Yes, Peoples is really my last name.
Write Peoples is a play on knowing the right people, finding the right people to work with, and my actual last name. I've spent a career thinking about storytelling, language, and the people who shape places, so Write felt right, too.
Lauran Peoples The throughline
My career never fit neatly into an org chart either.
For more than two decades, I've worked across the hospitality and tourism industry, with much of that time spent in destination organizations where sales, marketing, business development, visitor experience, community relationships, and strategy were rarely as separate in practice as they appeared on paper.
That gave me an interesting vantage point. I learned to pay attention to what happens between departments, where one team's information becomes useful to another, where a familiar measure may be telling only part of the story, and where asking a slightly different question can change the direction of the conversation.
Eventually, that way of thinking became the work. Write Peoples grew from the belief that some of the most useful perspective comes from connecting what an organization already knows.
New perspective
And then I became a student again.
At the end of 2025, I stepped away from full-time destination leadership and into a deliberately different season of my career. I moved to France, returned to the classroom, and began making room for questions about culture, place, stewardship, and the ways people experience and understand destinations.
Learning to live and study in another language has added another layer to that perspective. There is something wonderfully humbling about knowing exactly what you want to say and having to find another way to say it. It has made me more attentive to language, context, what gets lost in translation, and how much understanding we sometimes assume before we've actually established it.
I still work with the industry I know well. I'm simply approaching it from a different vantage point now, with more space to interrogate familiar assumptions, explore ideas across disciplines, and bring what I'm learning back into conversations with destination teams.
Sometimes seeing a place differently begins with changing where you're standing.
What I bring
A few things I bring with me.
- More than two decades in hospitality and tourism, including eight years in destination leadership.
- Cross-functional leadership spanning sales, marketing, business development, visitor experience, community relationships, and organizational strategy.
- A practice grounded in both experience and continued learning, with current academic work expanding my thinking around culture, place, heritage, and stewardship.
How I work
What you can expect from me.
I'm curious, but not endlessly theoretical. I like evidence, but I'm interested in what sits just outside the obvious conclusion. I'll ask the question behind the question, challenge an assumption when it deserves challenging, and tell you when I think the thing you're considering may not be the thing that actually needs your attention.
I also believe the people closest to the work usually know more than an outside advisor ever could. My job is to bring another perspective into the room, help make connections, and leave the organization with greater clarity about where it wants to go.
Where to next?
There's usually another question worth asking.
LET'S TALK THROUGH IT.If your team has been circling one, I'd be glad to hear what you're thinking about.