‘Welcome Center Wendy’ is Evolving Into A Tourism Superhero
“Welcome Center Wendy”
Blog written by Ted Sullivan
Have I evolved in tourism? I think so. You see, I started in the tourism industry in 1996 with an 800 number, a call-and-fulfillment center filled with travel guides. People would see an ad for a destination, pick up the phone, call us, and talk to an actual human being about taking a trip. A few days later, a travel guide would arrive and, if we did our jobs well, help convince someone where to stay, what to eat, and what to see.
That was destination marketing, and it worked.
I have spent 30 years watching that model evolve. Sometimes quickly, and others agonizingly slowly. We went from call centers and fulfillment houses to websites, search engines, social media, programmatic advertising, mobile devices, geolocation data, and now artificial intelligence. Today, travelers have access to more information than at any point in history, yet the way they discover and choose destinations is becoming less predictable. DMOs have extraordinary amounts of data while often struggling to determine what actually matters.
Somewhere in the middle of trying to explain all of this, Welcome Center Wendy became an embodiment of evolution and change. She wanted to evolve; she just needed some guidance. I put her behind the counter of an empty welcome center surrounded by racks of brochures, maps, and travel guides. Nobody was coming through the door, but Wendy was still there, ready to help, but was a bit clueless because of all of the technical changes.
I liked her because Wendy represented my past. She was good at her job, but the problem was that the job was changing around her.
As the presentation developed, I started putting Wendy through the challenges facing DMOs. At one point, I had her measuring a toad with a ruler because I wanted to poke some fun at our industry's habit of obsessively measuring things without always asking whether those measurements tell us anything useful. She watched private sector brands move faster and tell better stories. She confronted climate change, political polarization, increasingly complicated data, and the shift from simply promoting a destination to helping steward it
When I started working on the second half of the keynote, which focused on DMOs that were actually evolving, I realized Wendy shouldn't disappear; she needed to evolve with them.
Visit Fort Myers brought her back first. They are developing an AI-driven website with MMGY that uses the DMO's own content and intelligence to create a conversational experience for travelers. Wendy, who had spent her career answering questions across a welcome center counter, suddenly had an AI partner helping her do the same thing at an entirely different scale.
Visit Tampa Bay took another approach, using Tiki’s AI chatbot within international digital advertising in the United Kingdom and Germany. Potential travelers didn't simply click on an ad. They had conversations, asked questions, and revealed what they actually cared about. The media wasn't just generating clicks anymore. It was generating intelligence.
Visit Mobile then showed what Azira’s geolocation data could reveal about where visitors and residents actually moved throughout a destination. They could identify patterns, connect digital advertising with real-world visitation, and find places of interest that represented opportunities. Instead of relying only on what people said they did, they could begin understanding what they actually did.
I like the irony in this story: Welcome Center Wendy isn't real. She was created with artificial intelligence. I used AI to create a character representing an industry struggling to understand AI, and then Wendy herself started getting better as I learned how to use the technology. What began as a simple illustration became a recurring character with a personality, a history, and, inexplicably, a toad sidekick. She went from overwhelmed welcome center employee to tourism superhero.
This may simultaneously be the best of times and the worst of times for DMOs.
Budgets are being questioned, residents are asking harder questions, technology is moving faster than organizational structures, and our traditional ownership of the destination narrative is disappearing. At the same time, I cannot remember a period in my career when DMOs had access to more powerful tools or a greater opportunity to become indispensable to their communities.
The opportunity is not to become better advertising organizations. It is to evolve from organizations that primarily promote places into organizations that understand them.
I started my career putting travel guides into envelopes for people who called an 800 number. We weren't doing tourism wrong. It was exactly what travelers needed from us at the time. But I certainly wouldn't build a DMO around that model today.
Wendy shouldn't either. Welcome Center Wendy evolved. How will we?
