Insights
Tourism: What’s the Point? Part 2 – Join the Conversation
This week my blogging experience confirmed an intuition.There exists "out there" a real hunger for meaning and purpose and, unless we as businesses, bloggers, associations and governments acknowledge this, we will fail to serve our customers, readers, members or...
Good Morning Tourism: Time for Your Wake Up Call – Part One
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...
Is Conscious Business “Capitalism 3.0”?
Dr. Jean Houston, scholar, philosopher and researcher in human capacities, and one of the foremost visionary thinkers and doers of our time and principal founders of the Human Potential Movement sent me a summary of the major mindset shifts taking place at this point...
Is This Tourism’s Inconvenient Truth?
This article was originally published on LinkedIN on March 8th, 2019 here It’s that self-congratulatory time of the year again when the hyperbole about the resilience and value of tourism matches the rise in numbers and spending. It’s also time to re-read and ponder...
Sustainability is Out and Transformation is In – Beware!
As predicted earlier, the buzzword “du jour” in tourism is fast becoming transformation. Its predecessor, sustainability, has through over and mis-use become meaningless and ineffective lacking the capacity to lift hearts, inspire hope and, ironically, sustain action....
TransformationalTravel – another trend or the real deal?
It’s taken mainstream tourism nearly 20 years to fully embrace the wisdom imparted by authors Pine and Gilmore in The Experience Economy. Use of the word “tour” is diminishing, replaced by the word “experience” even though format and content may have stayed the...
Changing Tourism from the inside out – cause for optimism in 2017
Two important, but unheralded, events took place in 2016 that give me cause for optimism as we start a new year. First, the World Travel and Tourism Council (WTTC) - the self-proclaimed Authority for Tourism – released an article and video acknowledging that tourism...
Destination Marketers are collaborators
Destination marketers are collaborators: DMOs must strive for a “net benefit” from tourism in their communities Note: this article was authored by David Archer,Editor at Destination Think! on their site published on July 15, 2016. I had the pleasure of meeting with...
DMOs need to change their focus and function to transform tourism – Part 2
In my last post, I re-examined 6 recommendations for change in a DMO’s focus and function originally made in 2010 that are needed to transform tourism. Based on the positive response, I am both gratified and a little worried that they still apply as we approach 2017....
DMOs need to change their focus and function to transform tourism – Part 1
Given the way digital technology and connectivity have transformed tourism marketing over the past 25 years, why is it that our primary institutional structures – the Destination Marketing Organization (DM0) have changed so little? Their purpose has remained the same;...
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...