…in our subconscious quest to grab at anything and everything possibly related to destination visitation, have we gone too far? Have we stretched beyond our goals and mission to become more technology company than inspiration company.
Eventually, those in the destination vertical will have to make a choice due to the simple pressures of time, budget, staff and goals.
What is my area of focus? Are you a technology company with inspirational tourism content? Or are you a tourism inspiration company with a measured approach to technology?
If we stay stuck in the mindset of traditional marketing, there’s a tendency to view Facebook, Twitter, blogging etc as nothing more than additional distribution channels for a carefully crafted brand message or specific product offering pitched to targeted market segments.
Conscious marketers understand that it’s about creating relationships first and encouraging the emergence of communities of interest and support. Social media is not so much a channel as a powerful platform or engine that can be deployed by all members of the “tourism ecosystem.” Social media provides both a listening post and a mirror into which one can see how your community is really perceived.
This different mindset was much in evidence in Vancouver this past year - an exciting year for a young City that successfully hosted the Winter Olympics and then experienced some of the worst public riots in its entire history. Social media played a critically important role in both events.
This morning Paul Vallee, Candice Gibson and Stephen Pearce of Tourism Vancouver shared with me just how powerful social media can be and the critical importance of building community first and allowing its members to co-create authentic responses to the negative actions of a minority. They have given me permission to share the 20 minute Pecha Kucha presentation (20 slides, 20 minutes, 20 notes pages too!) that speaks for itself.
The real takeaway from this was the role that ordinary community members played in rescuing the brand. Tourism Vancouver didn’t respond in a traditional manner by pushing out a stiff formal message minimizing, covering up or even apologizing for the behaviour of a small irresponsible minority. They simply, but effectively, enabled and allowed.
They enabled the community to express their dismay by creating ThisisOurVancouver and allowed the voice of Vancouver’s responsible residents to leave a more authentic, enduringly positive impression. It can take courage for a DMO to do less and enable more but the end result is nearly always more effective.
Random Screen Grab From This is Our Vancouver
DMOs are not the hosts of a community. Its residents are. The more they can be enabled to extend the invitation in their own and by definition, authentic way, the more the cliché “tourism is everybody’s business” will assume real meaning and clout.
As DMOs become more conscious of the power of social media and the way it is radically changing how marketing gets done, expect to see less doing (as in leading and controlling) and more enabling and supporting in the years to come.
During my 40 year career in travel and tourism, the number of people crossing international borders has grown from 100 million a year to just under a billion. At the same time, I have watched distinctly different, magical and remote communities with cultures whose unique worldview had so much to teach us, be engulfed, usurped, diluted, and become endangered. As lamented in a previous post called On Homecoming and Wayfinding - Re-thinking Sustainable Tourism, present generations simply don’t know what they have been deprived of experiencing.
According to the UNWTO, the current volume of international trips is confidentially forecast to double over an 8 year period – in other words at rate 5 times that of the past growth I have witnessed. What alarms me is the lack of serious, considered debate as to whether such growth is possible or even desirable and what the costs of trying to meet those forecasts might be let alone the probability that they could be achieved or sustained. What does the doubling of tourism really mean? Who will benefit and who will suffer?
There is no doubt that tourism has become a powerful economic and social force with both positive and negative effects. It has provided entry jobs that have enabled hundreds of thousands of people to lift themselves out of poverty and helped spread wealth from what were once called “have nots” to the “haves”. Tourism has preserved some cultures and provided an economic justification for protecting some natural landscapes but at an enormous cultural, social and environmental cost that has never really been systematically inventoried or assessed.
The Tidal Flow of Tourism The returns from each incremental visitor are now diminishing year by year due the very nature of how the industrialized model works. In the same way that the ocean tide is controlled by the phases of the moon, the tide of tourism is driven by forces outside the control of the receiving community. Changes in exchange rates and the economic vitality of source countries account for over 90% of tourism traffic. So when the tide comes in and volume surges more capacity is increased (more hotels are built, roads are widened, and runways extended or increased.) When the tide flows out due to external factors that can range from terrorist attacks, epidemics, natural hazards to the collapse of stock markets, then prices are discounted and suppliers attempt to fill their time-based perishable products of rooms, airline seats and restaurant covers at whatever price consider necessary to meet an internal revenue target. Tourism demand is a roller coaster and its frequent and often unpredictable boom and bust cycles can cause untold hardship experienced mostly by vulnerable workers located at the bottom of its wage pyramid.
With each passing year the vitality of the sector is sapped. Consumers’ ability to make instant price comparisons increases the downward pressure on prices and converts what were once scarce, magical, mysterious retreats into commodities. Cost cutting follows. Processes and procurement are standardized and unique places lose their distinctiveness as services and places start to look the same. Automation strips the cost out of many services but deprives the traveler of human and humane care.
They suggest that a doubling of demand will have serious impact on the cost of living in key attractive cities where local businesses will have to compete with tourists for many services and, presumably, taxpayers in the host city will have to pay extra infrastructure costs (water, waste management, transportation, policing etc)
While vulnerable places like England’s Stonehenge, Ecuador’s Galapagos and Peru’s Machu Pichuu are having to limit visitation, it’s Venice that is probably the most obvious “canary in the mine”. We publicly may mourn “the death in and of Venice” - see previous post on this blog but fail to address the real problem: there is only one Venice and its capacity to absorb more and more visitors every year is limited.
USA today recently published an article on the tourism hotspot, observing:
Venice is "under siege" by tourists and faces "irreversible" catastrophe if limits aren't imposed on visitor numbers, warns a report released Monday by Italy's leading heritage group.
Italia Nostra (Our Italy) accused the Italian government of " underestimating the devastating effects of past and future development projects and tourism policy," Reuters reports.
The group will ask UNESCO, the United Nation's cultural organization to place the city on its endangered list and consider removing it from its list of World Heritage Sites. The lagoon city is besieged by 60,000 tourists a day, including many from an increasing number of cruise ships that come to call, says Reuter
How can we as a tourism community be proud to say “we destroyed Venice?” Furthermore, if sustainability is all about acting now to provide subsequent generations with the same choices and opportunities we enjoy, then how could our actions of the past 50 years be considered even remotely sustainable.
Disappointment with Leadership From Above who avoid “The Elephant in the Room” I am disappointed with the leadership shown from both governments and the private sector. The UN-related organisations send out mixed signals. They talk a good talk about sustainability – even issuing Green Passports- but get positively gleeful when volume projections bounce back to “near normal” and growth gets back on track.
They talk about tourism being resilient and a force for good but continue to demand more recognition and influence. Despite the fact that their demands for recognition have been made year after year on every Tourism Day with boring monotony, they have to admit that their approach is not working.
Even the WTTC, an exclusive club comprised mostly of the large vertically integrated corporations that have benefited most from the industrialization of tourism, continues to put out a begging hand and, every World Tourism Day, plead for more marketing support, less taxes, less red tape etc. None of these so called leader organizations puts serious pressure on the airline sector to raise prices necessary to cover the “externality” cost associated with spewing carbon into the upper atmosphere. In this Linked In Discussion Valere Tolle is right in part – the “big fat elephant in the room” is carbon but Valere is right only in part though. The real elephant is bigger. Until all the costs (social, cultural, economic and environmental) associated with international travel and tourism are completely and accurately measured and paid for, the elephant we’re trying to avoid is the one with the banner – Can we Afford the Cost of More Cheap Travel?
We know that polarized arguments between environmentalists and industrialists doesn’t work; we know that finger wagging and making people feel guilty for their sins doesn’t work. We also know that dictats from global and national agencies don’t work. Until recently there were no market mechanisms in place to provide the sticks and carrots that might change behaviour and when they were introduced (as in the Carbon Trading Scheme), they meet fierce opposition from vested interests…
An Alternative Vision and Approach In the same way, that we can only change our own personal behaviour by making small but consistent changes, every day; a critical mass of enterprises and individuals active in the travel community will need to change the way they operate by thinking and acting differently.
Individual hosts and guests are more likely to do this when they are presented with a very attractive, positive image of a better future.
I don’t think we have yet created and explored an image of a viable alternative. Acting responsibly is still associated with suffering and loss – it comes across as having to give up pleasure and enjoyment or to go backwards rather than forwards. The argument is always reduced to simple concepts – the economy versus the environment - and the perishable nature of the “product” encourages short-termism. What we need is a dynamic, expanded vision of a better, more profitable, more durable, more appealing, alternative to mass industrialized tourism.
It’s not that we haven’t got hundreds of thousands of people dedicated to leading change. Ron Mader has helpfully inventoried here all the different ways that proponents of an alternative to mass industrialised tourism label themselves. While great work IS being done by many, the Tower of Babel that dominates the change landscape is in danger of fragmenting and diluting both our focus and resources.
Furthermore, what we haven’t yet done either as a sector or as a community, is address the root cause of the current problem – which is our mindset, our paradigm and our worldview.
And that’s why we’re developing a conversation around the notion of Conscious Travel.
So why Conscious? Simply because “conscious” is to be awake, aware and alert.
First we need to wake from the trance of an old paradigm that no longer works when there are about to be 7 billion people living on one finite planet.
Second, we need to become fully aware of the impact that our behaviour has on others and the impact of being embedded in multiple other systems that will determine our future prosperity and even our survival. As individuals, businesses, communities we're all interdependent now.
Thirdly, we need to become infinitely more adaptable and creative if we are to thrive during what will be a period of intense upheaval and uncertainty.
Fouthly, we need to focus on what we can do for our country and humanity as oppsed to keep asking what they can do for tourism. We need to wake up and grow up aand assume our responsibilities as adults
In other words we have to address our “inner world” of values, beliefs and assumptions that underpin our choices and behaviour. Many of us have never examined those assumptions and understood why they might no longer be helpful or relevant.
So Conscious Travel isn’t another association, or agency. It’s simply an approach that integrates the good work done in eco, responsible, geo, and sustainable tourism and which starts with the values and mindset of the tourism operator as an indivodual human being. You can read more about what we are and what we’re not here.
Our aim is to attract a critical mass of operators in a community who want create durable, healthy businesses that “don’t cost the earth, are “worthy of the human beings that serve in them, ” deliver a richer more meaningful experience for guests while revitalizing the culture and biophysical environment of the host community.
“Heretics are the new leaders. The ones who challenge the status quo, who get out in front of their tribes, who create movements.” Seth Godin
We’re inspired by people like Seth Godin who understands how to create movements and Steve Jobs who believed that Apple’s success was based on its core belief that “passion & people can change the world.
So we’re looking for the heretics, misfits, and innovators who exist in virtually every community – the kind of people that inspired Steve Jobs – to co-create a better alternative and ensure that tourism lives up to its potential to be a positive agent of renewal and regeneration.
Please join the movement by visiting Conscious Travel here, subscribing and joining in the conversation.
The five biggest drivers of business change right now can be summarised thus:
1. Customers now have the power to talk back, to talk with each other; and to attract enormous attention simply through the power of their own creativity. The value of a company is now directly related to the subject and quality of the conversations that take take place about it and determine a reputation. Between 60-80% of all market capitalisation of companies is tied up in intangibles such as brand equity, reputation, human capital,and intellectual property. Never has it been so important, or, for that matter, so easy to LISTEN.
2. There's finally a recognition that companies aren't things - corporate entities only with legal rights and no responsibilities - but collections of human beings keeping company with each other and working to a common purpose. As Simon Sinek has said: 100% of employees are people; 100% of customers are people; 100% of investors are people; 100% of supliers are people etc. So it's not surprising to see that companies behave like the people who work in them.
Some companies seem to be super cheerful, energetic, happy, passionate and devoted to serve; others are rigid, buraucratic, stiff, slow, and affect a bored disinterest. We still talk about them as "brands" but what we mean is personality.
This trend, by the way, is sometimes described as "the humanisation of business" - as if there ever was a time when companies were run by robots. (That's in the future not in the past). So instead of companies fretting about transactions; we have collections of people focused on relationships. It's all soft & fuzzy; about feelings not product atttributes; and behaviours are harder to measure; highy subjective and utterly intrinsically SOCIAL. Hence the title of the post. So congrats if you have a Facebook page, a twitter account and your company President blogs. But that won't be enough. Unless you've opened up every business process (in human terms - every human task; item of communication; element of service) and looked at ways it WOWs the customer; while enabling the employee who are doing the wowing to feel that they are growing and developing too.
3. Because companies are human and because humans are in such a fix right now, there's a growing desire on the part of both employees to want to find meaning in their work and for customers to find fulfullment or feel good about their relationship with it. No longer can companies afford to be nothing but lean and mean transaction machines focussed on quarterly profits. Edeleman's Good Purpose 2010 report found that 86% of global consumers believe that companies should place at least equal weight on societies interest as in business' interest.
In fact, there's now growing evidence that companies whose culture expresses a "higher purpose" are significantly more profitable than those that place return on investment as highest priority. If you want proof, read Firms of Endearment, a more inspiring book than Jim Collins' Good to Great, that highlights the spectacular results achieved by 30 companies run by CEOs who are happy to call themselves Conscious Capitalists. There's even an institute that is promoting an alternative to the kind of capitalism that has got western economies into the trouble we're in now. So when you think ROI, remember that it stands for Return on Involvement (see Interaction Associates) and, as importantly, start to think of who is involved.
4. Customers are changing too. The recession accelerated a change that emerged in the late 90s when a growing proportion began to tire of the endless cycle of consumption, obsolescence and waste. As boomers aged, it was inevitable that they would be driven less by Maslow's deficiency needs (security, belonging, esteem) and more by a need to develop, to serve, to find meaning and purpose. Perhaps as a result of watching their parents and deciding that they didn't want to be like them, we find that GenY and the Millennials want more than a pay check. Some 61% of GenY employees say they feel personally responsible for making a difference in the world.
There's a huge body of research that has been conducted since the recession that suggests anywhere from a low of 30% to a high of just over 50% of consumers could now be described as "conscious" - awake, alert and aware. They are taking more responsibility for their own decisions as their trust in traditional, authoritative "command and control" style organisations like Government, the Church, big companies is at an all time low. At DestiCorp we're so convinced that this trend will provide a means for tourism to get off the mass, industrialised bandwagon that we think is so destructive, that we'll be focussing all our work on ushering in a Conscious Travel movement.
5.The role of women. Women have already shown their proclivity for use of social media. See an earlier post The Web is Female. We simply love communicating. But it's not all talk. Women also have the financial clout. According to Businessweek, American women make more than 80% of buying decisions in all homes.Their buying power has soared 63% over past three decades. Some 30% of working women now outearn their husbands
While they are still hitting their head against the glass ceiling of senior management, it's women who undertake the majority of tasks that involve face to face or voice to voice contact with employees and, thereby, are directly reponsible for a firm's reputation.
In summary. the decade beginning 2010 will be one in which companies thrive or wane on their ability to show they care; to create working environments in which human beings flourish and are active contributors to the healing, well-being and prosperity of their communities.
Examples of travel-related Companies that Care include the Roger Smith Hotel in New York, where social media is derived from an inherent belief of its CEO and President, James Knowles. He believes in and encourages “the miracle of human growth.” The hotel’s connection to a community of people is based on story telling, off-line connections, and relationships built on passion, says the company. The team is always interested in telling stories that engage people while building relationships and relevant communities. The hotel says it is selling hotel rooms and events via the strength of its networking and content. To find out how Kimpton Hotels and the Joie de Vivre Group are showing they care, review this summary on the new Conscious Travel web site here.
So How Do You become a Social Business?
Becoming a truly social business requires some form of transformative shift in mindset at the top of an organization. First it means appreciating that a company, like a community, is a dynamic, living breathing system made up of living breathing systems who happen to be human beings. The distinctions between what is internal and external are artificial - the boundaries are highly permeable. And in these systems, the intelligence does not lie in the nucleus, the brain or the HQ of an organization but is distributed throughout with highest concentrations on the edges (or in the case of tourism, on the frontline where customers interacts with hosts).
A conscious business acknowledges that all value resides in the nature of the relationship between supplier and buyer and the quality of those relationships is determined by the amount of self respect and mutual respect that exists in those relationships. Employees that are kept in the dark, not trusted by management, treated as children not adults, required to adhere to rigid "inhumane" policies and procedures etc. will pass on this antisocial culture to customers with disastrous consequences. The business might have a very active social strategy but implementation will fail if it hasn't addressed what it means to be a social business.
Sadly most businesses are jumping on the social media bandwagon by trying to master the tools without any consideration of the deeper change in mindset that's required. This is where I find Simon Sinek's observations helpful - treat the business as if it were a person not a thing because every interaction with customers, suppliers, other employees and other stakeholders will always be personal.
Here's Simon Sinek speaking plain common sense about Social Business. Pour yourself a coffee and take 25 minutes to remind yourself how the world really works!
This post was written in February of 2011 but for some reason stayed "under a bushel" - not published due to an oversight so I am making amends and publishing it now:
Two synchronous events occurred yesterday - a long-time business colleague and now dear friend, Lynne Gray, blogger of ThatsPR was recognised as the 4th most influential tweeter in the online travel and PR domain(@lynnerosie), and I came across this article in The Washington Post.
Lynne does not have the benefit of a large organization behind her and is completly self taught in social media but she is making a significant, positive impact and the reasons for her high klout ranking are described in two words: authenticity and collaboration. Lynne is always herself. While she may defy convention - some followers seem to think that the Twittersphere should only encourage serious tweets with cutting commentary deploying no-nonsense language. Lynne on the other hands spreads cheer - she is the classic maven who filters and passes on useful information (nowadays it's called "curation" ) and acts on a sincere desire to help and connect those she meets in this space.
In the Washington Post article written by the Head of the Center for Creative Leadership, John Ryan observes:
Forty years of experience and research at the Center for Creative Leadership has given me the perspective that leadership success starts with authenticity, or approaching our jobs by being true to our own positive values and principles. People will trust us because of that, and that trust makes it possible to get things done.
Lynne's influence is directly related to her trust worthiness - she is consistent and genuine.
Tourism suppliers and destinations should take note of this. Thanks to the rise of social media and the collaborative tools that encourage conversations and transparency, it is now easier to allow the authentic personality of a place to emerge through the multiple interactions between host and guest. While each of those interactsion my be individual and unique, the core essence of a destination emerges as a mosaic from the fragments of specific experiences. Never has it been so important for any organization to reflect on who they are; what they stand for and why they were formed. These are the attractors that will pull customers provided the experience on offer reflects those values consistently and with enthusiasm.
Ryan also goes on to say
Engagement, humility and transparency are important for every leader. In particular, we can learn to be more collaborative, and that's a skill at which every leader can improve. In his new book Boundary Spanning Leadership, my colleague Chris Ernst reports that 86 percent of senior executives believe it is extremely important to work across geography, business units, generations and other boundaries. But only 7 percent of these executives said they are very effective at doing so.
Lynne's achievement reflects these qualities and models what many tourism leaders might follow - by acting as a connector, Lynne creates the conditions for new ideas and relationships to emerge and, thereby plays a critically important role in the evolution of our tourism ecosystem.
