thing held together by people who decided it was worth doing.

Menton built a brand around a lemon that almost disappeared. The lemon came back because two people arrived in 1988 and planted it. If they were 25 today and walked into the same town with the same idea, they could not afford the hillside.

Most destinations don’t get a second comeback.

More from Destination Sunday

Hungry, by the time I reached the village of Comps-sur-Artuby, I was ready for lunch. Comps sits at 900 meters. One of 23 villages spread across this relatively remote stretch of inland Provence. The eastern gateway to the gorges.

It is the kind of place you pass through on the way to somewhere else.
Most people do.

I walked into the Grand Hôtel Bain. A cute place with a terrace with tables. The chef was sitting outside at the table. Lunch service had ended, he said. But I could get a drink, a coffee or a dessert.

The bar area is classic with ceramic beer taps, shelves lined up with bottles, an espresso machine. Not a soul around though.

A woman’s voice came from somewhere in the back, “just a minute”. Standing in the doorway, I was getting a little antsy waiting. Looking up and down the main drag for other options.

Then she appeared, wiping her hands, and told me not to bother with the dessert menu. Go into the dining room, she said. Look in the case.

I did. Passing on dessert, I opted for an Aperol spritz.

Outside at a table on the terrace, the chef sat with a beer and a cigarette. Soaking up the sun with no particular interest in what time it was. A handful of people chatting at a nearby table looked like they were locals. An artisan shop across the street was open, as well as a local TABAC store (a local convenience store). A couple cars passed on the road to the gorge.

She brought my drink. Within seconds I toppled the glass. She waved it off. Then she leaned over cleaning up my mess and suggested the lavender ice cream. Homemade. “Lavender ice cream, ugh” I thought to myself. Yet, I said, sure with a smile, mainly out of guilt for spilling my drink. She returned with the ice cream and a fresh drink. The ice cream was amazing!

And no charge for the spilled drink.

I later discovered: the Bain family has been feeding passers-by at this crossroads since 1727. The hotel as it stands was founded in 1737 by Claude Bain and his wife Marguerite, under the reign of Louis XV. Arnaud Bain is the ninth generation. His son Clément just finished hotel school and is coming back to take over.

Also, the French military swallowed two thirds of this settlement in the 1960s. Building the largest artillery camp in Western Europe. The ancient hamlets are gone. What remains of Comps-sur-Artuby, the 346 people, the hotel, an artisan shop, a TABAC, a restaurant or two on side streets is what survived.

The Guinness Book of World Records recognizes the Grand Hôtel Bain as the oldest hotel in the world operated continuously by the same family.

The regional tourism association covers all 23 villages in this territory. They promote a variety of routes, sights, and places to visit. Their info for Comps reads:

“The Templar past of Comps lines the rocky ridges with chapel silhouettes. In the village, life unfolds peacefully with the rhythm of the seasons.”

Two sentences. That’s it!

No mention of the Bain family.

No mention of the world record.

No mention of the woman who tells you to ignore the menu, just have a look for yourself.

They described the landscape and the seasons.

They missed the person, the family story, part of what gives the village life and personality, beyond the view.

This is what so many destinations overlook. Not the gorge. Not the bungee jump off the Pont de l’Artuby. The woman who tells you to ignore the menu, just go have a look. The chef who has nowhere else to be on a Friday afternoon. The ice cream that was worth stopping for. The son who just finished hotel school and chose to come back to a village of 346 people.

Comps-sur-Artuby is not a destination. It is a place. There is a difference.

The corner where a lovely bakery used to be is empty now.

I’ve been to Villefranche-sur-Mer three times in the past year. I’m here now. The boulangerie is gone. So is a bank. So is the post office. The town sits on the French Riviera, outside of Nice tucked into limestone cliffs.

A long-time resident called it morte.

Dead.

More homes sit empty most of the year than are lived in full time. The people who keep a town alive, the ones who need a bakery on Tuesday morning, who cash a check at the bank, who mail something at the post office, don’t live here anymore. The people who own here now show up for July and August.

A bakery can’t survive on July and August.

This past week, Villefranche elected a new mayor. Robert Capelier won in a tight second-round vote on March 22. There was a party on Friday night down by the harbour. Anyone was welcome. People showed up hoping he could bring the town back. Housing is his mission.

My rented apartment was a block from the party.

Villefranche isn’t drowning in visitors. Well, at the moment. It’s not on the cover of a travel magazine killing it with foot traffic. It’s not Dubrovnik in July or Amsterdam on any given Tuesday. The boulangerie didn’t close because 400 people showed up and bought out the croissants. It closed because not enough people live there to need it every morning.

That’s a different problem. And it requires a different conversation.

I wrote about destinations becoming more valuable as images than as places, last Sunday. The photo economy. The destination that exists to be photographed rather than lived in. This week is the same root, different wound. When real estate replaces residents, you don’t just lose housing. You lose the daily life that made the housing worth buying.

The people who bought those properties fell in love with the pastries or, the park with an open-air market, the blue of the sea, the way the woman at the post office knew everyone’s name. Then they bought a piece of it. And replaced someone who needed it year-round with a key lockbox and two weeks in July.

They didn’t kill the town on purpose. They hollowed out the exact thing they paid to be near.

Other towns have tried to stop this. None have figured it out.

In 2016, St Ives in Cornwall held a vote. Over three-quarters of voters said yes: stop new homes from being sold as second residences.

The problem is, new builds were only a tiny fraction of the housing stock. The existing homes kept selling to outsiders. Prices kept climbing. Whether the policy failed or was just too small to matter depends on who you ask. Cornwall has since added a 100% council tax premium on second homes. No I did not add an extra zero, 100%.

It took effect last year. Nobody knows yet if it changes anything.

Wales went further. The law now allows council tax premiums on second homes up to an eye-popping 300%. Some counties hit 150% - 200%. House prices dropped. Second homes went on the market.

The bakery didn’t come back.

On the north coast of Northern Ireland, the same thing is happening. In Portstewart, as many as one in four properties are second homes. A lawmaker said what everyone already knew: the towns are dying. Empty streets. No children. No policy yet.

They’re still in the naming-the-problem phase.

And in Provincetown, Massachusetts. The year-round population is roughly 3,500. In summer, it swells to tens of thousands. In Provincetown and on Martha’s Vineyard, workers cycle through partial-year leases because they can’t afford year-round housing. On the Vineyard they call it the Shuffle.

Every destination tried something different.

None of them got the bakery back.

Here’s the bitch.

Some of you reading this are in the tourism industry in a town like this. You run the guesthouse or inn. You take the bookings. You pay attention to your reviews, and you do your job well. And you watch the post office close. You know the family that had to leave. You wave at neighbors you no longer have.

You’re on both sides of this, and you know it.

I’m not telling you to stop. I love tourism; it’s been my career. I’m asking you to count what you’re losing before it shows up in shuttered windows. The thing people come to your destination or town for is the thing that’s leaving. The people are the one thing you can’t replace.

Because the moment worth paying attention to isn’t when the mayor gives a speech, it’s before that, before the bakery closes. Before the post office goes. When you still have something left to fight for instead of something left to eulogize.

I want that corner near the park open again, with pâtisseries in the window.

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If you stand by the lake in Hallstatt, Austria for a few minutes, you see it play out in real time.

Sightseers move toward the same stretch of waterfront, pause, and raise their phones toward the church steeple and pastel houses reflected in the water. Some scroll first. Checking the angle they saved earlier, then step forward to recreate it.

Hallstatt has fewer than 750 residents, yet millions of people recognize that single view.

People don’t arrive curious anymore. They arrive already decided on what it’s supposed to be.

By the time tourists arrive, they are not discovering the destination. They are confirming the version they saw online.

If you have ever had a guest say, “this isn’t what I expected,” you are already dealing with this.

Expectation is the product now. The experience just delivers on it.

This isn’t a trend. It’s a shift in how travel actually works now.
Travel starts long before booking. What’s changed is who shapes that early experience and what it costs when they get it wrong.

Your visitors arrive pre-trained. Someone else did the training, and you had no say in it.
Guests don’t show up unsure. They show up certain, and often wrong.

Tourism marketing didn’t just miss this. It accelerated it. Destinations have always shown their best side, but those images are now amplified by millions of travelers sharing their own versions of the same place.

Most destinations are still marketing what a place looks like instead of what it’s actually like once you’re there. That’s the problem.

This is a shift from promotion to preparation.
Promotion attracts attention. Preparation shapes behavior.

Most destinations now have two versions: the place itself, and the one people saw online.

Visitors arrive with both in their head.

When Everyone Shows Up for the Same Shot

Hallstatt is one of the clearest examples of this shift. Over the past decade it has become a global social media icon. A small town attracting millions each year. At times the crowds became so intense that officials installed barriers to block the most photographed viewpoint and began limiting tour buses entering the town.

A similar pattern appeared in Roccaraso, a mountain ski resort in Italy’s Abruzzo region. After a TikTok influencer posted videos of the snow-covered slopes, over 10,000 visitors descended on a town of 1,600 residents in a single day. Roads clogged and slopes overcrowded. Day trippers who had paid $20 USD for a tour arrived with no knowledge of ski etiquette, local norms, or the limits of the place they were visiting.

In the United States, the National Park Service has repeatedly reported visitors leaving marked trails to reach photo angles they saw on social media, particularly at places like Horseshoe Bend and Glacier Point in Yosemite. Rangers say most visitors are not trying to cause problems. They are following what they saw online.

What people see online does not just shape where they go. It shapes how they behave when they get there.

Visitors are not exploring. They’re reenacting what they saw, down to where to stand and what to touch. Cues written by someone who was never responsible for the place.

Sometimes those cues ignore boundaries, safety, or local norms. In many cases, visitors arrive having already learned how to behave somewhere from someone who didn’t live there.

They’re not just managing crowds. They’re dealing with behavior that was learned somewhere else, and every viral post trains the next wave before they arrive.

You don’t get a say in what they learned.

The industry spent years optimizing for visibility. Now it’s dealing with the consequences of it.

Where This Hits First: Operators on the Ground

This does not show up first in strategy decks. It shows up in operations.

Hotels, hosts, guides, and tour operators are downstream of content they didn’t create, written by people who don’t run the place, and believed by guests who think they already know what to expect.

Guests arrive expecting walkable distances that aren’t walkable. Quiet viewpoints that are crowded by noon. Access to places that are private, protected, or seasonal.
Staff end up resetting expectations in real time.

You and your team are cleaning up expectations set by people who don’t run the place.

You don’t control what the guest believes. They’re certain they’re right. By the time you step in, the experience is already going off the rails.

When expectations are off, reviews drop, and teams burn out. You see it quickly.

If you don’t shape expectations before arrival, you will spend your entire operation managing the consequences after. The destination story is already breaking before the guest arrives. Local businesses are just the ones absorbing it.

This Changes the Job

Social media has also created real opportunity. Small destinations now have visibility that once required significant budgets, and remote regions can reach global audiences in ways that weren’t possible a decade ago.

But visibility moves faster than infrastructure, planning, or visitor education. That changes what this job actually is.

Marketing is now behavior design, whether you signed up for that job or not. Every piece of content you publish is either teaching people how to behave or letting someone else do it for you.

Marketing, owners, and operators need to be aligned on what the experience actually is before the guest arrives.

Most destinations are still chasing attention. That’s what created the problem. The ones that win shape behavior.

Start with a simple review.

Look at your top-performing content. What is it actually teaching people to do when they arrive? Stand here? Crowd here? Skip everything else?

Show how to experience a place, not just what it looks like on a good day. Point out the local rhythms, boundaries, and tradeoffs before they arrive. Broaden the story beyond one iconic viewpoint, or everyone ends up in the same place.

If this isn’t addressed, the first thing that breaks is the review score. The second is your team. And the local community feels it not long after.

It’s Not Just the Crowds

This goes beyond demand. It’s the gap between the version of the place people see online and the one people actually live in.

Residents aren’t just reacting to crowds. They’re reacting to behavior that doesn’t fit the place, and to a version of their town that no longer feels like theirs. That runs deeper than the crowds, and it doesn’t go away when the season ends.

The Story Is Already Out There

For decades, destinations controlled how their story was told.

Back in 2009, during the economic crisis and swine flu in Mexico, I organized a conference in Cancún. A small group of us were already using early social platforms to show what was actually happening on the ground and push back on travel fears. We wanted to show others what social media could do, and how to use it to show what was really happening.

I told a room full of hotel operators that social media would matter. One woman said her property would never be on Facebook.
Same goal then as now. Get to people before someone else does.

What’s changed is who controls that perception. In the past, destinations shaped how they were seen. Today, that’s often set before they even enter the conversation.

Destinations used to own the story. Now they inherit someone else’s version and try to operate inside it.

The goal isn’t to take control of the story again. It’s to get there earlier.

A single video can introduce millions of people to a place overnight. One angle becomes the angle. One moment becomes the expectation.

So Now What

Social media didn’t change why people travel. It changed where the trip actually begins.

The experience doesn’t start at arrival. It starts the moment someone sees your destination online. People show up with a picture in their head and a way of being there they picked up somewhere else. Sometimes it doesn’t fit at all.

Destinations, hotels, and other businesses are all dealing with the same reality now.

You can shape expectations before people arrive.
Or you can manage the consequences after they do.

Those are the only two options. And one of them compounds the problem every season, because every visitor becomes the next piece of content.

If you’re seeing this play out where you are, I’d love to hear it.
What’s one place where the version online doesn’t match the one on the ground?

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In a remote village in Greenland, polar bear skins hang over porch railings. A small building doubles as passport control and gift shop, selling seal and bear-hide mittens among some postcards. The only grocery store receives deliveries twice a year.

Moments like this attest a problem in tourism. Visitors often arrive before they understand the place they’re visiting.

I did. My mental picture of Greenland came almost entirely from photographs of glaciers, icebergs, an polar bears. Not from understanding how people actually live there.

Many problems with visitor behavior are not attitude problems. They are explanation problems.

Places that welcome visitors often expect respectful behavior from people who arrive without much understanding of how the place works. Greenland shows what can happen when a place takes that void seriously.

Ilulissat and the question of preparation

Ilulissat sits on Greenland’s west coast beside the Ilulissat Icefjord. One of the most active glacier systems in the world and a UNESCO World Heritage Site. It is also one of the country’s main tourism gateways. Welcoming travelers on expedition ships and small adventure tours.

Tourism in Greenland is growing. But the way people talk about tourism there feels different from many other places. The issue is not only how many people arrive. It is whether visitors actually understand the environment and culture once they get there.

Greenland watched what happened in places like Iceland, where tourism expanded quickly and communities struggled to keep up. The response here has been slower. More deliberate. More attention is placed on how visitors are prepared for the place they are arriving in.

The Ilulissat Icefjord Centre helps visitors understand the landscape as both cultural and natural heritage before they head out to explore. Exhibits explain hunting traditions, climate change, and how local communities depend on the fjord.

Visitors are often briefed before they start exploring.

When rules appear without context

Many places respond by adding rules as tourism grows. Signs appear along trails. Drone bans are introduced. Visitor codes of conduct are posted at visitor centers.

Those tools help, but they rarely explain what the rules protect and why.

When visitors see rules without understanding what those rules protect, the restrictions can feel hasty. A boardwalk through fragile vegetation becomes an inconvenience instead of a safeguard. A drone ban feels bureaucratic rather than protective. A local tradition may look shocking rather than part of everyday life.

Visitors may follow the rule without ever really understanding why it exists.

Tourism often focuses on moving visitors through places.

Orientation asks a different question.

Do visitors understand the place they just entered?

Explaining the place first

Many guides and locally run tourism businesses in Greenland start somewhere else. They explain the place before presenting the rules that apply within it.

When visitors understand how people live with wildlife, why some seasons matter for nesting birds, and how hunting traditions developed, the rules they encounter later make a lot more sense.

Stories do not replace rules. Stories explain them.

In smaller communities such as Ilimanaq or Kapisillit, local guides explain how people live with the seasons, the land they depend on, and the traditions that shape daily life. Visitors begin to see the landscape as something people live with, not just scenery.

Moments of doubt become moments to explain the place.

In several Greenlandic towns, residents have helped shape visitor guidelines. They include simple things like asking before photographing people and respecting private spaces.

Field Notes: Greenland

While traveling in Greenland, a few observations made differences especially clear.

In some villages, polar bear pelts hang over porch railings or appear in local shops. Without context, visitors are not quite sure what they are looking at. Some may even be surprised to learn that animals considered protected elsewhere are hunted here.

Sled dogs are often kept outdoors along the edges of settlements. For travelers used to seeing dogs as household pets, the scene can feel harsh until the role of working dogs in Arctic travel and hunting is explained.

None of this comes from disrespect.

More often, it reflects expectations people bring with them from somewhere else.

Every place that welcomes visitors has its own version of this moment. It is when visitor expectations meet the reality of how the place works.

Working fishing docks, livestock pastures, sacred sites, alpine meadows, coral reefs, ski trails, sand dunes, and farms all mean something to the people who live there. Without context, visitors may not realize what they are looking at.

The details differ everywhere. In a ski town it’s trail etiquette. In a beach community it’s dune protection. In a historic city it’s noise and neighborhood life. In rural areas it’s private land and working farms.

But the pattern is the same.

Visitors arrive with expectations shaped in other places. But every place works by its own rules.

Preparation before visitors arrive

Some of that preparation starts before visitors ever set foot in Greenland.

Visit Greenland even published an article called Why Greenland May Not Be for You. It asks travelers to think carefully about their expectations and explains what visiting remote Arctic communities is really like.

Expedition cruise companies visiting Greenland follow guidelines from the Association of Arctic Expedition Cruise Operators (AECO). Before passengers go ashore, they are usually briefed about wildlife, local culture, and how to behave in fragile environments.

Visitors are encouraged to understand the place before they start exploring.

What understanding changes

People working closest to visitors notice the same pattern. Guides, tour companies, small hotels, and local hosts see behavior change once people understand the place they are in.

When travelers understand why fragile vegetation is protected, they stay on designated paths. Once they learn why wildlife areas are sensitive during nesting season, drone bans start to make sense. And when they hear how communities depend on surrounding ecosystems, people keep more distance from wildlife.

Preparation shapes behavior. It also changes who decides to come in the first place.

People working in tourism in Greenland often say the same thing: visitors who come with context stay longer, spend more in local communities, and ask better questions.

They are not different people.

They were simply prepared differently.

Where understanding still falls short

Not everyone in tourism believes that explaining the place will solve visitor behavior problems.

Some destination managers say the information is already there, in signs, visitor centers, and tour briefings, yet people still ignore basic guidelines. Others point out that many travelers are only there for a few hours or never read the information before arriving.

Residents in busy places raise another concern: sometimes there are simply too many visitors.

Even respectful visitors can change daily life when large numbers arrive at once.

Short cruise visits can make this harder. Passengers may only spend a few hours on land, leaving little time to really understand the place.

Social media is also changing how people behave when they travel. Dramatic photos and unusual experiences get attention online. Visitors may know a cliff edge is dangerous or a wildlife area is sensitive, yet still step closer for a photo that will stand out.

So, good preparation cannot eliminate every problem.

It reduces the chances that confusion turns into conflict between visitors and the places they came to see.

Questions places might ask

Every destination eventually runs into the same moment. It is worth asking:

• What assumptions do visitors arrive with?

• Where do those expectations collide with local reality?

• Are visitors encountering rules before they understand what those rules protect?

• Where should understanding begin, before visitors arrive or after problems start?

A pattern worth noticing

The pattern visible in Greenland appears in many places. Most visitors do not arrive intending to disrespect a place. More often they arrive carrying expectations from somewhere else about what is normal and how a place works.

Greenland itself has often been marketed through dramatic images of icebergs, glaciers, and adventure. Those images start shaping expectations long before travelers arrive.

When those expectations run into a different way of living, confusion usually comes first. Behavior follows. Places often respond with more rules. The harder work is helping visitors understand the place before expecting them to behave differently.

Responsible tourism often begins with orientation, helping visitors understand the place before they start moving through it.

In that light, the way a place is introduced to visitors, from website text to arrival briefings, becomes part of tourism design rather than an afterthought.

Frequently Asked Questions

Isn’t this just a Greenland thing? Our destination is completely different.

Greenland is a clear example, but the pattern appears in many places. Visitors arrive carrying expectations from somewhere else about what is normal and how a place works.

In a wine region, it may show up when travelers wander into working vineyards. In a fishing harbor, it appears when tourists walk onto active docks. In a desert park, it happens when visitors underestimate heat and distance.

The landscape changes. The moment when expectations meet reality does not.

We already explain the rules through signs, websites, and visitor centers. Why would more explanation make a difference?

Many destinations do provide plenty of information. The issue is often timing.

Rules land differently when people understand what those rules protect. When visitors first hear how a place functions. How land is used, how wildlife behaves, and how people live there. The rules that follow tend to make more sense.

That does not solve every problem. But it reduces the number of conflicts that start with simple confusion.

Most of our visitors are only here for a few hours or a weekend. Are they really going to read orientation materials?

Short visits do make this harder. Many travelers move quickly through a destination and absorb only bits and pieces of information.

Some places are experimenting with quick orientation moments: a short explanation from a guide, a story shared at a trailhead, a simple introduction at a harbor, ferry dock, or visitor center. Even a few minutes of context can change how people interpret what they see.

Understanding does not always require a long briefing. Sometimes it begins with a single clear explanation.

Isn’t the real issue too many visitors, not misunderstanding?

In some destinations, that is absolutely true. Large numbers of visitors can change the pace of daily life even when people behave respectfully.

Preparation cannot solve structural issues like crowding or infrastructure limits. But it can reduce the number of moments where confusion turns into unnecessary conflict between visitors and residents.

It is not a complete solution. It is one piece of a larger puzzle.

Doesn’t tourism marketing create unrealistic expectations in the first place?

Marketing naturally focuses on the most striking images of a place. Those images shape expectations long before visitors arrive.

The challenge is making sure the story does not stop with the photograph. When destinations also explain how people live in that landscape. How the land is used, and what matters to the community. Visitors arrive with a fuller picture.

Images attract attention. Context helps people understand what they are seeing.

Some visitors simply don’t care. Can preparation really change behavior?

There will always be a small number of visitors who ignore guidance. Preparation will never reach everyone.

But many travelers do respond once they understand the place they are visiting. Guides, small hotels, and local hosts often notice the same pattern. Visitors who arrive with context tend to ask better questions, move more thoughtfully, and stay longer.

Preparation does not change everyone. Often it changes enough people to make a difference.

Residents often feel tourism disrupts daily life. Can visitor orientation actually help with that?

In many places, the frustration appears in small moments. Someone blocks a narrow street to take photos. A visitor wanders onto private farmland. A drone appears over a quiet neighborhood. None of it may be intentional.

But those moments accumulate.

When visitors understand how a place functions, where people live, work, and draw boundaries, they move through it with more awareness. Orientation will not remove every tension, but it can ease many of the everyday friction points between residents and visitors.

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Sources and Further Reading

• Visit Greenland tourism strategy and visitor expectations guidance

• Ilulissat Icefjord Centre interpretation and visitor orientation initiatives

• Arctic Expedition Cruise Operators (AECO) visitor guidelines and community collaboration

• Research on tourist behavior in Greenland, including work on encouraging sustainable tourist behavior (Copenhagen Business School)

• Responsible tourism and community-based tourism initiatives in Greenland

An inflatable carried us from the schooner to shore in a remote part of Greenland. We were heading for a hike toward the glacier. The landscape was covered in thick moss and small Arctic flowers growing from the rock itself.

Before anyone began walking, our guide stopped the group and pointed toward the ground beneath our feet. Some of the moss we were looking at, she explained, can take decades to recover once it is damaged. When possible, step on the rock rather than the moss.

Another day in the small village of Ittoqqortoormiit, a pair of sled dog puppies tumbled over each other in the dirt. Cameras came out and a couple of people instinctively moved closer.

The guide stopped us again.

These are working dogs, she explained. If we touched them, the locals might have to put them down.

After that people stepped carefully across the rock rather than the moss, and the puppies were admired from a respectful distance.

Visitors respect the rules of a place once they understand what the place protects.

The Reality of How Visitors Arrive

Greenland works in part because the experience is guided. Someone designed the moment where visitors learn how the place works before they move through it.

Most destinations do not operate that way.

Visitors arrive from many directions. They come through a highway exit, a trailhead pinned on social media, a short-term rental tucked into a neighborhood, or a café. Places where no one pauses to explain how the place works.

No single organization controls the visitor experience. The place itself still teaches visitors how it works. Sometimes the lesson is intentional. Other times it is accidental.

The Industry’s Favorite Explanation: Bad Tourists

When visitor behavior becomes a problem, the conversation usually turns toward the visitors themselves.

Tourists are rude.

Tourists are entitled.

Tourists are the problem.

We hear the same explanations every season. Travelers who do not understand the place. Visitors who fail to respect fragile landscapes or local culture.

Destinations respond with what they can control most easily. Rules. Visitor fees. Warning signs. More enforcement.

The moment on that Greenland hike showed something different.

Why a Sign Is Easier

Explaining a place takes effort.

A sign is easier.

Most places involve land managers, business owners, tourism offices, chambers of commerce, and local governments that rarely sit at the same table. When that happens, a sign goes up instead of anyone just explaining how the place works.

Where Behavior Changes

When visitors are shown how a place works, something different happens.

Visitors do not arrive understanding a place. They learn it on site, or they guess. Sometimes a guide or host explains what the landscape or community protects.

Infrastructure teaches as well. Paths show where to walk and where fragile ground should be avoided. Garbage cans placed where people naturally stop prevent littering.

Culture teaches too. Visitors watch how locals move through markets, harbors, temples, or town squares and begin doing the same.

Visitors quickly notice how locals dress and behave in public spaces and adjust accordingly.

A Place That Teaches the Rules

At Antelope Canyon in Arizona, visitors walk through the narrow sandstone canyon on guided paths with carefully planned stops.

Visitors stop where the guides stop. They photograph the formations from the same spots and move through the canyon at the same pace. The structure protects the canyon and keeps people safe.

The structure of the visit shapes people’s behavior long before enforcement becomes necessary.

You can see smaller versions of this approach elsewhere. In the Faroe Islands, residents periodically close fragile landscapes for restoration and explain why. Visitors usually cooperate once they understand what the place protects.

What Happens When Visitors Have to Guess

When no one explains how the place works, visitors improvise. People step off trails for photographs, wander into sensitive areas without realizing it, or walk into places the community protects.

Over time, the costs add up. Fragile landscapes are damaged. Residents lose patience with visitors. Staff spend their time correcting the same mistakes instead of welcoming people. Trust between visitors and the community begins to erode.

Locals grow frustrated, and staff or guides correct the same mistakes over and over. More signs appear, and more rules follow. Yet earlier no one explained how the place works.

The same pattern appears in destinations everywhere. Once you start looking for it.

People respect the rules once they understand what the place protects.

Where Do Visitors First Learn the Place?

Start with one exercise.

Walk the first hour of a visit.

Notice where visitors first learn what matters. Where do they learn what the place protects and how it works? Where do they watch how locals behave?

Then look closely at the moments when visitors guess.

Also consider the complaints you hear from residents. Those frustrations often reveal where visitors were never oriented to the place.

In some places, a DMO notices this. In others, it is a chamber of commerce, a land or property manager, or a few operators comparing notes. Who starts does not matter.

Someone simply needs to notice where visitors guess. Those moments often lead to the problems that appear later.

Where Do Visitors First Learn Your Place?

Think back to the hike in Greenland. The guide explained why the moss mattered and why the sled dogs were there to work.

There were no fences and no enforcement. Once people understood the place, their behavior changed.

Most places do not have guides at every trailhead or street corner. The question still stands.

Where do visitors first understand your place?

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Most behavior problems do not start with visitors.

They start where no one explains what the place protects.

When people understand what a place protects, they rarely need to be told how to behave.

Hospitality has always worked both ways. Guests have expectations of the host or the place, and the place has expectations of its guests. That understanding has faded as some destinations are treated more like entertainment than places with their own way of life.

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If this made you think about where visitors first understand your place, you might also enjoy:

The Places That Feel Like They Were Expecting You

Why the first fifteen minutes of arrival quietly shape visitor trust.

Most destinations are built around being recommended.

We track how many people saw the ad, clicked, and booked a room, and when numbers dip, we spend more to bring in new people. That makes sense. It’s easier to count arrivals and bookings than it is to explain loyalty.

But the places that actually last are not always the ones getting the most attention. They’re the ones people choose to return to, again and again.

Going back isn’t the same decision as trying a place for the first time.

When someone is heading back for a second or third visit, they’re not scrolling through “Top 10” lists. They type the name straight into Google, check if their favorite restaurant is still open, look at where they stayed last time, and text a friend to see if they want to go back. At that point, they’re not comparing options or responding to a campaign because they already know what they want.

That kind of decision doesn’t show up in ad reports or even occupancy reports, which is why it’s so easy to overlook.

Repeat Visits Fall Through the Cracks

Here’s the catch.

In most towns, the person who comes back doesn’t really belong to anyone. They don’t fit neatly into a box.

Marketing is trying to get more eyeballs. Partnerships are juggling platforms and distribution. Hoteliers and hosts are just trying to keep rooms and tables full. And somewhere in the middle of all that is the guest who liked the place enough to return.

That guest doesn’t get ignored on purpose. It just isn’t clearly anyone’s job to grow that number. We assume they’ll come once, have a good time, and move on.

That’s the mistake. And it’s an expensive one.

So we default to what we can measure. We spend money to find new people because that’s what shows up on the dashboard. Over time, we get very efficient at replacing first-time visitors instead of building on the ones who already trust us.

That’s not momentum. That’s churn.

If that number isn’t visible, the answer is usually more marketing. That’s not because towns don’t care about loyalty. It’s because loyalty is harder to measure and harder to defend in a board meeting.

The most profitable booking is usually the one from a guest who has already stayed. Ignore that, and the cost starts creeping up in ways you don’t immediately see.

Here’s Where the Math Kicks In

It costs more to convince a stranger than it does to welcome someone back.

When someone returns, you’re not starting from zero. They already trust the place and understand how it works. They have a memory attached, which means your marketing does not have to work as hard and your message does not have to reintroduce the basics all over again.

When people come back, you’re not rebuilding demand from zero every season. Planning feels less volatile, and word of mouth carries more weight because it’s grounded in lived experience.

And yet most places can tell you exactly how many people arrived last year, but hesitate when you ask how many of them had been there before.

Over time, you end up paying to replace people who already liked you, and the town starts needing constant promotion just to stay upright. It looks like growth on paper, but it’s really being held up by spending instead of people choosing to come back.

If you’re not tracking who comes back, whether you run a destination, a hotel, or a vacation rental, you’re probably paying to replace people who would have come back anyway.

Why Some Places Are Easy to Return To

You don’t earn return visits by pushing volume. You earn them by keeping the promise people experienced the first time.

People come back when what they loved is still there. The shuttle runs when it says it will, the hours are accurate, and the experience still works the way they remember it.

The second visit feels easier because they already know the rhythm of the place.

There are smaller signals too, like a street that feels familiar, a breakfast table you recognize, or a staff member who remembers you without making it awkward. It’s not dramatic, but it’s what makes coming back feel easy.

You can see this at scale in places that protected what made them distinctive instead of reshaping everything to attract the next wave. Savannah didn’t invent walkability for a campaign. It kept the structure that already made the area easy to move through and easy to live in, and people return because that foundation is still there.

When discovery becomes the only goal, the pressure shifts. Cities and towns start optimizing for turnover, filling the calendar with events and promotions because busy is easier to measure than loyalty. Over time the place can start to feel less like itself and more like something built to handle volume.

Growth matters, and so do jobs and occupancy. But when arrivals are the only number driving decisions, we slowly design for turnover instead of return.

What Happens When You Track Return

If you want to see whether this applies to your town or destination, start by asking a few simple questions.

How many of last year’s visitors had been there before?

Do you track that consistently with your lodging partners?

And who is actually responsible for increasing that number over time, not just watching it but moving it?

You do not need a new slogan. You need another number sitting next to arrivals in the same report, and someone who wakes up thinking about how to improve it.

Start simple. Ask your lodging partners to track how many check-ins are returning guests. That alone changes the conversation.

Because when repeat guests are invisible, spending to attract new people becomes the default response to every slowdown. Over time, you end up replacing people who already trusted you, and that isn’t growth. It’s a loop.

The places that last aren’t the ones that win the recommendation game every quarter. They’re the ones people think about when planning a trip and realize they don’t need to be convinced again.

Repeat visitors don’t come from pricing or promotions alone. They come from coordination. Visitors can feel when a place works together, when businesses know what’s happening, when locals aren’t resentful, and when the experience works without explanation.

That piece, how a town actually operates behind the scenes, is a bigger conversation. I wrote more about that here.

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A hotel front desk agent in Kansas City’s Crossroads District fields the same question for the fourth time this hour: how do I get to the stadium? Outside, slow-smoked brisket and the sound of a dozen languages. It’s a Tuesday evening in late June, and the World Cup has turned a barbecue neighborhood into an international block party overnight.

The transit authority published a route map, but it doesn’t match what the FIFA app shows, and neither matches the directions a visitor assembled from ChatGPT that morning. Three organizations. Three different answers. Nobody wrong. The visitor still felt lost.

The parts of a trip that confuse visitors usually aren’t anyone’s job.

You’ve seen this in your own destination. The guest who booked based on a campaign that promised “walkable and vibrant,” then arrived to find the entertainment district closed on Mondays and the shuttle running on weekend hours. The hotel manager who apologizes six times a day for something they didn’t do, didn’t promise, and can’t fix. I’ve watched this play out more times than I can count. The apology isn’t for the property. The apology is never for the property. It's for everything around it that didn't show up the way the guest expected. The chamber director staring at a Google listing for the town that hasn’t been updated since 2019.

It’s not carelessness.

Coordination just isn’t in anyone’s job description.

The tourism board tracks reach. The city tracks permits. Hotels track occupancy. The chamber counts members. Nobody tracks the confusion.

The silence when a guest asks about a festival you just learned about from them.

The part that makes it expensive

Today’s visitor assembles a version of your destination before they arrive, from Google, Reddit, AI chatbots, or a group thread where someone’s cousin went last year. When the assembled version doesn’t match what visitors find on the ground, the gap shows up as a feeling: this place is harder than it should be, and nobody can tell you why.

Repeat visits stay flat. Word-of-mouth never forms. Campaigns get people curious, but bookings stall somewhere between “that looks great” and “I’ll book,” and then it never happens.

You end up paying for the same guest twice: once to attract them, again to replace them when they don’t come back. Not because they had a bad time, but because nothing about the stay created the absence that pulls someone back to a place. Bain’s research on retention puts a number on this: even a small lift in return visits compounds faster than any campaign.

A visitor in Onomichi, Japan follows a hillside temple trail and a local guide redirects them toward a lesser-known route with a view of the Inland Sea. The salt air, the surprise of the view, the feeling of being led somewhere worth going. That visit stays with you. Weeks later, the visitor misses that place and can’t say why.

In any destination where a visitor spends 20 minutes searching for parking the website called “convenient,” what sticks is the searching. Nothing worth remembering. Nothing pulling them back. Just a stay that fades by the time they unpack at home.

When a visit makes sense, it becomes a memory. When it becomes a memory, it pulls people back.

The person who ends up eating that cost is almost never the one who caused the gap in the first place. If you run a small hotel or a tour company, you know this in your bones. You’ve spent your own time printing directions the city should provide, explaining things the tourism board never communicated. Staying late to answer questions that aren’t about your property at all. Walking back promises a booking platform made without asking you.

You are already the informal coordinator. The question is whether anyone else in your destination knows you're doing it, and whether they ever show up to help.

What it looks like when a destination actually coordinates

The World Cup starting June 11 will make this impossible to miss. Sixteen cities, tens of millions of visitors, and in every one, the people shaping the trip never sit in the same meeting.

Kansas City’s KC2026 organizing committee launched the KC Game Plan, bringing small businesses, neighborhood councils, transit planners, and city government into the same picture. Check-ups for small businesses. Lending workshops. Vacant storefronts turned into pop-up experiences during the tournament. They’re not asking one person to own everything. They’re making sure everyone can see the same map.

But you don’t need a mega-event to build this.

That temple trail moment didn't happen by accident.

Onomichi is a port town of about 130,000 in Hiroshima Prefecture, Japan. Its waterfront smells of salt air and the pork-fat broth of its signature ramen, simmering in shopfront kitchens along steep hillside lanes. Visitors knew it as the starting point for the Shimanami Kaido cycling route. They passed through without engaging the town.

Then a handful of people decided the town mattered enough to coordinate, not because anyone told them to, but because the alternative was watching visitors pass straight through. They renovated a disused waterfront warehouse into Onomichi U2: a cyclist-friendly hotel, bakery, cafe, bar, and bike shop under one roof. The Onomichi Denim Project connected local fishermen, farmers, and shipbuilders with raw denim, then sold the naturally faded jeans. The wear patterns told you who made them. A guide network trained local residents to lead tours that spread visitors across the town’s 25-temple walking trail instead of piling them up at the two most popular spots.

No grand tourism structure. Just stubbornness and a shared bet.

Barcelona sits at the other end of the spectrum. After tourism grew from 1.7 million hotel visitors in 1990 to over 12 million by 2023, the city figured out it had to manage this on purpose. La Rambla in August tells you why: the press of bodies, the scent of churros and diesel and jasmine competing for the same air, rolling suitcases on stone. The city now publishes daily crowd forecasts. When numbers spike, the calendar turns red. Residents adjust their plans. Hotels adjust their staffing. Visitors arrive into a destination that anticipated them instead of reacting to them. Not perfect. Not universally loved. But visible enough that fewer surprises land on the front desk.

The scale is different. The principle is the same: the destination works because the people inside it can see what the people visiting it are about to experience.

Not a program or a budget. A question. Instead of “How do we get more visitors?” the room starts asking “What does a visitor think this place is going to be like before they get here, and does it match what they actually find? It doesn’t need a task force. It just needs a room: the tourism board, the chamber, a couple of hotel owners and tour guides, someone from the city. When those people look at the same picture, it gets harder to pretend the gaps aren’t there.

This week

The destinations I remember most aren’t perfect. They’re the ones that held together.

A destination that just makes sense is what creates the absence that brings people back. That’s not marketing. That’s coordination.

An ask you can bring to your team or use with AI.

“Map the first three decisions a visitor makes after arriving in our destination. For each one: who provides the information? Is it consistent everywhere a visitor looks? Where does the visitor have to guess, and who absorbs the cost when they guess wrong?”

• What would change if those three information sources were looking at the same data?

• Where is the cheapest, fastest coordination win hiding in those three moments?

• What information disappears between what your tourism board publishes and what your front desk actually says?

If you run a hotel, a rental, a tour company, or a restaurant: When your destination’s coordination breaks down, where does it show up first inside your property, and what are you already doing to fill that gap, whether it’s a fix you built or just you and your team are just dealing with every day?

And if you’re already doing coordination work in your destination, I want to hear about it. Reply to this email or leave a comment.

Leave a comment

They don’t start on your website. They start on Google, an AI summary, and a Reddit thread from 2022. In 12 minutes, they build a version of your town from sources no one at the destination has reviewed.

That’s the version they’re deciding from. You’ve never seen it assembled.

The assumption that keeps this invisible

Most destinations assume: we have a brand, a website, a social presence. We’re managing our story.

Here’s where it breaks. Your published story is one input among dozens. For a growing share of travelers, it’s not even the first one they encounter. The AI summary, the cached blog post, the old listicle that still ranks on page one. That composite is the working draft of your destination’s identity for most people researching a trip.

Nobody at the destination has assembled it to see what it says. Not because anyone failed. Because this gap sits between job descriptions. And until recently, it wasn’t anyone’s job.

The research path has changed. Your site enters late.

Marriott Bonvoy’s 2026 travel research, drawn from over 22,000 consumers, found that half of all travelers surveyed have used AI to plan or research a trip. Up from 26% two years earlier.

And once they use it, they trust it. A TakeUp survey of U.S. leisure travelers found 94% of AI users trust the recommendations as much as search engines or travel sites, while 52% say inaccuracy is their top complaint.

They trust it. And it’s often wrong.

The cost of that isn’t dramatic. It’s the steady loss of bookings that never form. People who researched your town, built a picture that didn’t pull them in, and moved on without you knowing they looked. It shows up in destinations with full marketing teams. And in towns where tourism is one line on the chamber director’s job description.

How this shows up on the ground

Closed businesses still appearing in search results. Seasonal descriptions displayed as year-round. A blog post that calls your downtown a “thriving food scene.” Three restaurants, two of them seasonal.

The couple from the couch arrives carrying that version. They don’t complain. They recalibrate. The lunch spot the blog recommended is closed on Wednesdays. The walk to the waterfront takes longer than the map implied. Not angry. Adjusting. That adjustment is where your review score lives. In the distance between what they expected and what they found.

Last month in Tasmania, a tour company’s AI-generated blog sent visitors to a natural hot spring that doesn’t exist. That’s the extreme version. Yours will be smaller. A closed restaurant. Wrong hours. Same pattern. Information you didn’t write shaping visits you didn’t expect.

Your operators already know what visitors are confused about. The barista who gets asked three times a week where the trailhead is? She knows the Google Maps pin is off. Nobody’s collected that intelligence yet.

When you see it, you can work with it

The audit takes 20 minutes. Open an incognito browser window. Research your town the way someone who’s never been would. Begin with Google. Then an AI tool. Then Reddit or TripAdvisor. Write down what you find.

Some of it will be wrong. Some will be outdated. And some of it will be better than you expected. A review that says what you wish your tagline said.

You can fix what you can fix: Google listings, outdated hours, your own site. You can influence what feeds the AI, because AI answers are built from sources. Those sources are often the same outdated listings and blog posts you found in your search.

You can’t edit the AI. You can edit what it reads. Start there.

This works. When Tennessee’s tourism board audited rural businesses through a Destination Optimization Program, they found most profiles were incomplete. They fixed them. Visibility improved. Listings ranked better. Photos reached millions.

And you can talk to your operators. Not a briefing. A conversation. “Here’s what visitors are finding when they research us. What are you hearing from guests?” When your front-desk staff and your shop owners know what story the visitor arrived with, the first interaction stops being a correction and starts being a confirmation.

When the picture matches the place, the stay makes sense from the start. What makes sense sticks. And what sticks isn’t what they consumed. It’s the thing they carry home that makes them want to come back.

This week

Twenty minutes. Incognito window. No logins, no dashboards. Search your town the way they search it. Screenshot what’s wrong. That screenshot is your next board slide.

Then ask yourself:

When was the last time you researched your destination the way a stranger would? Not your website. The full path from search bar to booking decision.

Do you know what an AI tool says about your town right now? If you haven’t checked, that’s most destinations. It takes two minutes.

Which closed businesses, wrong hours, or stale descriptions are still circulating online and sending visitors to a version of your town that no longer exists?

If someone assembled everything they could find about your destination in fifteen minutes tonight, would you stand behind that picture?

You have a marketing strategy. You may not have an information strategy. The visitor doesn’t know the difference.

Orientation doesn’t begin at check-in. It begins at the search bar.

FAQs

How do travelers research destinations before booking?

Most travelers now research destinations through a combination of Google search, AI tools like ChatGPT, Reddit threads, TripAdvisor reviews, and cached blog posts. Marriott Bonvoy’s 2026 research found that 50% of travelers have used AI to plan or research a trip, up from 26% two years prior. Roughly 60% of Google searches end without a click to any external website, meaning many visitors form their impression of a destination entirely from search results and AI-generated summaries without ever visiting the official tourism site.

How accurate is AI-generated travel information?

AI-generated travel recommendations frequently contain errors. A TakeUp survey of U.S. leisure travelers found that while 94% of AI users trust the recommendations, 52% cite inaccuracy as their top complaint. A tourism researcher cited by CNN noted that roughly nine out of ten AI-generated travel itineraries contain mistakes, ranging from recommending closed businesses to fabricating attractions that don’t exist.

How can a destination audit its online information?

A destination information audit takes approximately 20 minutes. Open an incognito browser window and research your town as a first-time visitor would: start with Google, then an AI tool, then Reddit or TripAdvisor. Document what appears, noting outdated listings, closed businesses, wrong hours, and inaccurate descriptions. Fix what you can directly and influence what feeds AI answers by correcting information at the source.

What is a destination information landscape?

A destination’s information landscape is the complete set of online information a potential visitor encounters when researching a place, including search engine results, AI-generated summaries, social media posts, review sites, blog posts, and cached content. Unlike a destination’s brand or marketing, which the destination controls, this landscape is assembled from many sources and is often outdated, incomplete, or written by people with no connection to the community.

This week, a destination marketing director saw their destination on a major travel list. Screenshot to the board by lunch. Press release by three. LinkedIn post before dinner.

NatGeo. AFAR. CNN. The New York Times. Condé Nast. Over 200 destinations named in a two-week window. Some named on multiple lists at the same time.

I’ve seen the celebration.

Here’s the part nobody includes in the press release.

The lists know what they’re doing

The New York Times’ 2025 editorial brief to its “52 Places” contributors said this: “The word of the summer has been ‘overtourism,’ so in putting together the coming year’s list, please keep that in mind. Are there places we can suggest that might help mitigate the crowds? Can you, at the very least, do less harm?”

The list is aware it creates the problem it’s trying to solve.

Craig Mod, a regular NYT contributor who recommended Morioka (#2 in 2023), described what happened when the list dropped. Morioka is a mid-size Japanese city. Population around 290,000. Not a tourist hub. A regional capital that most international travelers hadn’t heard of.

The mayor told press they were “surprised.” The city hadn’t campaigned for inclusion. Journalists from nearly 20 outlets called Mod wanting to know why he’d suggested “just another midsize Japanese city.” Mod didn’t know whether his pick would be selected, or where it would rank, until publication day. Neither did Morioka.

That’s the pattern.

Your destination wakes up on a list it didn’t apply to, didn’t prepare for, and can’t control what it says.

A reader later pointed out that another city’s featured attraction on the same list was covered in scaffolding and wouldn’t be visible again until 2026. The contributor who nominated it had missed this. The visitors who booked because of the list would not.

Travel lists are traffic machines. The ranked, numbered, “best of” format is built to drive clicks, affiliate bookings, and revenue. The NYT’s “52 Places” is one of the publication’s biggest annual traffic generators. Every major list this cycle included some version of “we want to lessen overtourism” in its framing. Then they named 200+ destinations and hit publish.

What this looks like at your scale

You don’t need a hundred-fold increase for this to hurt. You need a 30-40% bump in a place already running at capacity on summer weekends.

Two stoplights. One public restroom downtown. Visitor center open four days a week. Your three most popular restaurants already have 45-minute waits on Saturdays. Your one scenic overlook has parking for 20 cars. Your chamber website still lists last season’s events.

A list sends new visitors next month. They don’t arrive in a spreadsheet. They arrive on a Tuesday, expecting the version of your town that the list described. The restaurant is closed Mondays. The “emerging food scene” has three places and two of them are seasonal. The photo was taken in October. They booked for March.

That disconnect is where repeat visitation dies. Someone drives through, doesn’t stop for lunch, doesn’t come back, and never writes a review explaining why.

You won’t see that visitor in your data. You’ll feel it in next year’s numbers.

I’ve watched a “win” like this stretch a small town thin.

Celebrate after you check whether you’re ready.

Mod defended the impact: “These recommendations are mostly positive. They bring attention and tourism dollars to off-the-map worthy locations.” He’s not wrong. But Morioka didn’t get to decide what to do with the attention before it arrived.

A local hiking spot in Norway went from 800 annual visitors to over 80,000 in less than a decade. Almost entirely social media. Unprepared tourists in wrong footwear triggered 42 rescue operations in a single year. The municipality raided other budgets for trail safety it never planned for. “International hiking destination” wasn’t in the budget spreadsheet.

Overtourism concerns don’t track with how many visitors a place gets. They track with how fast the number changes.

“Fast” is what list placement produces.

The destinations next door

There’s a version of the list hangover nobody talks about: spillover.

When the listed destination’s parking lots fill up and its restaurants hit two-hour waits, visitors don’t go home. They drive to the next town. Your town. Without any of the preparation, any of the context, and none of the economic benefit.

They get the headline. You get the parking problem.

If your region has a destination that made a list this cycle, the readiness question applies to you too.

48-hour readiness checklist for destinations named on best-of travel lists

If your destination appeared on a list this recently, or if one in your region did, here’s a response you can put on an agenda this week. Name it. Assign it. Run it before the visitors arrive.

Hour 1-8: Know what was promised

Read the full list entry. What did the publication say? What photos did they use? What season do the images suggest? What did they name? Print it. That’s the promise your visitors are carrying.

Some entries name specific places. Others sell a vibe: “a food scene on the rise” or “an outdoor paradise worth the detour.” When the entry is impressionistic, figure out which real places will absorb that vibe. Where will someone who read “food scene on the rise” try to eat? Where will “outdoor paradise” try to park?

If you’re the destination next door: Read the entry for the destination near you. Your version of this step is knowing what those visitors came for, so you recognize them when they end up with you instead.

Hour 8-24: Walk the promise

Visit every place the list mentioned or implied. As a first-time visitor would. On a weekday. Is it open? Do the hours match Google? Does it look like the photo? Can someone who doesn’t know the area find it without calling anyone?

Check what the list didn’t mention but visitors will need: the closest bathroom to the featured attraction. The parking. The two restaurants within walking distance. Are their listings accurate?

If you’re the destination next door: Drive the route a frustrated visitor would take from the listed destination to your town. What do they find first? A closed visitor center? A gas station with no signage? A charming downtown they don’t know exists?

Hour 24-36: Brief your business owners

Tell your top 20-25 businesses a list dropped. Share the entry. Most businesses won’t have seen it. The ones who interact with visitors first, the front desk, the coffee shop, the gas station, need to know what story the visitor arrived with.

If the list mentioned specific businesses, call them. Ask if their hours, menus, and availability match what the list implies.

If you’re the destination next door: Brief yours too. “The town 30 minutes east just made NatGeo’s list. When their parking fills up, some of those visitors end up here. Here’s what they were looking for. Here’s what we offer.”

Hour 36-48: Close what you can close

Update your website if the list drives visitors to outdated pages. Add a “Featured in [publication]” page that sets accurate expectations: what’s open, what’s seasonal, what to know before you visit. Not a press release. An arrival guide.

Fix the Google listings you can fix. Flag the ones you can’t. One-page handout for businesses: “We were featured in [list]. Here’s what visitors will expect. Here’s how to check your listings in 10 minutes.”

If you’re the destination next door: Make yourself findable on purpose. Update your listings. Make sure your website says what you are, not just what you’re near. If you have capacity when the listed destination doesn’t, say so. Not as competition. As hospitality.

After 48 hours: Assign the ongoing work

One person owns monitoring. Track what visitors ask about. Watch for reviews where expectation and experience don’t match. Report back in 30 days.

That window is your only shot at closing the distance between the story and the reality.

Why the mismatch matters more than the list

A study of 411 first-time visitors to a resort destination measured the gap between what they expected and what they found. If reality beats the hype, you win a repeat visitor. If it doesn’t, you lose both the return trip and the referral.

TikTok travel content views increased 410% from 2021 to 2024. Seventy-five percent of travelers say social media is their top influence on destination choice. The list is the match. Social media is the accelerant. The disconnect between promise and delivery is where the damage lands.

This stint, some destinations appeared on five or six lists at once. One Caribbean island of roughly 2,000 residents appeared on two major lists simultaneously. What could have handled 30% growth over six months now has to handle it in six weeks.

The destinations that handle this well built systems before the attention arrived: regional branding that spreads visitors across a corridor, arrival coordination that makes the whole route work instead of piling up at the three places everyone already knew. You don’t need a national program. You need to make sure the experience matches the story.

For the destinations that didn’t make a list

You just watched someone else get a free stress test. Use it.

Pick a destination similar to yours that appeared on a list this cycle. Watch what happens over the next six months. Then run the same audit on yourself. Not because a list is coming, but because the weaknesses are already there.

Run the check with AI

If you don't have a team to run this review, you still have 10 minutes and ChatGPT.
Copy, paste, and fill in the brackets. These are starter questions, not scripts. Let the conversation go where your destination needs it.

For destination leaders

Our destination: [name]
Featured on: [publication/list name]
Description used: [paste description]

Assume a first-time visitor arrives motivated specifically by that article.

1. Briefly describe what their first 2 hours likely look like step-by-step.

2. Then ask me 5–7 highly specific, operational questions about:

   • What’s actually open

   • What’s accessible without reservations

   • What requires advance planning

   • What may be seasonal, closed, or capacity-limited

   • Where signage, transportation, or staffing may break expectations

3. Identify where the largest expectation gap is likely to appear between the published description and on-the-ground reality.

Avoid generic strategy questions. Focus on friction a real visitor would encounter immediately.

For businesses in the region

A major publication featured: [destination]
We are: [distance/time away]

Assume some visitors will arrive disappointed, full, or unable to access what they expected there.

Ask me 5–7 practical questions about:

• What those visitors will immediately need

• Whether we are discoverable at the moment of frustration

• What signals we send that we can solve their problem

• What small adjustments would convert them from overflow to intentional guest

Focus on findability, clarity, and readiness in the first 24 hours.

For chambers

Our region includes: [listed destination] and surrounding communities.

Assume the feature increases demand unevenly.

Ask me 5–7 operational questions about:

• How overflow physically moves through the region

• Which communities absorb it without preparation

• Where infrastructure strain will show first

• What a shared readiness or communication protocol would need to include

Keep the questions grounded in traffic flow, hours, staffing, signage, booking systems, and public information accuracy.

If you want the board-ready version of this audit as a downloadable checklist, I’ve built one.

Download the 48-Hour Readiness Check

Lists don’t break destinations.

Unprepared ones break themselves.

Attention doesn’t build capacity. It exposes it.

If you can’t deliver the version of your town that a writer in New York just sold to a few million readers, the list isn’t the opportunity.

It’s the exposure.

If you celebrated this week, good. Now run the audit. The visitors are coming whether you do or not.

This is Destination Sunday. I write here every week for the people running DMOs, chambers, and destinations who want more visitors in town, and want those visitors to find what they came for.

If this would help a colleague who just celebrated a list placement, or one in the same region, send it to them.

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Meanwhile, someone just closed six tabs and decided to go somewhere else. You’ll never know why. If your conversion rate from “interested” to “booked” is flat while awareness is rising, this invisible inconsistency layer is a prime suspect.

There’s a layer underneath reviews where credibility lives.

The Ten Tabs

Someone is planning a trip to your destination this second. They don’t just search once and book. They open tabs.

Your official tourism site. Google Maps. An OTA listing. Instagram. A travel blog from 2019 that still ranks. Back to Google to check whether that attraction is still around.

Expedia tracked this behavior. Trip planning now spans hundreds of pages. Up from a few dozen a decade ago.

At each tab, one question: Is this really worth the effort to get there?

When your destination website says a café the visitor wants to check out opens at 8 am and Google says 9 am. They notice. When your event calendar lists a festival from last year. They notice. When accommodations, attractions, or neighborhoods look nothing like what your destination promises. They notice.

No complaints. They don’t leave a review. They vanish.

A Number Worth Knowing

Recent local search surveys from BrightLocal show that around two‑thirds of consumers say they would avoid or stop using a local business if they find incorrect information in its online listings.

Not a brutal review or public callout. Just hours that don’t match. A phone number that rings nowhere. Photos that predate the renovation. An address pin that drops them behind a dumpster.

You see small stuff. They see: What else will be wrong when I get there?

You’re Probably Thinking: “We Keep Our Info Updated”

Most destinations believe this. And for the things you directly control, your own website, your own social accounts, it’s probably true.

The problem is everything you don’t control. You don’t own OTA listings. You can’t edit private websites. You have no authority over a gallery’s Google hours.

But you can coordinate and make accuracy easier than neglect.

Google pulls from sources you don’t actively manage anymore. Old information sticks around far longer than anyone expects. The chamber site still shows last season’s hours. A travel blogger quoted your 2021 event schedule, and that post still ranks.

Nobody lied. The information changed. Just not everywhere. Six sources, three different answers, zero trust.

To make sense of it, break “inconsistency” into three buckets:

• Factual mismatches: hours, address, phone, price.

• Visual mismatches: photos, quality, and ambiance that don’t match reality.

• Promise mismatches: what your brand story says versus what Google, OTAs, and third‑party sites actually show.

This isn’t a PR issue. It’s a conversion issue. The people reading this are judged on heads in beds, tax receipts, and bookings. When travelers vanish between tabs, that’s lost room nights and ticket sales, not just hurt feelings.

If each invisible dropout is just one lost two‑night stay, and it happens 20 times a week across your partners, that’s hundreds of room nights a year you will never see in your reports.

This Hits Developing Destinations Harder

When a destination is growing fast, information breaks apart faster than anyone can track.

A new restaurant opens. Google doesn’t know it exists for months.

Seasonal hours change. Only one platform updates.

The tourism board refreshes its site. The regional one is stuck in last year.

An event gets added. The cancelled one never comes down.

The more your destination grows, the more sources exist. The more sources exist, the more the information varies.

The traveler checking tabs doesn’t see the complexity behind the scenes. They just see inconsistency. And inconsistency looks like indifference.

Sweden Decided to Fix This

Visit Sweden launched a national system in 2025. About 14,000 entries across 21 regions; hotels, restaurants, experiences, events. All following the same structure. When a business updates their hours, every platform pulling from the system shows the same hours. When a festival gets added, every site reflects the same dates. Update once, it shows everywhere.

What Sweden did with a national API is what your region can approximate with a shared spreadsheet and a quarterly check‑in.

It took years. They did it anyway, because trust breaks before booking, not after.

Sweden also talks about this unified database as a competitiveness and discoverability play: central, consistent data makes it easier for the world to actually find and trust all those entries.

Ireland Tried Something Similar

Wild Atlantic Way launched in 2014. 2,500 kilometers along Ireland’s west coast. The route made headlines. The real work was wrangling hundreds of businesses under one brand.

A decade later: roughly 29% more visitors, about 60% more revenue, and around €3 billion annually.

Consistency didn’t create demand. It made it easier for existing demand to actually reach your hotels, restaurants, and experiences.

“We’re Too Small for That”

You might be reading about Sweden’s national program or Ireland’s decade-long effort and thinking: That’s great for them. We don’t have those resources.

True. And the principle shrinks to fit.

Sweden and Ireland succeeded because they understood something simple: when information matches everywhere, trust builds. When it doesn’t, trust breaks.

You don’t need a national system to start. You need to look at what travelers actually see when they’re deciding whether you’re real.

A Simple Exercise

Try this. Pick one business. A café, a kayak outfitter, a guesthouse. Search for it the way a traveler would. Google, their website, TripAdvisor, an OTA. Do the hours match? The photos?

Five minutes. You’ll see it.

Now do nine more.

You’ll find cracks in most of them. Not because anyone is careless. Because nobody made it anyone’s job.

Now imagine a traveler doing the same exercise, except they don’t know your destination. They don’t know which source to trust. All they see is: it doesn’t match.

What you’re mapping isn’t mistakes. You’re mapping where people start to second-guess if they should visit.

The Real Reason This Gets Overlooked

Reviews feel urgent. A one-star rating lands and demands a response. You can see it. You can measure it. You can act on it.

Information accuracy doesn’t feel urgent. It’s invisible until interest fades and you’re left guessing why.

Where This Leaves You

Reviews are worth monitoring. Don’t stop.

But reviews are what happens after someone visits. Information accuracy determines whether they visit at all.

To make this something your board and members can grab onto, turn your “Simple Exercise” and what comes next into a named, repeatable program:

Quarterly Ten‑Tab Audit

Three steps you can put on an agenda:

1. Sample: Pick 20-25 high‑impact businesses and events (mix members and non‑members).

2. Compare: Look at their hours, contact info, and photos across Google, their own site, and one OTA.

3. Fix: Note every mismatch, show each business what travelers see, and support them in updating.

Audit the basics, including non-members. Pick 20 businesses. Mix members and non-members. Check their hours, contact info, and photos across Google, their own site, and one OTA. Write down every mismatch in a simple template: business name, link, platform, mismatch type, and who owns fixing it. When you show a non-member what travelers actually see, you’re not selling. You’re helping. That builds trust faster than any membership brochure.

Share what you find. Most businesses don’t know their listings are wrong. Show them the gaps, not as a criticism, but as a mirror. When they see what travelers see, they want to fix it.

Make it about sales or reservations, not admin. Nobody fixes their listing because the chamber asked. They fix it when they realize it’s costing them money. Accurate info isn’t paperwork. It’s the difference between a traveler calling or closing the tab.

Give someone ownership. Information consistency needs to be someone’s job. Not an afterthought. Even part-time works. What matters is that someone wakes up knowing this is theirs. In a small office, this often lives best with whoever already owns your website and email CRM. They’re already closest to your listings and digital touch-points.

Make updates easy. Small operators let listings rot because fixing them feels complicated. Clear instructions help. Direct support helps more. For example: create a one‑page “How to fix your Google listing” handout and walk it around Main Street once per quarter.

Treat seasonal changes like events. When summer hours start or winter hours end, that’s not trivia. Build a checklist that fires every time a season shifts.

Build the habit together. Travelers don’t blame one business. They just start doubting the whole place. Try pairing a hotel with a nearby restaurant. They share visitors. They’ll notice when the other’s info is off, and they’ll care.

Track the fixes. Report them quarterly. Small wins build momentum and make the case for more resources.

If you want a simple starting point, begin with your top 25 searched businesses and events. Aim for one clean, consistent record for each of them everywhere they appear online. That’s work a 2-3 person team can realistically take on.

Want a head start? I’ve put together AI prompts to help. One for auditing businesses, one for creating a handout, one for seasonal changeovers, and a few more. Email me or message by hitting the button below. I’ll send them over.

What This Really Comes Down To

Credibility isn’t built in a single moment. It accumulates across dozens of small moments. Every time a traveler checks a source and finds it matches, every time an answer comes without effort, every time a destination feels like it’s really worth the effort to get there.

Reviews matter. They come later.

The visitors you’re losing right now will never write one.

You’re not failing. You’re missing something invisible. Once you see it, you can assign it, track it, and fix it.

If you want more practical, no‑fluff ideas on how destinations actually earn trust before anyone books, subscribe below.

Visitors arrive disoriented. They spend the first hour figuring out what’s actually open. They ask area businesses questions that the destination should have answered. They leave without finding what would have made them stay, or return.

None of this shows up in your campaign metrics. But your operators feel it. Your frontline staff absorb it. And your repeat visitation numbers quietly reflect it.

The cost is real. It just doesn’t land where anyone’s measuring it.

What It Feels Like When A Place Is Ready

You pull into a coastal town you’ve never visited. Late afternoon, shoulder season. The light’s going gold over the harbour, salt and woodsmoke in the air. You’re tired. You haven’t eaten since breakfast. And you have no idea where anything is.

But the first thing you see when you step out of the car is a hand-painted sign at the edge of the lot. Not a billboard. Not a QR code. Just clear directions: town centre this way, public toilets there, the bakery closes at five but the pub kitchen opens at six.

No one asked you to scan anything. No one tried to sell you a tour. The sign answered the questions you hadn’t asked yet.

By the time you reach the pub, you’ve already decided you like this place.

That decision happened before anyone said a word to you.

The destination was “ready”. And you felt it.

The Problem No One Budgets For

Most destinations are built to generate awareness. The campaigns run, the beds fill, the restaurants get busy. Success.

But awareness isn’t the same as “welcome”. And marketing a destination isn’t the same as preparing for the people who actually arrive.

What’s Actually Happening

Visitors show up with expectations shaped by your website, your social content, your partner listings. When reality doesn’t match, when the hours are wrong, the attraction is closed, the parking situation is nothing like what they read, that frustration doesn’t disappear. It lands somewhere.

It gets absorbed. By someone.

That info gap gets pushed downstream, onto the staff and margins of local businesses.

A trust problem with a very specific cost:

• fewer repeat visits

• more OTA dependence

• more staff burnout

All of it invisible in your quarterly report.

How Trust Forms (and where it breaks)

Trust doesn’t start at the front desk. It starts in the parking lot. At the trailhead. In front of the closed restaurant with no sign explaining why.

When things are clear, guests relax. When they relax, the trip sticks. And weeks later, that’s what they miss, the ease of it. That missing feeling is what pulls people back.

When someone arrives at a place that was expecting them, they don’t have to figure anything out. They can just be there. That ease sticks. It becomes the story they tell.

When someone arrives at a place that wasn’t ready, where the signage contradicts the website, where no one seems sure what’s open, visitors spend their energy orienting instead of enjoying. That irritation sticks, too. They leave, saying the trip was “fine.” They don’t come back.

What does this mean Monday morning? Every out-of-date listing, every inconsistent hour, every unanswered arrival question is a small withdrawal from a trust account you can’t see, but your area businesses can feel.

The Bind You Are In

Here’s the part no one says out loud: most DMOs were built to market, not to coordinate.

You don’t control hours. You don’t control staffing. You don’t control signage, municipal infrastructure, or what private operators decide to do on a Tuesday. You’re funded to drive awareness, measured on hotel room nights, and evaluated by stakeholders who want more visibility, not fewer surprises at the trailhead.

And yes, members want visibility, whether they’re ready or not. That’s real pressure. But promoting what isn’t ready doesn’t make them ready. It just moves the disappointment downstream.

So when someone suggests “readiness,” the honest response is: “With what authority? With what budget? With what mandate?”

That’s a real bind. And this piece isn’t pretending you can dissolve it by thinking differently.

But here’s what’s also true: the visitor experience doesn’t care about your org chart. Guests don’t know the difference between “the DMO” and “the destination.” When arrival goes poorly, it all blurs into one feeling: this place wasn’t ready for me.

You may not control coordination. But you’re already paying for the lack of it, just through channels that don’t show up in your metrics.

What it looks like in practice

In 1994, a 900-person Alpine village near Salzburg made a decision.

Werfenweng was losing to bigger ski resorts. They couldn’t compete on scale or amenities. They were watching visitors drive past to somewhere shinier. They knew they had to do something different or disappear.

So instead of marketing harder, they chose a constraint: soft mobility. Car-free holidays. Arrival without issue.

They built every touchpoint around that decision. Guests who arrive by train, or who agree to park their car for at least four days, receive a mobility card. It includes free shuttles from the train station, electric vehicles, e-bikes, and even horse-drawn carriages.

The system answers every arrival question before the guest thinks to ask.

The result: visitor numbers increased by over 35 percent. Not because they marketed harder, but because the experience matched the promise.

This works because expectations are shaped before arrival. Not because it’s charming.

Someone, somewhere, decided what this destination was for. And made sure the first fifteen minutes reflected it.

That’s not control. That’s alignment. A shared understanding of what gets promoted and what visitors can actually expect.

You don’t need a new department. You don’t need a new budget. You need a different filter for deciding what gets marketed before it’s ready.

What This Doesn’t Require

This doesn’t mean saying no to every member who wants visibility. It doesn’t mean perfect coordination across every touchpoint. And it doesn’t mean waiting until everything is ready before you promote anything.

It means asking one question before something goes out: “If a guest shows up expecting this, will the experience match?” When the answer is no, that’s not a reason to block—it’s a reason to flag, to prepare, to align. The goal isn’t control. It’s reducing the gap between what you promise and what actually happens.

Alignment doesn’t require unanimity. It requires shared minimums.

This works best when destinations are willing to disappoint the wrong guests to serve the right ones.

What Happens When You Don’t

When readiness stays someone else’s problem, the pattern repeats:

More campaigns. More visitors. More operators absorbing the friction of arrival. The marketing gets louder. The experience stays uneven. And the guests who could have become regulars drift away without saying why.

Meanwhile, your best operators burn out. Not just running their business, but correcting misinformation they didn’t create, explaining closures no one told them about, apologising for a destination that promised something it couldn’t deliver.

That’s the bill. And it comes due in churn, in complaints, in the slow erosion of the trust that makes a destination worth returning to.

The Questions That Matter This Week

You don’t need to fix everything. You need to see it.

What does someone actually experience in the first fifteen minutes after they arrive? Not what you hope. What happens.

Where are the gaps between what you’re promoting. What’s actually true this week?

Who is currently absorbing the cost of those gaps, and how long have you let them carry it?

The Bottom Line

The places people remember weren’t trying to impress them. They were ready for them.

It’s a choice about what gets promoted before it’s coordinated. And who pays when it isn’t.

Right now, that cost is landing on your area businesses. On their staff. On their margins. On repeat visits that never happen.

The question isn’t whether you have the authority to fix this. It’s whether you’re willing to change what you reward. And what you’re willing to stop promoting until it’s ready.

For This Week

Paste this into a meeting agenda or share it with your team.

Map the first fifteen minutes of a visitor’s arrival in your destination.

• What questions do they have before anyone speaks to them?

• Where do they go for answers, and is that information current this week?

• At what point do they stop orienting and start enjoying?

• Where do confusion or friction usually show up?

• Who absorbs the cost when this breaks, and have you talked to them about it?

Then ask:

• What is one small thing we could change this week that would make those first fifteen minutes easier?

He’s standing on his 80-acre property in Pomfret, Vermont, watching his tractor idle. He’ll use it again this afternoon. Not to work his land, but to haul another rental car out of a ditch along Cloudland Road. Behind him, more than a hundred vehicles line the narrow, unpaved lane, parked on lawns and in driveways. A woman has set up a portable changing booth, cycling through outfits for photos with Sleepy Hollow Farm in the background.

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A Walk Through Tulum Today

On Reading Between the Lines

This wasn’t about marketing fatigue or changing travel trends.

It was about trust eroding before arrival. About a destination losing bookings quietly, long before price ever entered the conversation.

I lived in the region for over 20 years. Back when the highway to the beach was a narrow lane-and-a-half road with more bikes than cars. What’s happening now isn’t a surprise. It’s the bill that comes due when the experience stops matching what’s sold.

The New Airport, the First Signal

Tulum International Airport opened in December 2023 with fanfare. Direct flights. Headlines. A signal that growth was coming.

By late 2025, airlines were cutting service. December 2025 scheduled capacity was down more than 20% versus the year before. International arrivals fell 43.7%. Five major U.S. carriers reduced service or pulled out entirely.

For a first-time visitor booking a trip in early 2026, this doesn’t look like a crisis. It looks like friction.

On…

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The ferry pulls into a harbor town somewhere in the Mediterranean. Late-shoulder season. Morning light cuts across the water. A couple steps off with their bags, following the trickle of passengers toward the old town.

They pass the taxi stand. The drivers are clustered together, scrolling phones, not looking up. A shopkeeper adjusts a display with her back turned. At the café terrace overlooking the quay, a server clears plates and sets down a folded menu without a word.

Nothing is rude. Nothing is wrong.

But nothing welcomes them either.

Now picture a different arrival. A nod from a fisherman. A warm word they don’t understand. A half-smile at a café table. Same infrastructure. Different climate.

That feeling will shape everything that follows. How long they stay, how much they explore, and whether they come back.

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