By Andrew Leary
Principal, Coraggio Group

(With permission. Originally published on LinkedIn)

“Two weeks out from Newport Beach, here’s what I keep coming back to from our conversations at the DI CEO Summit.

Nearly 300 destination leaders gathered last month for Destinations International’s 2026 CEO Summit. The theme was “EXPLORE: The Mindset of Modern Leadership,” but what actually unfolded—in the hallways, at roundtables, over dinner at Pelican Hill—was harder to categorize. A reckoning, maybe.

Here’s what stayed with me:

📣 Nobody is hiding anymore. “Leading When Everyone Is Watching” wasn’t a motivational session…it was a mirror. Boards are asking harder questions. Elected officials are paying closer attention. Communities want to know what tourism actually does for them. Kara Franker, JD, CDME, Michael Crockatt, and Daniel Kuperschmid were direct: the old playbook of impressions and economic multipliers isn’t landing. The response has to be a fundamental shift in how we define and communicate value. Not better slides. A different conversation entirely.

📣 AI isn’t a tool problem. It’s a leadership problem. Todd Brook from Unchained framed it well: the most important question about AI isn’t what it can do — it’s what it requires of leaders. Where do you automate? Where do you protect the human element? How do you guide teams through change without losing their trust? Most of us left agreeing we’d been having the wrong version of this conversation.

📣 Relationships are now strategic infrastructure. We pushed on this hard in the relationship-building session. The idea of relationships as a “moat” reframed something I’ve believed for years but hadn’t articulated this clearly. In an era of distributed power and rapid policy shifts, your network isn’t a soft asset. It’s operational. The most effective destination leaders right now are managing relationships with elected officials, hotel ownership, and board members with the same discipline they apply to marketing strategy.

📣 The funding conversation is getting uncomfortable. The Newport Beach MAP model, a private hotel ownership funding partnership, and a frank discussion on executive compensation under scrutiny made one thing clear: the financial structures supporting destination organizations are under stress and overdue for reinvention. DI’s own research suggests a significant share of destination organizations see their funding as vulnerable in the next three years. That’s not a rumor.

📣 And the external headwinds are real. Gloria Guevara Manzo from World Travel & Tourism Council, Ellen Davis from U.S. Travel Association, and along with Leslie Bruce ICD.D, CDME and Norbert Kettner didn’t soften the picture on inbound travel softness, geopolitical uncertainty, or global economic pressure. The destinations that weather this won’t ne cessarily be the best-funded—they’ll be led by people who know how to negotiate complexity and keep their communities behind them.”

📷 : all images sourced from Destinations International