Field Notes

In this episode of Field Notes: Insights and Observations for the Travel Marketer, Sara Dyer challenges one of marketing's most commonly accepted success metrics: website traffic. While traffic remains useful, Sara argues that marketers may be giving it far more importance than it deserves in an era where discovery happens everywhere.

Drawing parallels between discovering a favorite musician and choosing a travel destination, Sara explores how modern audiences move through a web of recommendations, social content, AI conversations, playlists, reviews, and personal connections long before they ever land on a website. By the time someone arrives on your site, they may already be deep into their decision-making journey.

The discussion highlights a growing challenge for marketers: attribution. Consumers often remember the destination, brand, or artist they chose, but rarely remember the exact sequence of touchpoints that influenced their decision. As AI, social platforms, and recommendation engines continue to shape discovery, measuring influence becomes increasingly complex.

Rather than focusing exclusively on clicks and visits, Sara encourages marketers to think more broadly about creating memorable moments, meaningful experiences, and content that contributes to the journey—even when it doesn't receive direct attribution.

Key Takeaways

Topics Covered

Featured Guest

In this episode of Field Notes: Insights and Observations for the Travel Marketer, Eric Hultgren breaks down what may be the most powerful piece of marketing released this year: Nike's celebration of the New York Knicks' first NBA Championship since 1973. More than an ad, it's a masterclass in cultural storytelling, preparation, and understanding audience identity.

Using Nike's frenetic, emotionally charged spot directed by Josh Safdie and set to Billy Joel's "New York State of Mind," Eric explores why the campaign resonated so deeply with fans and why it represents something larger than sports marketing. The ad captures the energy, anticipation, and collective identity of New York City at a moment decades in the making.

The conversation draws parallels to iconic real-time marketing moments like Oreo's famous "Dunk in the Dark" campaign, arguing that the magic isn't found in speed alone. The real advantage comes from preparation, cultural fluency, and having the right team ready when the moment arrives.

For destination marketers, the lesson is clear: every community has its own version of a Knicks championship moment. The challenge is identifying what your residents and visitors care about deeply enough to create that kind of emotional connection—and being prepared to tell that story when the opportunity appears.

Key Takeaways

Topics Covered

Connect With Us

Want to discuss destination marketing, storytelling, AI, or audience behavior? Visit Advance Travel & Tourism and explore more insights for travel marketers.

Dreaming. Planning. Booking. Experiencing. Sharing. Clean boxes. Useful shorthand. Increasingly fictional.

Sarah watched her own honeymoon research blow right past the model — talking to ChatGPT about vibes before she'd picked a continent, picturing herself in Greek restaurants before Greece was even on the list. Discovery and consideration weren't sequential. They were the same moment.

That's the shift worth paying attention to: travelers are arriving at destination websites already half-decided, shaped by creators, Reddit threads, AI conversations, and TikTok saves that marketers had no hand in and often no visibility into. The website didn't start the journey. It entered one already in progress.

The five stages aren't wrong exactly — they just describe how marketers think about the journey, not how travelers actually move through it. And that gap is where a lot of travel marketing budget quietly disappears.

The real question isn't how to get someone to your site. It's how to show up in the moments that are doing the actual deciding.

What happens when a traveler chooses your destination without ever visiting your website?

In this keynote, Eric Hultgren explores how AI is fundamentally changing destination discovery and why traditional measures of digital success are becoming less reliable. From ChatGPT-generated itineraries to Google's AI-powered search experience, travelers are increasingly getting answers before they ever click.

Eric breaks down the rise of zero-click travel planning, the growing importance of AI visibility, and what destination marketers need to do today to remain discoverable in an AI-mediated world.

Along the way, he shares practical frameworks for evaluating destination content, building AI-ready campaigns, creating organizational AI policies, and identifying the questions your destination should "own" before someone else does.

Key Topics:

• Why website traffic may no longer be the most important metric

• The rise of zero-click search and AI-generated travel planning

• How Google, ChatGPT, and Claude decide which destinations to trust

• Why YouTube has become a critical AI visibility channel

• The difference between AI dabblers, producers, and AI-native organizations

• Building content for retrieval, not just publication

• How to identify the traveler questions your destination should own

• Creating scalable AI workflows for campaign development

• Why clarity beats cleverness in the age of AI discovery

• Practical ways to audit your destination's digital presence today

Memorable Quote:

"The influence begins before the click. AI is just one more tool travelers are using to decide where to visit."

Key Takeaway:

The question is no longer whether travelers can find your website. The question is whether AI can find, understand, and trust your destination before the traveler ever arrives.

About the Speaker:

Eric Hultgren is National Director of Content for Advance Travel & Tourism and a leading voice on the intersection of AI, search, storytelling, and destination marketing. His work focuses on how emerging technology is reshaping traveler behavior and what marketers must do to remain visible, trusted, and relevant

In this episode of Field Notes: Insights and Observations for the Travel Marketer, Eric Hultgren reads a piece from strategist Ryan Winfield and Sara Dyer is back to explore two of the biggest questions facing destination marketers right now: How is AI reshaping search behavior, and what does it really mean when 90% of marketers say they're using AI?

Ryan Winfield shared his findings on Linkedin from a review of 24 destination marketing organizations' analytics accounts, comparing 12 months of performance against the previous year. While organic search traffic declined by 14%, referral traffic from ChatGPT increased by an astonishing 446%. The conversation explores why "zero-click" search experiences and AI-generated answers are changing traveler behavior, what this means for SEO strategies, and why organizations should focus on creating unique, authoritative content that AI systems can't easily replicate.

Sara Dyer tackles another widely cited statistic: nearly 90% of marketers now use AI. Rather than focusing on adoption alone, she argues that AI is rapidly becoming infrastructure—more like email or collaboration software than a standalone marketing tactic. As AI becomes commonplace, the competitive advantage shifts away from access to technology and toward human judgment, original thinking, proprietary data, and the ability to ask better questions.

Together, the discussion offers a practical look at how travel marketers should think about visibility, authority, and differentiation in a world increasingly shaped by AI-powered discovery.

Key Takeaways

• Organic search traffic may be declining, but AI-driven referral traffic is growing rapidly.

What separates the travel marketers who see what's coming from the ones who are always reacting to it? It's not more data. It's a different way of looking.

In this keynote, Eric Hultgren makes the case for trading the archeologist's mindset — reconstructing what was — for the anthropologist's — understanding what's becoming. The difference shows up in your content, your campaigns, and whether you're leading your audience or chasing them.

Along the way, he walks through a jaguar tracker in the Amazon, a peanut butter sandwich that became an NFL licensing story, a shoe store in Brooklyn that turned a Tuesday into a purchase, a black box at a Michigan electronics company, and a fudge shop employee who didn't bother to put down her salad.

What connects them: wonder dies from overexposure. The longer you've been in a space, the harder it is to see it. And the harder it is to see it, the harder it is to tell a story that makes someone move.

This isn't a session about AI tools or content calendars. It's about the skill underneath all of it — curiosity as a competitive advantage, play as a professional practice, and the compass over the map as a strategic posture.

If you work in travel marketing, DMO strategy, hospitality, or destination storytelling, this one's for you.

Topics covered:

No guest today. Just a question that won't let go.

Sara Dyer traces her own honeymoon research—bouncing between ChatGPT, TikTok, Instagram, friends, comment sections, and back again—and arrives at something uncomfortable: she can't remember most of what influenced her. She remembers the feeling. She remembers Greece rising to the top. She doesn't remember the campaign.

That might not be a problem. It might be the point.

This episode makes the case that travelers don't experience marketing—they experience an ecosystem. And the best marketing might be the kind that's completely invisible by the time someone books: no single video that closed the deal, no campaign they can cite, just a slow accumulation of signals that moved them from uncertain to confident.

Worth sitting with if you spend your days measuring impressions and wondering whether any of it lands.

ChatGPT narrowed the destination. TikTok sealed the deal. This episode, Sara Dyer joins Eric Hultgren to break down her actual honeymoon research process—and what it reveals about the real job travel content needs to do in 2025.

They open with two news items worth paying attention to: OpenAI reportedly wants to abandon the chatbot format entirely in favor of a context-aware super app, and what that pivot could mean for Gemini's dominance. Then Eric unpacks Obsession—the horror film with a $750K budget that's made $152M and keeps gaining audience each weekend—as a case study in the kind of experience that only works when you're trapped in it. The parallel to travel marketing is not subtle.

The bulk of the episode is Sara walking through how she and her fiancé Max actually chose Greece: ChatGPT for the shortlist, TikTok for the conviction. She watched 30–40 videos. She can't name a single creator. And that's the point.

What you'll hear:

Most destinations aren’t short on data—they’re short on decisions.

In this episode of Field Notes, Eric Hultgren sits down with three operators who live at the intersection of data, strategy, and real-world application: Frida Bahja, Ktimene Axtell, and Josh Gibson.

The conversation cuts through the noise around “more data” and gets to the harder question:

You’ll hear:

And then it pivots.

Eric reframes the entire conversation through the lens of zero-click search and AI decision-making, where travelers don’t visit your website, but still make decisions about your destination.

That shift changes everything:

This isn’t a conversation about tools.

If you're responsible for growth, storytelling, or strategy in travel—this is the episode that forces a reset.

What if the job of a DMO isn’t to grow tourism…

In this episode, Eric sits down with Nate Wyeth, Chief of Staff at Visit Bend, to unpack a deceptively simple idea:

If the community doesn’t benefit, the destination eventually breaks.

This is a conversation about regenerative tourism—not as a buzzword, but as an operating system.

And it starts with a North Star Nate has been chasing for two decades:

How do we grow in a way that actually benefits the people and places we serve?

Tourism isn’t just an economic engine.

It’s a relationship:

Break that relationship…

1. Community isn’t a stakeholder—it’s the starting point

Because:

If you ignore that… you’re borrowing time.

2. The real definition of sustainability

It’s not branding.

It’s literally in the word:

Sustain = make it last.

That forces a shift from:

3. The balancing act every DMO avoids (but shouldn’t)

Tourism creates:

But also:

The job isn’t to eliminate one side.

4. The smartest resource allocation analogy you’ll hear

Most DMOs:

Walk into a casino and drop everything on the first slot machine.

Better approach:

5. Why some communities “get it” faster than others

It’s not geography.

It’s people.

Places like Oregon work because:

That’s the unlock.

6. How to build buy-in (even in skeptical markets)

You don’t start with:

“We need sustainability.”

You start with:

Then expand the aperture.

7. The “toddler on a sugar high” economy metaphor

Right now, tourism feels like:

The real question:

What happens when the sugar crash hits?

Smart DMOs are already planning for that moment.

8. The most underrated discipline: postmortems

The industry bias:

What’s missing:

Nate’s take:

If you don’t learn from failure, you’re just repeating it faster.

9. Collaboration isn’t optional—it’s structural

Visitors don’t respect boundaries:

So DMOs can’t either.

The Bend model:

Everyone at the table.

Because impact doesn’t stay in one place.

If your AI talk is about being found,

Most destinations are still optimizing for:

This is about:

There are really two futures for DMOs:

Nate is clearly building the second.

If this hits, here’s where to start:

Catch more episodes of Field Notes for grounded conversations with people shaping the future of travel marketing.