Why the world needs “Meaningful Tourism”

A return of the world to the good old pre-pandemic times is not possible, especially for global tourism. Quality, satisfaction and benefits for all stakeholders involved need to become the guideposts for the tourism development in the 2020s. 

The world developed economically at an ever-growing speed in last 30 years without a parallel growth of political institutions managing globalization – the climate catastrophe, rise of despotism and the concentration of wealth in ever fewer hands have been the result.

Global tourism spending even outpaced global GDP growth, but likewise no regulatory body emerged to define and enforce limits to the acquisition of public goods like beaches and city centers, to look after the “carrying capacity” of nature and host communities or to fight the two elephants in the room of the tourism industry: seasonality and sub-standard working conditions. 

In 2018 and 2019 already a debate under the headline of “overtourism” developed as a result of growing resistance of host communities. During the pandemic, a plethora of discussions evolved about the necessity of a “new” tourism, of adherence to sustainable development goals and of the need of the tourists to finally start to behave in a more sustainable and responsible way.

With the restart of international tourism in the past weeks, not much seems to be left of all these debates. Return tickets from Hamburg to Palma de Mallorca are on offer for less than €50, citizens of Barcelona complain that Las Ramblas are fuller than ever with tourists, even the cruise ships started again to spew out 5,000 short-time visitors onto hapless cities and islands.

It helps little to give schoolmasterly commands to tourists to put the interests of the host communities and the environment before their own interests. It also does not help to speculate how many percent increase in prices customer would agree to pay for a “greener” tourism product if the customers are not offered more than a better consciousness for their extra dough. 

In almost all of the many recently published studies and strategy papers for the post-pandemic tourism development, the elephants in the room continue to be ignored: The one-size-fits-all approach of many destinations that results in pronounced levels of seasonality and staff shortages.

Segmentation

Tourism source markets and the demands and interests of market segments is more segmented than ever, with travelers searching for experience and immersion. 

The need for relaxation is not the key purpose of leisure tourism anymore. Travelers are increasingly belonging to the 50-plus age cohorts and increasingly having a non-Western cultural background.

It helps little to give schoolmasterly commands to tourists to put the interests of the host communities and the environment before their own interests.

Wolfgang Georg Alrt

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Car factories produce, with the help of artificial intelligence and robots, vehicles with each having a different configuration according to the wishes of the customer. Dell started decades ago to offer bespoken PCs. In tourism, the decision of Vancouver Island Tourism Board to morph into a “social enterprise created to ensure that travel is a force for good” called 4VI can still be considered as an avant-garde move. The insight of the president of the Greek Tourism Confederation SETE that “Happy residents bring happy tourists” is still counteracted in many destinations by all-inclusive beach resorts that prevent any contacts with the wider destination. Even the 4VI and SETE leaders still speak of the need to “balance” the interests of guests and hosts, as if they were enemies, instead of supporting ways to align them as well as the other stakeholders in a benefits-for-all situation.

Having huge numbers of customers buying all the same product is mostly in the interest of tour operators. Airlines, hotels and restaurants do not mind much why travelers fly to and stay in a destination. Attractions, mobility companies and retailers will even prefer a greater diversity of visitors. 

For most tour operators, “niche” remains a dirty word, but for the rest of the industry it will become, in the guises of “special interest” and “international source market,” the answer to the question how to kill the elephant of seasonality. Using all part of a country and all seasons of a year for touristic offers is possible almost anywhere and anytime, if it is based on the identification of the right global market segment and the right product adaptation, which in many cases will include the participation of local people. 

Tour operators are losing importance within the tourism industry thanks to increasingly experienced and internet-enabled individual travelers. In a recent survey, only 7% of Chinese travelers, for example, identified traveling in package tour groups as their preference. 

The tourism industry will have to catch up to other industries to become a part of what Pine & Gilmore described 20 years ago as the “Experience Economy.” Sustainable tourism, responsible tourism and restorative tourism will all be necessary elements of that development in the 2020s, but will not be enough.

"Meaningful Tourism"

Enter “Meaningful Tourism” - a paradigm that is based on a return to quality, satisfaction and benefits for all stakeholders involved, namely the guests, the host communities, the employees of service providers, the companies, the government and the environment, with quality and satisfaction measured by the stakeholders themselves. 

Guests who are provided with exactly what they wanted, and even a bit of what they did not know they wanted, will turn into product ambassadors, offering free recommendation marketing instead of expensive and decreasingly efficient social media marketing. 

Host communities will see the advantages of receiving visitors interesting to interact with, employees will value better pay and year-round jobs with the possibility to feel as hosts rather than servants. Companies will be able to ask for higher prices against perceived better quality, will be able to use their resources year-round and can retain and train their staff. Governments will receive more taxes and will be able to use tourism as a regional development tool. 

With a feeling of belonging in the sense of a kinship economy, guests and hosts alike can be expected to treat the natural environment with more care. 

Putting up signs of “Verboten!” and flygskam campaigns will not change the behavior of the majority of tourists. Doing something good for the environment will not convince customers to pay substantially more money for the same service. Traveling is a human right, not a privilege, so pricing and taxing the bottom half out of the market is not an option either.  

Distinguishable benefits are necessary to complete the Meaningful Tourism approach as the key element to change the attitude and perception of all stakeholders involved. The discussion about “experience economy” has moved further from staged experiences to co-creative experiences and further to transformative experiences. For the global tourism industry there is still a long way to go.