2015 wary optimism: will tourism to be sustainable at last? Or not!

The rise and rise of the OTAs, refugees or tourists, climate change accord – a host of sustainable commercial opportunities unveiled in 2015

OK – it’s been a BIG year for the Big Picture. On the negative side we have seen the beginning of the chaos and destruction forecast by many climate change gurus – territorial wars (read DAESH, Ukraine, Yemen, Afghanistan, Nigeria and more) leading to mass refugee migration, said to be as high as 25million at the moment.

And this is just the beginning – there are over 500 million climate refugees forecast for 2030.

Don’t for one minute believe that all this won’t fundamentally affect the tourism industry.

On the positive side – there was unanimous world agreement on the sustainable development goals in September in a full forum of the UN. And the Pope was there.

And in December, in Paris the world agreed on climate change. And everybody who was everybody was there

Don’t for one minute believe that all this won’t fundamentally affect the tourism industry.

And one big thing that could be good and could be very bad – the rise of the OTAs. Whatever they call themselves – "The Sharing Economy", "User Generated Content Review Sites"- $63bn Priceline (aka Booking.com), $25bn AirBNB, $12bn Tripadvisor now hold tourism businesses to ransom all over the world.

In the next few important years, where the OTAs figure in the picture and whether they in turn are disintermediated will be key.

But in 2016 the great 2015 achievements of the world’s governments will be tested by the big meeting of ICAO. Will the world’s airlines commit to emissions caps or not?

And will the Year of Sustainable Tourism in 2017 truly be a year in which sustainable tourism in all its forms – economic, cultural, social and environmental actually be practiced. And will destinations take up the baton?

Maybe also destinations will begin to Monetize their tourism by taking control of the visitor relationship before, during and after the visit – just like those nasty OTAs. Maybe they could do it by creating value-added options including all of their destination exports into the offer. Maybe even by putting a Sunark on their territory to track their tourists.

And, if you really believe in climate change (sorry this seems like a pantomine line!) then you will also believe that alpine resorts will be denuded of snow – what will you do with the Profitable Paradox of beautiful mountain destinations with lots of gash accommodation?

And have you noticed this year the prevalence of FOOD? Slow food is everywhere. What does Slow Food mean? It means seasonal and local. So you can either eat your own local seasonal food or you can go somewhere to enjoy their local seasonal food (it’s different from yours – that’s what local means…duh!) Should be a boon for tourism, what about local food tasting trails – now popping up everywhere ?

And I now get what the phrase ‘Sharing Economy’ means! It means that you can share your local tourism profits with a nice bunch of billionaire shareholders in Wall Street. And the wonderful thing is that they don’t need to take any risk at all, lucky things! In the olden days they used to build hotels and employ people to make money. Now they just have to invent an algorithm and spend a few billion with nice Mr Google. And it’s so good that those bankers who screwed up the world economy in 2008 have found gainful and profitable employment.

So, it’s nice to see that AirBNB (which owns nothing – not even an escrow account) is worth $25 billion and that the world’s biggest hotelier IHG (with 4,000 hotels) is worth $6bn.

Would you say that a bust is in order? How many people does it take to see that the emperor has no clothes before everybody believes that he is actually naked?

And the biggest Threat/Opportunity on the horizon is climate change which has got to be no1 issue in politics shortly – when everybody agrees that it is ‘The Biggest Challenge that Mankind has ever faced"

In the meantime much assiduous work is taking place in a few of the world’s 80,000 destinations to make them green. Because they want to serve their communities and welcome sensitive visitors, because they want to steward their environments and because they want to build places worth living in, and, above all, because they really have a tangible stake in the future.They really have skin in the game unlike IHG or the OTAs.

See some of them at http://www.greendestinations.info

And one destination to watch next year – Morocco. Why? Because it has a massive sustainable tourism plan, it’s where the next Climate Change Conference takes place in 2016 and it’s where it all started as the Marrakesh Process was initiated for sustainable tourism 

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Valere Tjolle

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