What Happens When the World Comes to America and Discovers A Waffle House

The Japanese man who wrote a love poem about unlimited chips and salsa has broken me. He sat down at a Mexican restaurant and a basket of free tortilla chips appeared on his table before he even opened the menu. Unprompted. Unlimited. Free. And he wrote:

“We have not earned these.”

He has not EARNED these chips. (!!!)

Sir, they are bottomless. And they keep coming and nobody is counting and welcome to America. Our feeds are gracing us with the gods of all these funny, beautiful, genuinely moving videos of international visitors experiencing the United States for the very first time. And not polished major metros either. No welcome packets.

Middle fucking America. 🇺🇸

The Waffle Houses and the Buc-ee’s and the free refills and ranch dressing and the Twinkies from a gas station and the absolute chaos of the glorious Big Gulp.

Friends, we get FOUR MORE MONTHS of feel good content from our 1.24 million international visitors experiencing all of it through completely fresh eyes, posting in real time, creating some of the best travel content from the most mundane, ordinary, and unexpected places we never think about and almost always take for granted.

This is the moment we can finally pause for a moment and appreciate the things that we have and who we really are when the government and media doesn’t actively try to divide. We are AMERICAN MAXXXING. 🦅🦅🦅

That is an actual gift I did not realize how badly we needed it. Their presence has been the exact light we needed. We haven’t collectively experienced joy like this as a country in so long. Watching people from ALL OVER enjoying each other’s culture. It’s a reminder of what we can be.

Waves of dopamine from the algorithm feed right now

Freddy, the German soccer fan on a six-week road trip across America for the World Cup, is documenting everything with fresh eyes of ‘Merican greatness. His posts got so big that when he crossed into Louisiana, someone taped a handmade welcome sign to the official state sign. J.J. Watt put him up in the presidential suite at a Houston hotel. Alabama’s governor personally invited him back for football season. He became an Ella Fella and got TICKETS TO MEET HER. He did a 1 a.m. Waffle House run and gave it 10/10. I love this man.

My favorite part about this content is how obsessed internationals are with our food:

• Finding God in Cracker Barrel’s biscuits and gravy

• Learning that we use large stadiums for American football

• Experiencing crushed ice at a Sonic drive-in

• The first bite of a fatty Texas brisket for the very first time

Can we also talk about the very CONCEPT that these people are experiencing the US OF A for the VERY FIRST TIME right before America 250… and the impression we’re getting of us?

The UFC fight on the White House South Lawn. Some guy got to New York City on the exact night the Knicks won their first championship in 53 years and fans lighting five school buses on fire. Every single store in America buried in America 250 decorations. Eagles on everything. “FREEDOM” on every throw pillow.

Hell yeah, brother. 🦅

And, the Japanese visitors went to a Dallas Walmart in the middle of ALL of this and they probably think THIS IS JUST HOW WE ARE ALL THE TIME ITS SO FUCKING FUNNY TO ME. I cannot stop laughing.

The kids are okay. We’re still okay. And right before America 250, we can celebrate each other and celebrate who we are. Fuck all the government issues that have divided us for what feels like forever. It’s just our everyday people, our culture, our genuine kindness. We have to remember that.

My soul is being healed scrolling through this content. It’s the only thing on my algorithm right now and it’s so fun to watch. I stopped at a Waffle House on the way to Bonnaroo this past weekend on purpose because Freddy made me want to. Hash browns smothered, middle of nowhere, genuinely perfect.

The Beer Data

The Financial Times projected fans will drink one billion extra pints of beer over the 39 days of this tournament. Past World Cups have driven consumption surges of 2.5% to 9.9% in host cities. England fans are arriving from a World Cup in Qatar where stadium beer literally wasn’t an option. Multiple states changed alcohol laws specifically for this tournament including New York, Philadelphia, Rhode Island, Washington, Georgia, and New Jersey all extended bar hours. States are rewriting laws to let these people drink longer. 85% of matches are scheduled during peak drinking hours and those England fans arriving from a World Cup where stadium beer literally didn’t exist is about to drive some serious cash.

Stadium beers run $14.50 to $16.50 across US venues. Fans are furious about it on social media, which means that money is walking out of the stadium and straight into the local bar down the street. New York, Philadelphia, Rhode Island, Washington, Georgia, and New Jersey all extended bar hours (some to 4am) specifically for this tournament. If your F&B partners haven’t been briefed that they are the direct beneficiaries of FIFA’s pricing decisions, do it and call them up. What an awesome opportunity for partners.

Gear Shift: The latest with AI and what this means for DMOs

Two things happened in our AI landscape this week.

First: the Adobe numbers that dropped yesterday.

Skift published Adobe data yesterday (June 17) showing that AI-sourced traffic to U.S. travel sites jumped 194% year over year in May, based on analysis of over 8 million visits. The visitors coming through AI are staying 70% longer per visit than people from non-AI sources. They bounce 41% less. They are 21% more engaged.

194% is a pretty wild jump. But, AI visitors convert at lower rates than traditional search visitors. Why? Because AI systems are surfacing whoever they can read, not necessarily whoever is best. And the readability problem is very much dependent on structure.

Adobe found that airlines are largely invisible to AI because their fare data is rendered client-side in JavaScript, which most AI crawlers can’t read. Hotels and car rental companies get surfaced because their content is server-rendered and machine-readable. The gap in AI visibility between airlines and hotels is not a marketing problem. It is a technical architecture problem. And destinations have the exact same exposure.

Sojern has been coming out with some bangers of data publications lately, so here’s another one From CEO Kurt Weinsheimer, who wrote in the Hotel Yearbook that the game has shifted from 50 search results to a shortlist of five. I highly recommend you have your hoteliers check out this link and look at the pre-stay checklist for the AI era.

BCG found 37% of travelers already use AI-enabled tools to plan and book trips. McKinsey found 84% say it improved their experience, and AI-referred visitors show a 45% lower bounce rate when they reach a travel site. That lower bounce rate from AI visitors that Adobe also confirmed is the same signal from two independent sources.

AI sends engaged visitors. The problem is it only sends them to destinations it can read.

SimpleView/Granicus analyzed ChatGPT traffic on destination websites and found that in a single eight-day period, ChatGPT made nearly two million requests to DMO sites seeking to answer traveler questions. And 45% of those requests targeted individual listing pages for attractions, restaurants, hotels, and tours. Not the homepage. Not the brand campaign. The listings.

Skift found that major hotels and airlines are already losing the AI visibility game to NerdWallet and Reddit. Third-party aggregators and user forums outrank brand content in AI-generated travel answers because AI systems weight sources that appear credible and user-validated over polished brand copy written to convert. Your destination’s content is competing for the same credibility.

Anthropic launched Claude Fable 5 on June 9. Three days later, the U.S. Commerce Department issued an export control directive suspending access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5 for any foreign national anywhere on earth. Anthropic received the order at 5:21 p.m. on a Friday and killed both models for every customer worldwide by that evening. So, that just happened. A government letter, a Friday afternoon, and the most powerful publicly available AI model disappeared for every organization using it.

Industry research published this month found only about 11% domain overlap between what ChatGPT cites and what Perplexity cites for the same queries. ChatGPT favors encyclopedic, Wikipedia-style content at roughly 48%. Perplexity cites content under 30 days old at 82% and leans heavily on Reddit at around 47%. Google AI Overviews are now appearing in roughly half of all searches.

Each model is building a completely different shortlist from completely different content. Optimizing for AI as a single thing is the equivalent of running one ad platform and calling it a media plan.

Let’s connect these threads: we have 194% year-over-year growth in AI-referred travel traffic, AI visitors who are significantly more engaged than traditional visitors, a discovery layer that compresses to five names, 72% of destination professionals who feel ill-equipped to compete in it, a government that just demonstrated it can disable the most powerful AI model on a Friday afternoon, and clear evidence that each AI platform is building its answer from a completely different set of sources.

The board question is not “should we be doing AI.” The question is: which destinations are on the shortlist, who built it, and when did your organization decide it was going to be in the room?

Five Plays for to make this week

1. This content window is open and it’s closing. Jump in!

Every viral post from a World Cup visitor mentioning your region is attributable, shareable, real destination proof. This is some of the best earned media in a decade. Jump in the comments. Respond. Repost with credit. Be genuine about it! Four months of greatness in the algorithm.

2. Brief your food, beverage, and bar partners on how to win during this time.

Let’s get them some love. Half of all visitor spending is going to food and beverage, one billion extra pints are being drunk this tournament, and the fans paying $19 for a Stella inside the stadium are spending that difference down the street.

3. Run an AI audit on your destination if you haven’t already.

Ask ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini where to stay, what to do, and where to eat in your destination the way your visitors would actually ask. What comes back? What’s missing? What competitor fills the gap? The 194% traffic growth is going somewhere. Know whether it’s going to you.

4. Your listing pages are your AI content. Treat them that way.

45% of ChatGPT’s requests to DMO sites target individual attraction, restaurant, and hotel listing pages. Not your homepage. Not your campaigns. If those listings are thin, outdated, or semantically vague, that is what AI is reading and that is what it is surfacing to the visitors who stay 70% longer.

5. Build a multi-model visibility strategy, not a single-model one.

ChatGPT and Perplexity share only about 11% of their source citations. Google AI Overviews pulls from an entirely different set. A single-model AI content strategy is not an AI content strategy — it is a single-platform bet, and the Fable shutdown is what happens when that platform bets lose. Diversify across models. Measure across models. The destinations that do this now will compound the advantage.

The chips were free. Everybody deserved them.

And if you’re heading to TTRA next week, I’ll see you there. Let’s grab a drink.