Disruption is coming for the DMO world.

Actually, scratch that. Disruption is already here.

You can feel it in the way people plan trips, and you can see it in how quickly new tools show up and change behavior almost overnight. Things that felt predictable even a couple of years ago now feel less certain. The role of a website, the way people discover destinations, how influence actually works, even who owns the relationship with the traveler. None of that feels as stable as it once did. And if you’re paying attention, there’s a realization that comes with that. The playbook that got us here will not be the one that gets us where we need to go next.

That’s not a reason to panic. But it is a signal that we need to start thinking differently about how we operate. When the path forward isn’t clear, having all the answers isn’t realistic. What matters is how you approach the problem. For me, that comes back to one idea. Over the long term, Scrappy always wins.

Scrappy is one of those words that gets used a lot, and it can mean almost anything depending on who’s saying it, so it’s worth being clear about what I mean. If you look at how the word is actually used, there are two very different ideas hiding inside it.

The first is the feisty version. The scrappy underdog. The one that fights anyway, even when the odds aren’t in their favor. There’s a kind of naive confidence to it. A willingness to try, to take a hit, to get back up and go again without overthinking it.

The second is more literal. Made from scraps. Piecing things together from what you have, pulling ideas from different places, connecting dots that weren’t meant to be connected. It’s resourceful, but more than that, it’s creative. It’s about looking outside your immediate environment for inputs and inspiration.

When you put those two ideas together, you get something much more useful. Scrappy becomes a mindset built on courage and imagination.

Courage is the willingness to try something when you don’t know how it’s going to turn out. It’s being comfortable with the possibility that it might not work. Imagination is the ability to see connections other people don’t and to bring ideas in from outside your space in a way that hasn’t been done before. When those two come together, you give yourself permission to challenge the way things have always been done.

That permission matters, because for a long time in the DMO world, the biggest perceived risk was trying something new. There was always a reason to stay inside the lines. Budget constraints, stakeholder expectations, board oversight. Playing it safe felt responsible.

That has flipped.

The biggest risk now is doing the same thing and hoping it keeps working. The environment is changing too quickly for that. Standing still is no longer neutral. It’s a slow decline.

That’s where asking “why not” becomes powerful.

Why not test a new format for how you tell your story instead of repeating the same campaign structure year after year?

Why not build something that doesn’t fit neatly into a traditional marketing bucket if it serves the visitor or the community in a meaningful way?

Why not partner with someone outside your industry who sees the world differently?

Why not try something small, learn from it, and iterate instead of waiting until it’s perfect?

Most of the time, the honest answer isn’t that you can’t. It’s that you haven’t.

And yes, some of those things will fail. That’s part of it. But the failure you can recover from is trying something that doesn’t work. The one that’s harder to recover from is realizing too late that you never tried at all.

That mindset only works if it’s grounded in the right place. Every decision has to run through the lens of the people you serve. In hospitality, that’s the guest. In the DMO world, it’s a mix of visitors, stakeholders, residents, and partners, but the principle is the same. If you’re not thinking about the long-term experience of those groups, you’re going to make short-term decisions that eventually catch up with you.

You see this pattern all the time. An organization focuses on efficiency, on outputs, on what’s easy to measure. The numbers start to look good on paper, but over time something drifts. The work becomes less connected to the actual experience people are having in the destination. Stakeholders feel it. Visitors feel it. The story we’re telling and the reality on the ground start to diverge. The best organizations don’t let that happen. They stay close to the experience. They spend time understanding what people are actually feeling, not just what the data says. DMOs need to be doing the same thing. If we’re not talking to our stakeholders and our visitors, we’re guessing, and guessing is not strategy.

The challenge is that doing anything new is uncomfortable. Trying something for the first time creates doubt, opens you up to criticism, and makes you feel like you don’t know what you’re doing. Your brain will come up with a long list of reasons to wait. That’s normal, but it’s also where the opportunity is.

One of the most valuable lessons I learned early in my career came from a mentor who pushed me to do work that felt unnecessarily hard. We would spend hours digging through data looking for insights that weren’t obvious, and I remember questioning why we were doing it at all. His answer was simple. Because it’s hard, and because most people won’t do it. That stuck with me.

Internally, we’ve turned that idea into a phrase. We call it hugging the cactus. If something feels difficult, that’s not a reason to avoid it. It’s often a signal that it’s worth leaning into. You don’t get meaningful outcomes without a little discomfort along the way.

There are two ways I think about applying this in practice. The first is from the ground up, using first principles thinking. That means stripping away assumptions and asking a simple question: what does the customer actually need?

In my former role at Fuel Travel, we hit a point where paid media wasn’t working the way it used to. It was getting more expensive and less effective, and we needed a different approach. When we stepped back and looked at what our audience was actually doing, the answer was clear. They were listening to podcasts, not just for information but because they enjoyed them. That insight led us to try something new.

We were scrappy. We had imagination and courage. We bought an $80 microphone, spent a few hours figuring out how to use it, and hit record. The first episode wasn’t great, but we published it anyway. Over time, that podcast became the number one show in hotel marketing and drove significant growth for the business. It all started with asking a better question and being willing to try.

The second way to apply this mindset is from the top down. This is where you commit to something bigger, something that isn’t going to be solved in a single campaign or budget cycle. It’s what people often refer to as cathedral thinking.

At Visit Myrtle Beach, that showed up in our work around sensory-friendly travel. When I came across the stat that 87% of families with a loved one on the autism spectrum were not taking vacations, it became clear there was a bigger opportunity. We weren’t going to fix that overnight, but we could start building toward something meaningful.

We began locally by training businesses, building awareness, and creating a foundation. From there, we expanded outward into a children’s book, a television series, and partnerships with people who knew how to do things we didn’t. None of that sat neatly inside a traditional DMO playbook. It required patience, persistence, and belief before there was proof. But it worked, not just in terms of awareness or awards, but in the impact it had on real families.

One of the barriers that often gets in the way of this kind of thinking is how we define our roles. We tend to separate ourselves into marketing, communications, partnerships, and so on, but the reality is that marketing isn’t a department. Your brand is not your logo or your color palette. It’s the sum of the experiences people have with your destination, measured against what they expected those experiences to be.

If someone shows up in your destination and the experience matches what they expected, you’ve done your job. If it falls short, you’ve lost ground. If it exceeds expectations, you’ve created something valuable. Every touchpoint matters, which means everyone who shapes the visitor experience is influencing your marketing whether they think of themselves that way or not.

The next few years are going to require a different level of adaptability. We don’t know exactly what’s coming, but we know things are going to change. The organizations that are willing to question their assumptions, try new things, and stay close to the people they serve are going to be in a much better position than those that keep relying on what has always worked.

This isn’t about having all the answers. It’s about how you approach the questions. You can control how you think, how you respond, and how you influence the people around you. That’s where your energy should go.

At the end of the day, it’s fairly simple. Be courageous enough to try, imaginative enough to see new possibilities, focused enough to stay close to the people you serve, and willing to do the hard things when they matter.

That’s scrappy.

And in a world that’s changing this quickly, that mindset is going to be the only way to win.

If this way of thinking resonates, we talk about it every week on the Destination Discourse Podcast. Real conversations, real challenges, and a lot of ideas that don’t fit neatly into the old playbook. It’s built for people who are trying to figure this out in real time.

Listen on Apple Podcasts
Listen on Spotify
Watch on YouTube

Go be scrappy.