Moving Beyond Overtourism will require more than a redefinition
What a difference a year, # overtourism and some negative publicity can make. For the past two years I have returned from the World Travel Market with my heart in my boots – see Walking the halls of WTM with hope and despair (2014) and 2015 – Responsible Tourism Day:...
Comparing Apollo 13 with Mass Tourism
If the international tourism “industry” were a spaceship called Apollo 13, it would, in retrospect, come as no surprise that we’re hearing reports of a problem. Over the past 12 months a relatively inaudible concern expressed by a few has grown into a small but...
The biggest but unrecognised challenge facing DMOs today
This post was originally published as a guest post on DestinationThink! here. After interviewing dozens of destination marketing leaders, Destination Think! identified fifty individual, albeit interrelated, challenges facing the industry. They then grouped these...
Do planet and profit need to be at odds?
DestinationThink! is getting ready for its Summit in New York in October (pdf) and one of the themes is titled Profit and Planet. Partly in preparation, the following discussion formed the third in a series of interviews conducted by David Archer of Destination Think!...
Has the growth of tourism become a wicked problem?
This post describes the characteristics of “wicked problems” and suggests that given forecasts of tourism’s continued growth, the term might apply. The designation is important because wicked problems cannot be solved in conventional ways. A new kind of thinking is required.