88: Is Your DMO Protecting Itself Into Irrelevance? (Chris Fair)

Jul 2, 2026 · 51 min · 12 segments

Most DMOs talk about economic impact. Chris Fair, CEO of Resonance Co and author of the annual Best Cities report, talks about something harder to measure — and more consequential: whether a city is actually lovable. In this episode, Fair shares data from Resonance's perception vs. performance analysis across hundreds of destinations. The gap between how a place performs on objective metrics and how people actually feel about it is where most DMO strategies fall apart. DMOs that focus narrowly on defending their budget and organizational territory are becoming obsolete — while cities that integrate tourism, economic development, and community quality into a unified lovability strategy are pulling ahead. The conversation gets into why the traditional DMO model is structurally misaligned with how people actually choose destinations today, what the Best Cities data reveals about which markets are winning and why, and what it would take for a DMO to genuinely lead a city's positioning rather than just promote it. **Bottom Line:** DMOs that protect their narrow lane are engineering their own irrelevance. The ones that survive will be the ones willing to own the harder question - not just "are people visiting?" but "do people love this place?" - and build the cross-sector partnerships to do something about it.