DestiCorp 2.0

Possible Augmented Reality Innovation for Phocuswright Next Year?

• *    Have you ever attended a conference or business event and imagined how it would be great to have your name positioned on your forehead to avoid watching eyeballs failing to find contact as they search for the label known innocuously as a name tag but used as a social filter? 
•  *   Did you think that the ideas Pranav Mistry described in the previous post were too futuristic to be believable? 
• *    Have you wondered how Augmented Reality could be used in addition to finding nearby cafes, hotspots or bars that sell Stella Artois? 

If so, be careful what you ask for. The bright young folks at The Astonishing Tribe (TAT) have just produced a powerful demo eliminating the problem - whom do I talk to in a crowded room? What might we have in common? Simply whip out your iphone (of course) and point it at a person of interest (their face not their label) and layered upon your screen will be details of the individual which he or she has deemed relevant for the event. 

Would this app add value to an already amazingly good-value conference - Phocuswright, next year? or would it mean that, instead of looking at name tags, participants would be tripping over each other as they view their real world through the augmented lens of an iphone.  A new meaning for "stumble upon" perhaps? But then,  it won't be long before we'll have a nano camera attached to our bluetooth headsets (or equivalent)  that will deliver the relevant information orally and chance encounters - the source of innovation - will be few and far between. What a pity!

PS: Don't underestimate these guys - they hail from Malmo, Sweden the city that brought us Spotify....

Two more screen shots from the demo follow....

  

Vail's Gutsy Leader Turns Marketing Strategy Upside Down

Here’s a superb example of tourism leaders re-thinking marketing in response to the down-turn and the emergence of social and rich media. CEO Rob Katz explains via video, of course, how Vail has completely re-thought its marketing strategy and relationships with skiers. 

The full story is available from Advertising Age link here

The recession significantly shortened the planning time  for the purchase and sale of ski experiences - decreasing from 4-6 months to 2-3 weeks.  Vail also recognized the volatility in the marketplace and realized that print media restricted their ability to respond to short-term, even real-time demand. 

Last year Vail had spent 80% of its budget before the vacation period so couldn’t respond to last minute demand.  So they took the brave decision to pull 50% of their ad spend out of print and put in reserve. Vail now uses social media and operates like a political campaign to communicate in real time response to local market conditions.

It’s a brave call – their competitors are still present in the big ski publications with the conventional rich brand messaging but Vail has a war chest with which to strike as demand rises closer to the holidays. No wonder Katz likens himself to Braveheart!

If it works and the gamble pays off, you can bet others will follow – hopefully the print community possesses similar gutsy leadership within its ranks. They’re going to need it.

PhocusWright Innovation Adds Value to an already highly valuable event

Just back from Phocuswright's three day conference - worth every penny! Congratulations Philip and all the Phocuswright team not just for attracting a brilliant cross section of the travel & technology community; creating an incredibly rich program; superb organization but also for a really USEFUL innovation.

The decision to make online participation available for those who couldn't make the trek to Orlando was brave - so many traditionalists think that online meetings will diminish or cannibalize markets. 132 people participated this way from all parts of the world. I believe it just increased exposure and increased the appetite for the real thing. The very fact that it was a sell out in very difficult economic times further attests to the value associated with attendance. 

Live streaming the event was expensive but was of HUGE benefit to the participants. All major sessions were available in real time during the conference and will be available for review for the next 60 days. There was so much content to absorb and this innovation allows everyone the chance to review a second time and, more importantly, REFLECT on what was said; see linkages and connections that would not have been immediately apparent at the time; and share this knowledge with peers. Knowing that the live presentations are now "in the cloud" relieved the anxiety associated with many events when you want to chat with a colleague but also don't want to miss hearing the speaker...

Through use of event specific hashtags, real time commentary was enabled and can be aggregated to get a birds eye view of the content. Here's one participants experience before and during....

It'll take me a few weeks to complete that process of review and reflection and I will share what I think are the strategic implications over the days ahead. In the meantime, the travel bloggers at TNOOZ will be able to provide a faster review of specific technologies and useful insights on how to implement..

Finally, just to show I had a great time, here's a picture of me, Patrick Payne, CEO of QuickMobile, who created a brilliant i-phone application for the event; and Leslie Anne Palamar of Building Tourism Excellence who's organizing Canada's next e-connect event in Montreal in January. 

Picture courtesy and copyright of Phocuswright - see their stream on Flickr.

WTM Celebrates 30 years - video designed to encourage reflection

Thank you Dimitrios Buhalis for posting this video on Facebook. It's an 8 minute overview of the growth, evolution and potential future of what has to be the world's most global and pervasive economic and social phenomenon.Designed to inspire the 5000 exhibitors at the World Travel Market and the hundreds of thousands of visitors, who walk the trade hall floors,  to think reflectively about the future, it provides plenty of food for thought! It will be discussed at the Tourism 2030 event at WTM on 12th Nov - see here

Will Whitehorn, whose company Virgin Galactic aspires to move people carbon free, outside the earth's atmosphere, urged hotels to "become much more efficient through the use of solar, wind, waste and water power in order to live with the risk of expensive oil while dealing with a public that demands better, cheaper ecotourism".

While there were several heartening references to the need for responsibility, there appeared to be an implicit assumption that "industry" must also cater to what the public wants i.e. more, better, cheaper ecotourism...The Secretary General of the UNWTO, Taleb Rifai confirmed this by saying that "travel has become a human right, like the right to breath, the right to speak and the right to think" almost implying that any attempt to curb this appetite would be an infringement of those rights. 

Mr Rifai concludes with a bold and "optimistic" vision - "very soon, there will not be a single human being on ths universe who will not cross an international border as a tourist or as a businessman. This tremendous power of people moving all over the world is what is going to shape our industry and impact the world". 

You betcha... 9 billion people crossing an international border at least once a year equals a 10-fold increase in tourist arrivals...just as well they'll be flying in space. Now what kind of fuel will be used to defy the gravity sufficiently to lift off 9 billion souls eager to keep exploring? 

I'd like to think travel was a right but I think  its secondary to and dependent on the right to clean water, sufficient food to grow healthy bones, and a roof over one's head. So if Mr. Rifai's vision were to be realised, we've got much responsible work to do. 

Having spent my entire life serving this phenomenon we call tourism, I happen to really care about the future of the many dedicated and bright people engaged in it. But there won't be a future unless much higher standards of self-honesty and realism are applied. It's time to focus energy on creating a vision of a better , less harmful tourism and jettison ideas that we can continue with "business as usual." International tourism is a privilege NOT a right. It can bring benefits but incurs huge environmental and social cost - just ask the Venetians. Responsible tourism or Sustainable tourism will never fly unless both sides of the equation are recognized from the outset and we stop applying a woolly-headed, polyannnish, false optimism and got deadly serious about transformation.

Gen Y Holds Tight to E-Mail and Texting - where do they get time for travel?

Newspapers may be reporting on the demise of e-mail, and some research indicates that young people are turning more toward social networking than more traditional online communication, but college students still see e-mail as a critical medium for messages.     via www.emarketer.com

I had read elsewhere that Gen Y considered email too slow but this research shows that emails are as popular as sending SMS messages. 

The key point to note from the emarketer article is that the amount of time devoted to social networking sites and email combined is huge - some 62 hours. But that total doesn't include the time spent on sending those texts, talking on the phone, reading messages and visiting web sites - all activities US college students would be loath to give up. Add in the time needed for study and attending classes (?), chilling out with friends, traveling to and from school, attending to bodily functions and requirements and you have to wonder where they find time to travel. Has anyone done a study on the potential for screens to absorb more attention than the real world? 

UK Tour Operators Lead in Thinking About the Future

Kudos to ABTA, British Airways, Carnival UK, Co-operative Travel, The Travel Foundation and TUI Travel plc  and Forum For The Future for leading the way towards some really thoughtful and intelligent debate on the future of outbound tourism.

The report, Tourism 2023, available here, should be mandatory reading for every tourism destination. It’s highly readable, full of substance and deliciously thought provoking. 

Even though it doesn’t quite achieve its own objectives – i.e. “to set out a clear vision of a profitable, successful future in which the travel and tourism industry recognizes its wider responsibilities to society,” it does makes a very good start. While designed to help the signatories identify and address the complex environmental, social and economic issues affecting outbound tourism, it contains enormous food for thought for all places that attract visitors.   

The talented team at Forum for the Future apply a scenario planning approach to paint a picture of four possible futures based on the inter-play of two key variables: the appeal of overseas travel and the presence of inhibitors to overseas travel. 


The four scenarios represent a caricature of a possible future but are described with compelling detail and logic. Sadly,  none is particularly attractive!

1.    Boom and Burst describes a world in which mass tourism continues to grow fast and furiously based on disposable incomes rising in developed economies and the middle classes of emerging economies exercising their right to roam the planet.  It’s a similar forecast to that outlined in the HBR article: Tourism: The Ticking Time Bomb and describes overcrowded, congested iconic destinations and the disappearance of wilderness. 

2.    Divided Disquiet describes a different world in which devastating impacts from climate change, resource scarcity and social unrest have rendered the planet as unstable and hostile; protectionism is rife, yet where the most popular form of  tourism is “doomsday tourism” with a few tourists wealthy or brave enough flock to see places before they disappear. 

3.    In the Price and Privilege scenario, high oil prices have also caused the cost of travel to soar. Many companies couldn’t cope with the efficiency gains needed and went out of business. Capacity shrank and long-haul travel reverted to the aspirational luxury status associated with the turn of the century. 

4.    Carbon Clampdown describes a possible future in which the high cost of carbon , combined with growing environmental awareness and concern, make travel both uneconomic and anti-social.  Tradeable  carbon quotas restrict demand and economies are more localized. 

I simply cannot do justice to this useful piece of work  in a short blog post, so will likely revisit the topic – often. I am also loath to be critical as I would hate to discourage others from showing such thought leadership. But there are some serious limitations – most likely reflecting the fact that a consortium commissioned the work and each company would probably like to think and respond to its findings privately.  

While no one can argue with the six motherhood principles for creating a sustainable future, the three areas where they say urgent action is needed sound lame and self serving: 

1. The industry needs to demonstrate and monitor the economic benefit tourism delivers to destination communities to help protect them for the future and increase their appeal and value to customers. (The insertion of the word NET before benefit would have made this objective so much more credible as it’s the destinations that generally bear the external costs and not the tour operators)      

2. Low carbon innovation – the industry needs to focus on trialling new technologies and taking them to scale; increase energy efficiency, reduce waste and use more renewables. (Of course, but why not set a big hairy audacious goal and say that enterprises based on the grownd will go carbon neutral while we strive to find less harmful ways of getting airplanes to stay airborne?)
                     
3. Driving Customer demand – develop further insight into what will motivate people to take sustainable holidays. (At no point is a “sustainable holiday”  defined nor is the problem addressed. Vacationers could all stay at low impact facilities and drive around in hybrid or electric cars but if the industry as a whole continues to grow at 5% per annum and increases its demand for concrete and kerosene at the same rate, it wouldn't qualify as sustainable)

Tourism 2023 does conclude with a proposed strategic approach that outlines the areas above in slightly more detail and provides one important target – that the outbound industry will sign up to the WTTC target of a 50% reduction in emissions by 2035. It also references the Global Sustainable Criteria but doesn’t go as far as Walmart, for example, in setting a Sustainability Index for the members of the supply chain. 

In addition to the good content and imaginative scenarios, the report does, however, throw down the gauntlet to the managers and policy makers in tourism destinations everywhere.  These are the agencies that should be doing this kind of work – aren’t destinations supposed to determine the kind of tourism they wish to attract and help their businesses operate in a sustainable and beneficial fashion and ensure that their communities benefit not suffer from the influx of tourists? It’s sad and ironic that such public agencies have been upstaged by a handful of tour operators but not necessarily a bad thing….over to you DMOs...... The stage is now set for some action from you…..How are you thinking about the future?

Geobeats Let Residents Share their Favourite Places

For years I have been arguing that residents are an under tapped source of of both local knowledge and enthusiasm about the unique attributes of the place they call home and that visitors experience as the destination. There are now a host of independent companies emerging to tap this resource in an intelligent way - and I'll review more later. 

But today Geobeats caught my attention a.) because of the quality of content. I believe there has to be a filter to ensure that everyone's home movies, regardless of taste, topic or visual quality, are not thrown in my unsuspecting direction and b.) because of the ease with which I could embed the player. The whole process of finding Geobeats - thanks to a tweet from @lynnerosie, reviewing their site, embedding the player, and writing this post took 15 minutes. 

I selected Siena as my choice of place as it happens to be my favourite Italian community but their coverage of places is growing fast. Beneath the video player is a frame grab of the embedding process (I even inserted my logo onto the beginning of the video).

 

Calling on Tourism CEOs to Dig Deeper

It is a cliché to identify our world as one in which change is the only constant. Overuse of this concept has minimized its meaning and power and misuse has lead to confusion and miscalculation.

In our opinion there are three types of change as illustrated in the familiar image of the iceberg.

• Surface change which takes the form of trends in fashion, modes of speech, popular technology, management fads etc. They are easily visible - representing 1/8th of the iceberg - with new trends quickly attracting attention and possessing a relatively short life span. Their length of influence is determined to the extent that they are rooted in stronger change forces.

• Systemic change which reflect a deeper set of dynamics associated with the economy (eg., the rise of the middle class), demographics, changing consumer and personal values, big technological developments (e. g., the arrival of the phone or car), emergence of new political ideologies. They take longer to emerge and be recognized; last longer, and, if significant enough in strength and power, can be taken as reflecting the norm by any given population.
  
  The dominance of the automobile in American society and the pervasive belief that every American has the right to own and use a car whenever and wherever is a societal force totally integrated with the rise of the middle class, the beliefs and aspirations of the Founding Fathers, the growth in prosperity, the cheapness of raw materials, energy and credit. But it goes deeper than that. The western obsession with the automobile reflects a much deeper set of beliefs and unexamined assumptions and beliefs about how humans view the world, and their relation with it and each other. These are paradigms, mindsets or worldviews.

• Paradigm change occurs much less frequently and results not in the modification of something familiar but a fundamental transformation - in everything. The last big paradigm shift occurred over a 200-250 year time period starting with people like Copernicus and Galileo who began to trust their powers of observation and measurement over the prevailing orthodoxy of a powerful institution - the Holy Catholic Church.

Paradigms are sets of beliefs and assumptions about how the world works or mental maps that we use to make sense of our world. They are agreements that, as they are used over and over again, have become invisible - it's the way things are - simply because they are used to filter out information that might be contradictory.They affect what we choose to see and what sense we make of the world. See some examples here.

We are living in a period of paradigm change as great as that which transformed medieval society into the Age of Enlightenment and saw science rise to predominance over religion. The challenge is that this transformative switch is not taking 250 years to emerge but is occurring over a period less than a century. Everything and everyone will be affected by it - the travel and tourism sector being no exception. Yet most tourism leaders remain either oblivious or unwilling to contemplate the implications.

We can be forgiven for our reluctance to venture into this space of "deep change" for a number of reasons:

1. The time horizons of leaders in tourism are inevitably short. They sell a time and located based service that is highly perishable.
2. Their investors and or political masters are interested in short term results not long term strategic planning, as they expect whatever issues arise to be on "someone else's watch".
3. Furthermore, there's no precedent. In the past paradigmatic change occurred gradually and almost imperceptibly over several generations. Life at the time might have been both confusing and exciting, but it was still manageable simply because the scale and depth of the change was not clear. If you have never seen or heard about an elephant before, it's hard to get frightened about the prospect of one charging out of the forest in a rage. It's also common for very enlightened folks to move easily between two paradigms. Newton the founder of mechanical physics and responsible for the rise of scientific inquiry and rationalism was a committed Alchemist (he tried to turn dross into gold in his spare time). I suspect several quantum physicists may play the lottery.

At DestiCorp we are convinced that it is both possible and vital that tourism leaders, especially those heading up destinations, national and international associations and agencies, and heads of multi-nationals start investing their time and intellect in understanding that nature and implications of paradigmatic change on their sector and the future livelihoods of the communities they serve. Unless they do, they will be ill equipped to understand let alone deal with the gale force winds of change gathering on the horizon and make the decisions TODAY that will create options for decision-makers tomorrow.

Subsequent posts will provide examples from tourism life that show these deeper forces at work - they'll be tagged with the category "deep change."

WOW! That's pretty heavy for tourism marketers, we know. But if you are interested in what happens after "your watch" as a result of your leadership today; if you have any interest in leaving a positive legacy, then you could do no better than start to understand what all this means.....

This web site is just a start of an exciting journey that will develop over time and hopefully lead to some very fruitful discussions.... Please join us here as we develop more material.

Over the next few days and months, we'll be adding thoughts on

• Tourism Trends and Fashions (2009 - 2010)
• Systemic Change Drivers
• Tourism Growth Forces - the Following Winds
• Tourism Growth Threats - the Head Winds

Recession Not Hurting Everyone in Travel

The recession isn't bad for everyone in the travel industry.  According to Sramana Mitra, Priceline has regained lost ground in terms of valuation and revenue growth while Expedia gained market share and saw an increase in both ad value and the number of properties represented.