Joining the Board of City Destinations Alliance

The International Conference and General Assembly of City Destinations Alliance, held this year in Helsinki under the theme "The Human Pulse of Place and Purpose," concluded on 22 April with a Board election that brings several new members into the network's governance. Leena Lassila from Helsinki Partners, Marie-Louise Schnurpfeil from Linz Tourismus, and I were elected as Board Members for three-year terms. Gerry Lennon from Visit Belfast was re-elected, and Maya Janssen from Amsterdam & Partners was elected Vice-President for a one-year mandate. The continuing Executive Committee, led by Barbara Jamison-Woods as President, was confirmed in its composition.

For me, this is a moment worth pausing on. Joining the Board of CityDNA is an honour, and equally an invitation to contribute more actively to a network I have long respected and learned from. It also arrives at a particularly interesting point in the wider conversation about what European city destinations are for, how they are measured, and how they continue to earn the trust of their residents while remaining internationally relevant.

A parallel experience on the other side of the Atlantic

I have spent the last several years as a Board member of Destinations International, the global association primarily grounded in the North American DMO and CVB community. That experience has been valuable in ways I did not fully anticipate when I joined. Serving on an international board requires a different kind of listening than running a destination organisation. Priorities do not always align across regions. The issues that dominate one market are often adjacent concerns in another. Funding structures, political contexts, and resident sentiment dynamics vary substantially. What consistently holds, however, is the underlying craft of the work. Destination organisations everywhere are trying to understand visitors better, represent their communities well, and navigate a tourism economy that is more complex than it used to be.

Stepping into the CityDNA context extends that work rather than replaces it. European city destinations operate with particular characteristics that deserve engagement on their own terms. The density of urban tourism, the proximity between markets, the regulatory environment, and the specific dynamics of social licence in European cities all shape a DMO landscape with its own logic. I am genuinely looking forward to learning that ecosystem from the inside, and to understanding more precisely how DMOs and convention bureaux across Europe are adapting to pressures that, in some form, all of us recognise.

Why this network matters

City Destinations Alliance describes itself as a knowledge-sharing network. In practice, it is something slightly more specific. It is one of the few places where European city destination leaders meet in a structured way to work through problems that none of them can solve alone. Overtourism debates, climate pressure, funding sustainability, resident sentiment, data access, and the growing geopolitical weight on travel all now cross city borders. The quality of individual destination responses is influenced, quietly but meaningfully, by the quality of the shared thinking behind them.

What makes CityDNA particularly relevant at this point is its willingness to engage with harder questions without softening them. The CEO Summit in Barcelona earlier this year took reputation and trust as its central frame. The Helsinki conference placed the human dimension of destinations at the centre. The organisation is consistently asking the industry to engage with the structural rather than the cosmetic.

Where I hope to contribute

Each Board member brings a particular set of experiences and priorities to the work. For me, two areas feel most immediate.

The first is the international perspective carried over from Destinations International. The same challenges present themselves differently across markets, and there is real value in a network that can translate those differences into shared learning rather than parallel conversations. Bringing part of that perspective into CityDNA, while genuinely absorbing what the European ecosystem does differently, feels like a useful exchange to pursue.

The second is artificial intelligence in destination organisations. This is an area I am working on actively through doctoral research and in daily practice at Visit Oulu. The conversation at CityDNA Helsinki on AI and the changing architecture of destination discovery made clear that this is no longer a topic for a single workshop or keynote. It is becoming a structural question for the industry, and a governance question for destination organisations themselves. I am keen to contribute to how CityDNA itself uses AI in its operations, and to the wider work the network will undertake on behalf of its members, including the online workshop in June and the white paper expected in the autumn.

A note of thanks, and a view forward

Elections of this kind are never simply a matter of individual selection. They reflect the engagement of the wider membership, the quality of the candidate field, and the willingness of colleagues to support each other in stepping into roles that take time and attention away from already full jobs. My thanks go to the CityDNA members who voted, to Barbara Jamison-Woods and the continuing Executive Committee, and to the team behind the conference in Helsinki, which was among the most substantive industry gatherings of the year so far.

The European city destinations sector is at an interesting moment. Whether that moment becomes a period of coordinated progress or one of fragmented drift depends, in part, on how well its shared institutions function. CityDNA is one of those institutions. I look forward to the work ahead.