View From Afar S2, E4: IPW 2026 | Lauren Bennett McGinty on Why Minnesota’s Tourism Strategy Starts With “Neighborism”

How do you tell your state’s tourism story when the national headlines aren’t telling it for you? Lauren Bennett McGinty, executive director of Explore Minnesota, has spent the past year doing exactly that: leaning into authenticity, neighborliness, and the everyday people who make Minnesota, Minnesota.

In this IPW 2026 episode, recorded live from the conference floor in Fort Lauderdale, Bennett McGinty sits down with Afar editorial director Billie Cohen to talk about leading a state tourism agency through a year of federal enforcement activity, tensions with Canada, and the Boundary Waters mining ruling.

She walks through the Come Visit Your Neighbors campaign — Explore Minnesota’s “love letter” to the state — how it came together in a matter of weeks, and why grounding tourism marketing in real people and real stories has become her playbook for navigating crisis.

Transcript

Billie Cohen: I’m Billie Cohen, Afar’s editorial director. Welcome to View From Afar, a podcast that spotlights the people and ideas shaping the future of travel. And in this special series, I’m coming to you live from the floor of IPW the annual travel conference organized by the U.S. Travel Association, to share the best of America with the rest of the world.

It’s a big moment in US travel. Our country is preparing to co-host the FIFA World Cup and celebrate its 250th anniversary. All this is happening even as international arrivals are down and global events are affecting travel across the world. But the reasons we all travel haven’t changed. In fact, they’ve become more important. Joy and connection. So we’re talking to industry leaders about how their destinations are adapting in a tough world, and how they’re finding ways to give visitors experiences that make them smile and make them feel welcome

My guest today is Lauren Bennett McGinty, executive director of Explore Minnesota. Lauren joined the state marketing office in November 2021. Not an easy time, and she’s had to rise to more recent challenges, to Canadian tourism, to this northern state has decreased. And of course, Minneapolis was in the spotlight this past winter when the Trump administration sent federal agents to the city. But Lauren and her team have been getting creative and showing a resilience and an optimism to their approach to tourism that I’m excited to talk about. I’m also looking forward to this conversation because I love Minnesota, and I’ve had a few phenomenal trips there over the years. There’s really nothing like Minneapolis in the spring, as the city warms up and flowers start to bloom. And there’s nothing like the Lake Superior region in Cook County in the fall as the leaves start to turn gold and there’s early morning frost that makes the hiking trail shine. So let’s get to it all.

Welcome to View From Afar. Thanks for being here.

Lauren Bennett McGinty: Thank you for having me.

Billie: I was going to start with fangirling because we just launched a new podcast series called “Feel-Good Fridays.” Talk about great things that are happening and things we’re excited about in the travel world. And so my first appearance on it was talking about Minnesota and the Saint Croix Valley Pottery tour that I love so much. And then I was in Lutsen on Lake Superior last fall and wrote about that in our newsletter. Like just as fall and the leaves were changing color and stuff. So I just yeah, no question here. I’m just fangirling for a second.

Lauren: Yeah, I love that the Saint Croix Pottery tour is such a special thing because it’s in some people’s houses and it just kind of goes along the river. And then right in that area too is the Franconia Sculpture Park, which is. Yeah, beautiful. I just found out about this a couple years ago, but that community in that area, they’re all very artsy and they have like their own art crawls all the time and they like share things with you. It’s, it’s amazing. It’s just this like teeny tiny little art community that you would never guess is there.

Billie: Sounds awesome. I want to find out about those additional art crawls. Yeah, But okay, so let’s, let’s get into talking about tourism and everything that’s going on now. So you were leading tourism for a state that’s dealing with a lot right now, right? There’s federal enforcement activity, tensions with Canada, the recent Senate ruling to allow mining in the And that has real economic impacts on travel. How are you thinking about your role, you know, leading Explore Minnesota and tourism in a time like this?

Lauren: You know, it’s hard. And I don’t wish a lot of those things on anyone. I think Metro surge in the Twin Cities area, but really, it was the whole state that was impacted by the federal presence, came on the end of a really tough year for Minnesota in general, with a lot of other big events that we faced. And so our hearts have been broken for a while, and I think that our role as a tourism agency is to be good stewards of the state. And that means a lot of things, but in the instance of what we’ve been experiencing, whether it’s the Boundary Waters or its metro surge and kind of taking care of the hospitality industry. It really means that we are here to tell those stories for the state, and we are here to champion that. And I think in a time where tourism is probably not the first thing on people’s minds, when we dealt with what we dealt with this winter, our role was really to make sure we were paying attention to what was going on, helping where we could provide any sort of resources or information to people, but now our role has really become like, we’re stepping out and we’re speaking on behalf of all these places so that people understand who Minnesota really is beyond the headlines that they might see in the news.

Billie: How do you do that? How do you tell that story and talk about tourism in a way that feels relevant and not disconnected from what people are experiencing?

Lauren: Yeah, I think for us, we we have been really fortunate in the last couple years to have launched the Star of the North campaign, and that has put us in a position where authenticity is the baseline. And we really launched that campaign with the idea that a lot of people talk about Minnesota, or they’ll go and they’re surprised by what they find. They, you know, they’re like, wow, Minneapolis and Saint Paul are amazing. But also, I can be in nature in 20 minutes and I can go to like a sculpture crawl on the river, right?

And so I think for us, we really wanted to have other people tell our story because Minnesotans are just a real quiet, humble bunch and we don’t like to brag about ourselves. And so we started inviting people to come and experience it for the first time. And that became our tourism campaign. And so when it came to these difficult moments, we really understood who we were as a tourism entity, how we marketed, how we sort of joke Minnesotan to the rest of the world. And we made sure that we were using assets and kind of experiences of, of real people from Minnesota, but also not from Minnesota to say Minnesota’s friendly, we’re neighborly. We’re here to welcome you when you’re ready.

Billie: Is that how you came to the Come Visit Your Neighbors campaign.

Lauren: Adam Serwer wrote in The Atlantic that we sort of define the word neighborism in Minnesota. And I think during the time everybody sort of got this pride in this energy, and I remember this pizza place that came onto social media and they were talking about what it means to be Minnesota nice. And there’s always this sort of like backhanded thing with Minnesota nice that, you know, it’s a little passive aggressive, which is true. But they they kind of said yes. And Minnesota Nice means that you are vehemently defending your neighbors. No matter what you are supporting them. You are pushing them out of a snowbank. Even if you think that the way they got into the snow was dumb, like you were there for them no matter what. And I think for us when we heard the term neighborism, we were like, yes, that is who we are. We are welcoming. We care about the people who visit.

We care about the people who are down the street from us. And we want to show everybody that when you come here, you’re our neighbor. Again, it was telling the story of the people rising above the headlines of all of the things that were going on, and showing more about the communities that were supporting each other, that were buying groceries or taking people to their job or the hospitality industry that instead of getting upset because people were too afraid to come into work, they were helping their families. And so I think it was just a really unique opportunity for us to, again, elevate that story and that experience for other people to truly understand that Minnesota is not only a safe place to visit, you know, when there isn’t a federal presence, but it’s a place that you can visit and feel safe and feel welcome and part of the family. And that was a really important message to get across.

Billie: How are you getting that message across? Are there videos of people telling their stories?

Lauren: Yeah. So what we did for the neighbors campaign specifically, it’s a little bit different than anything we’ve ever done because it was just so specific to that point in time. And we had had to cancel our winter campaign, just given everything that was going on. And then we did launch our spring campaign in early March, but this was sort of that bridge of like, we know that spring summer campaign is out there, but we need to do something in addition to that to support the hospitality industry and to prove that tourism needs help right now. I mean, that’s the other component. They are your neighbors, right? The people running hotels and bars and restaurants are your neighbors. They need your help. We need to drive traffic to these places. Um, so for this one, we call it our love letter to Minnesota because it was a project where we got to kind of take all the assets we had from Star of the North and put those in, but we also pulled a bunch of like historical footage and photos of like very nostalgic Minnesota, like old blizzards and literally videos of people pushing you out of a snowbank and just this sort of flashback in time to demonstrate this is who Minnesota has always been. We’ve been here all along. We’re here to welcome you. We haven’t changed. And I think that that was just it was a moment where a big team of people at Minnesota were, were really just kind of like, you could just feel the love gushing out as we were doing it. It was about a minute and a half. So it’s not a typical ad, but it was on social. We did billboards in key cities, 6 major cities across the country, uh, for just two weeks.

Billie: Wow.

Lauren: Okay, so it was a real short stint because we were like, we got to get something out fast. We don’t have a ton of extra money because it’s all wrapped up in other campaigns that we can’t stop. And then we got some voices and tried to do some earned media around it. So we got a little earned media. And we had like Chef Yia Vang, who talks about like his Hmong heritage, but how he feels like he’s like, not only is his family with him in Minnesota, but he’s created a whole new family too. And, um, we got Olympian Jessie Diggins to talk about how much she loves Minnesota. And R.T. Rybak, former mayor of Minneapolis, who is literally he has asked me if he could be the cheerleader for Minnesota. And I’m like, I don’t think it’s an official position, but you can have it if it is right. So it’s all these people who. It’s just Minnesota runs through their veins and they they couldn’t wait to participate in kind of help really amplify all of the, the great stories that were out there.

Billie: What a smart and quick pivot to take advantage of that moment in a way that, that was going to help tell the story of Minnesota. What’s been the response? You know, what kind of response from that campaign have you seen so far, and what has it taught you about how travelers are thinking right now?

Lauren: Yeah. Um, so I want to be like accurate with my numbers. So I do have it written down. And on social media, we reached 900,000 people and drove almost 30,000 clicks in just two weeks. And then it was an engagement rate of almost 9.5 percent against the 1.63 percent benchmark. So really good. Yeah. And, you know, Times Square performed the best. And again, these were key spots. I had a trip planned to Boston, um, when the campaign was live. It was very coincidental. I was just going there with my husband on vacation and I was like, our ads going to be up in Boston, which is never a thing you get to experience. And so it was outside of Fenway Park opening weekend, like, right, where people are all lining up and it’s right there. And I was like, Oh my God, it was really fun to see that in person. But I think it just shows that people. When we got feedback on the Times Square one from an influencer that was there and she’s like, this is amazing. I love seeing Minnesota just like talking like strongly about who they are and being confident in who they are. And I think that’s what people want when they travel more and more. I mean, we’re at IPW, we’re hearing these stories of people who are like, I want to come from an international place and I want to feel safe. And I want to like, be in nature. I want to be with unique, interesting people and do all these things with my families. And I think that’s what they’re seeing in this moment is they’re, they’re like, oh, this is a genuine experience I can have. And I don’t have to try that hard to find it.

Billie: Right. They’re seeing real examples. Again, smart to connect people with. These are the real things that are happening, the real people that you could meet. Exactly.

Lauren: They can come to Minnesota in the winter, we promise. At the bare minimum, we will dig you out.

Billie: I found it interesting looking at the Explore Minnesota website, you’re not just marketing visits, you’re also talking about convincing people to move to the state. Right on the homepage of Explore Minnesota, one of the options is Move Here. So why lean into that and how do you see tourism and relocation working together?

Lauren: Yeah. So the halo effect is something we knew about, you know, for years. But Minnesota has it was five years ago, four years ago, at a really interesting point that we kind of all predicted was going to happen, but that we started losing our net migration and we were negative. So we were not getting new people in. More people were leaving. It was happening a lot in the Midwest. The Midwest attrition was it was a challenge. And so between us and our Department of Economic Development, you know, we really wanted to make sure that we were kind of meeting the problem head on. And they’re like, we’re not marketers. You guys are marketers, so how can we work together to make this happen?

And so we really were able to put our heads together and pull off the sort of Explore Minnesota for business side of things. We got a lot of one time funding to be able to do this, along with our new Star of the North campaign, and we put everything under the same banner so that if you saw tourism ads, you were like, I’m there with them. This feels great, this feels authentic. But then we also pulled in people who had moved to Minnesota in the last 10 years to tell their story, which sort of feels like a tourism piece, like they’re experiencing a lot of things for the first time, but they chose to stay and it’s been really rewarding for them, and that’s gone super well, too. I think we saw both ads when we did them in campaigns together across the country, we could see them lifting each other, and more and more people were gaining awareness of Minnesota. And so our numbers have gone up for the last couple years. And then for the first time in 6 years, our net migration is up in Minnesota. And I’m not taking all the credit, but I will take some of it. I will take as.

Billie: Much.

Lauren: As you can. I will take some of it and.

Billie: We’ll take some because our podcast director sister actually moved to Duluth.

Lauren: So amazing. So she clearly saw the ads that we put together.

Billie: So you’re welcome.

Lauren: Thank you.

Billie: Clearly, you worked hard on these campaigns and you brought real people into them. What about opportunities with new technologies like AI? How are you and your local tourism partners dealing with AI’s impact or leveraging it?

Lauren: Yeah, well, AI is one of those things that I don’t think anybody has the right answer to right now. You know, we’re hearing from different vendors and stuff about different solutions. And I think has a really cool feature on their site, but we’re all still figuring it out. One of the things that our team has done a phenomenal job on is the website. You know, when we first saw Google Gemini hit and was really kind of taking a bite out of everybody’s click through rates. Our team pivoted very quickly. They audited everything. They tried to feed the models and really get things up to snuff. So we went from like a 40 percent nosedive and we’re back up closer to level, which is great, but it’s also taking that information, sharing it with our partners, learning from our partners, what are people clicking on? But it’s constantly changing. And so I think the challenge for us is how do you keep up when we as a state agency, you know, our budget only gets updated every two years or, uh, you know, if you hit any bump in the road, like people are canceling events and not coming in and giving those local DMOs their lodging tax, like, how are you making up the gap when AI, even though it’s readily available, is still not the cheapest tool that you can have, right? And so for us, it’s, it’s constantly learning and trying to adapt to things we can control. And then researching, making some smart decisions with the budget that we have and kind of learning as we go.

Billie: So I want to go back to experiences and what it feels like in place right now. So despite anything that’s ever going on in the world, our M.O. at Afar is that we see travel as a way to bring people together and experience joy. So can you give me an example of something going on in Minnesota right now that would help a traveler feel genuinely welcome and joyful? What does that look like for someone visiting right now?

Lauren: For one, I would say if you are traveling to Minnesota and you think you’ve seen giant statues, you haven’t. We have the Jolly Green Giant. We have this amazing water tower that looks like a fishing bobber out in Pequot Lakes. We have the Spam Museum. We have babe, the Blue Ox and Paul Bunyan. Of course. Of course we’re getting more. We have the giant trolls by Thomas Dumbo up in Detroit Lakes, which are beautiful. And then soon I’m very excited about this one in Luverne, which is in southwestern Minnesota. They are building a giant nutcracker that is actually going to be able to crack nuts. To be clear, years ago, this woman in town had this giant collection of nutcrackers, and she was like, I don’t know what to do with these. Is this something someone would be interested in? So they turned it into a museum where you can see all these. She has all these unique thousands of nutcrackers and people come and see it and they have like Christmas in July to celebrate it.

So it’s stuff like that. It’s like the little things, right, that I don’t think people realize that it will be worth it, but I can guarantee you that it will. And Minnesota is full of small town charm, even in our biggest cities. You know, we’ve got Stillwater right along the Saint Croix River, which has an old Main Street, but big city amenities. And we just had our fishing opener there, which is like combining all of these beautiful, like fishing and big city and small town all in one. And so I think the joy of Minnesota right now is kind of those little off the beaten path experiences, but combined with some really fun stuff, like we’ve got the Yacht Rock Festival coming this summer, which despite its name, is not all yacht rock. It is what I think is an elder millennials dream this summer, when I get to see the Strokes and Passion Pit together on the same day.

Billie: No way.

Lauren: Yeah, very excited.

Billie: Will they be wearing captain’s hats?

Lauren: Well, see, I don’t know. Now, like you probably should be required to if it’s.

Billie: I think you should. There was a band at last night’s opening event that was wearing and captain’s hats, and I decided that anyone ever playing at Rock should be mandated to wear them. Or really any concert.

Lauren: Any concert. Absolutely. I mean, if it’s near the water.

Billie: There should be hats. Yeah. Right.

Lauren: Yeah.

Billie: That sounds like a great a great lineup.

Lauren: Yeah. And I think the other thing that we don’t talk about a lot in Minnesota is our food. And we are really excited that Michelin has announced that they’re coming to the Great Lakes area, and they’re going to be doing several cities in the Great Lakes, but we have tons of James Beard Award winners in Minnesota, too, from pastry chefs to really great bar programs and food from around the world. We’ve got two of our chefs are Hmong, and their restaurants have been up before. So it’s it’s a really great scene that I think you don’t have to try too hard to like, throw a rock and hit a James Beard restaurant. So I encourage people to do that too.

Billie: For other destinations that are navigating similar challenges, whether it’s perception or politics or sudden shifts in demand. What have you learned that they could apply now? Is there a lesson you would share.

Lauren: For Explore Minnesota, you know, I think we were in a position where everything was happening in the last couple months and last year, really where I think we were really focused on that authenticity, which helped. And so I always encouraged people to dive into the people in their communities and the stories that they have, because when something goes awry, when something becomes political, it’s really hard to make it political against specific communities and people.

Unfortunately for tourism, it continues to be put in a place where it is political. You know, whether it’s overtourism in Europe or travel issues elsewhere. It’s sort of one of those things that and now it’s sort of not off off the table anymore, as an issue. And so for us, we always talk about what is it that we can control. And that is telling stories of the people and the places that we have and really trying to do it in a way that’s like, everybody wants to travel, everybody wants to experience something new and different outside of their bubble. And the more you can give that to them without putting any kind of like headline or policy on it, the easier it’ll be. And so my best advice is just to kind of sit down with your team and talk about what are those kind of non-negotiable things that you do as a tourism agency for your community that no matter what, you go back to that that is your framework. You continue to say like, this is who we are, this is who our people are. And to me, that is one very simple way that you get to kind of move things forward, even in a crisis.

Billie: Thank you so much. This has been so interesting. Thank you for your candor and your insights and your excitement about Minnesota. Now I have to go and see all the nutcrackers. Yes.

Lauren: Oh, guaranteed. You’ll have a great time. Thank you for having me.

Billie: Thanks for joining us for this episode of View From Afar. In the show notes, you’ll find links to everything we talked about today, as well as explore Minnesota’s social media handles and website, and be sure to follow along this week to hear more interviews with industry experts.

You can find more Views from Afar on Afar.com, and be sure to follow us on Instagram and TikTok. We’re at @AfarMedia. If you enjoyed today’s exploration, I hope you’ll come back for more great interviews. Subscribing always makes that easy, and be sure to rate and review the show on your favorite podcast platform. It helps other travelers find it.

This has been View From Afar, a production of Afar Media. The podcast is produced by Aislyn Greene and Nikki Galteland, with assistance from Michelle Baran and me, Billie Cohen. music composition from Epidemic Sound. This podcast is part of the Airwave Media Podcast Network. Visit AirwaveMedia.com to listen and subscribe to their other fine shows like Culture Kids and The Explorers podcast.