by Pádraic Gilligan, Co-founder, SoolNua Consulting

City Destinations Alliance—mercifully shortened to CityDNA—has been curating the inner life of Europe’s cities for more than half a century, even as it changed its name from EFCT to FOTVE to ECT and finally to its current, rather fitting identity.

What we now call CityDNA is, in truth, a meeting point—two rivers converging into something broader and deeper. On one bank, the world of meetings, incentives, conferences and events (aka “MICE”), carried forward from the European Federation of Conference Towns, founded back in 1964 when “conference” still meant paper, pens and patience.

On the other, the more fluid, and arguably more emotional currents of leisure travel, shaped through the European Cities Tourism, itself born from the earlier Fédération des Offices de Tourisme des Villes Européennes. Two traditions, one rooted in commerce and education, the other in cultural immersion and exchange, now sharing the same bloodstream.

Across these fifty-plus years, CityDNA has stood ringside as tourism evolved and grew, shedding its early innocence, finding its voice, and ultimately claiming its place as a serious socio-economic force, a sector that shapes cities as much as it sells them. Today, that evolution is recognised in parliaments and policy circles, right up to the European Commission, where responsibility for tourism now sits, in part, with Apostolos Tzitzikostas.

And perhaps that is the real story here: not just an organisation changing its name, but an entire industry changing its meaning—moving, as CityDNA itself would argue, from simply counting visitors to shaping a more balanced, inclusive and regenerative visitor ecosystem.

With my colleague Gráinne Ní Ghiollagáin, I’ve had the privilege to work with President Barbara Jamison-Woods and the amazing HQ team at CityDNA on some of its signature meetings and gatherings over the past number of months—the Autumn Conference in Tórshavn, the CEO meeting in Barcelona and, most recently, the Spring Conference in Helsinki.

CityDNA events have a particular cadence to them. They balance the panoramic with the practical, the keynote with the kitchen table. There is always a sense of big-picture thinking, ideas that stretch you (thanks Greg Clarke!), challenge you, occasionally unsettle you, set alongside the grounded reality of cities sharing what’s actually working, what’s not, and what’s still a work in progress.

And perhaps more than anything, there is a generosity in the room. Cities speaking openly, sometimes disarmingly so, about both their successes and their failures. No gloss. No performance. Just a shared recognition that the challenges we face, whether climate, community, competitiveness or credibility, are too complex for any one destination to solve alone.

Helsinki, though, felt like something more again.

If Tórshavn was about reflection, about stepping back and asking, in the wild Atlantic air, what kind of visitor economy we actually want, then Helsinki was about response. About taking those questions and beginning, tentatively but deliberately, to answer them.

The theme – The Human Pulse of Place and Purpose – could easily have drifted into abstraction. But it didn’t. Instead, it found its way into the very fabric of the programme, most notably in what turned out to be one of the defining sessions of the conference: The Great Debate.

The motion was deceptively simple: “Destinations have moved too far from the humans behind the numbers when designing tourism and urban strategies.”

What followed was not a debate in the theatrical sense, but something closer to a collective reckoning. Two teams, industry veterans (thanks Richard and Simon from MMGY) paired with next-generation students (Go Riina and Eemil!) arguing, counter-arguing, listening, adjusting. Experience meeting fresh perspective, not as a gesture but as a genuine exchange.

And in truth, the conclusion was never going to be binary.

As MMGY’s Richard Boardman reflected afterwards, “data shows us what travellers do, but humans tell us why it matters”.

We have never had better tools: real-time intent, behavioural insight, attribution models that would have seemed like science fiction even a decade ago. But those tools, for all their sophistication, only ever tell part of the story. Because behind every search, every click, every booking, there is a person, seeking connection, chasing meaning, hoping to feel something when they arrive.

And when strategy leans too heavily into what is measurable, it becomes all too easy to optimise for volume over value. More visitors. More nights. More growth.

But not necessarily better outcomes. Not for the traveller. And not, crucially, for the people who call these cities home.

What Helsinki offered, then, was not a rejection of data, but a rebalancing. A quiet but firm insistence that data and humanity are not opposing forces, but complementary ones. That the future of destination strategy lies not in choosing between them, but in integrating them, using data to inform, but human insight to guide.

This idea surfaced again and again across the programme. In discussions around business events as platforms for societal impact, in conversations about seasonality as an opportunity rather than a constraint, in reflections on trust, governance and the long-term legitimacy of the visitor economy.

And perhaps most powerfully, in the recognition that destinations are no longer simply places to be visited. They are systems to be managed, communities to be engaged, and responsibilities to be upheld.

Which brings us, neatly, back to where CityDNA itself now finds its purpose.

Not as a promoter of cities, but as a steward of them. Not as a curator of visitor numbers, but as a convener of ideas, a broker of shared understanding, and increasingly, a influential voice in shaping what the visitor economy becomes next.

Because if the last fifty years were about building the industry, the next fifty may well be about justifying it.