Dan Peltier

Brand USA is optimistic about its future and is ending its budget year by meeting its partner contributions' goal. But with international visitation in the U.S. continuing to decline, it hopes to get smarter and more strategic with how it spends its marketing dollars in the coming year.

Somewhat shockingly, the U.S. National Park Service is just now getting familiarized with the travel industry even though it oversees some of the oldest and most popular attractions in the country. More parks are beginning to work with local tourism officials, and their budding symbiotic relationships are critical to the park service's future.

Hurricane Irma is a monster storm the likes of which the Caribbean and United States haven't seen in a while. While tourism usually rebounds after major storms, we haven't seen an active Atlantic hurricane season like this for nearly a decade and many travel brands will need to think long-term to recover.

This was anything but a sleepy summer. The Trump administration, Brexit, and overtourism — to name a few tourism topics — definitely kept us on our toes during the past few months and we expect more news on these fronts in the months ahead.

It's not a tsunami, but it's been clear for some time that the tides are turning: Skift's data show 23 percent of U.S. consumers who booked a hotel in the past year used a smartphone to do so. The waters – or mobile hotel bookings – will only keep rising.

Tourism board websites in 2017 exist in an increasingly diverse world of platforms that have also been readily adopted by travelers as trip-planning resources. Here are some trends we noticed from our review of the world's best tourism websites this year.

For a small town, Hopkinsville, Kentucky has some big-time lessons on how to plan and host a mass tourism event that will only happen once. The town is still figuring out how to use the positive PR to its advantage and how it can convince some of the eclipse chasers to come back.

London is quick to paint a bright future for its tourism industry in the face of Brexit, but it also needs to accept that visitors won't be happy with their experiences if the city loses its EU tourism workforce and that causes problems ranging from longer wait times to lagging infrastructure investment.

We're still many years away from seeing a tipping point when more Chinese travel independently than with tour groups. But this data should be a wake-up call to destinations and travel brands that a shift is already happening in some places and for some segments of the market.

It's not that the travel industry doesn't understand that overtourism is a problem. It's an issue that at times might conflict with their bottom lines, and there is a lack of thoughtful and effective plans on how to deal with it. Guevara is already working on the topic — and we'll be watching to see how creative she and the WTTC can be.