There is no escape for travel and tourism get new folio

Global tourism industry between a rock and a hard place – find out your opportunities – get sustainabletourism2015

The emissions noose is tightening. A combination of the looming COP21 Paris climate deal and a tacit agreement between the US and China means that there is definitely a deal to cap global emissions nation by nation in sight.

Next year, also, the ICAO is set to agree a global deal for airlines.

There is no escape – the global tourism industry will simply have to play by the rules.

Added to all this, there was a 100% agreement at the key UN Sustainable Development Summit last month for all world nations to pursue sustainable development programmes relating to social, economic, cultural and environmental aims. Targets and goals have been agreed including, for the first time targets directly relating to sustainable tourism.

There is no escape – within a very few years, travel and tourism will be emissions restrained & judged by its sustainable benefits to tourists & host destinations

So…

How can the industry expand by a forecast 80% (to 1.8 billion international tourists) in the next 15 years and reduce its total emissions while it’s doing it?

And how can it deliver practical benefits that can be audited and counted?

Looks like tourism is between a rock and a hard place.

This means big challenges for the outbound travel and tourism industry like tour operators, travel agents, airlines AND for the receptive, inbound industry like destinations, hotels, tourism attractions.

And there is one other major and related sustainability challenge in the global tourism industry – EFFICIENCY – in other words minimizing of waste.

Not only waste that is created by tourists but waste that is created by tourism.

For instance there are some beautiful destinations that are overfull with tourists (like the iconic ones – let’s say Venice, Florence, Amsterdam, Paris for example) and some that are overempty.

The fact is that tourism geographic distribution is horribly lumpy and consequently inefficient. And it’s not just that some places are that much better than others – its simply that they don’t get any visibility in the global marketplace.

Then there is more inefficient lumpiness in the system like seasons, and weekends.

Seasonality is a major efficiency issue – leads to terrible utilization of property, rubbish ROI, bad employee relations, ungainly value chains and is consequently very important in terms of sustainability.

And finally…there is the issue of the OTAs and intermediation.

Whereas the internet offered the opportunity for visitors to deal direct with hotels and destinations to book their accommodation, the commercial development of the world wide web took it away.

OTAs neatly placed themselves, their pay-gates and other fee-charging intermediaries between destinations/hotels and their guests.

Plus, it’s practically a duopoly. With Expedia’s recent purchase of Orbitz, Expedia and Priceline now own 94% of the US online travel agency (OTA) market, according to Phocuswright data. New channels such as Book on Google and TripAdvisor Instant Booking will surely disrupt the market further.

And it doesn’t stop there – all these booking engines are making advances to sell the total holiday packages – restaurants, tourist attractions all come into destination packages which the next versions of OTAs – (let’s say  OTA2’s) will deliver. Tripadvisor for instance already owns La Fourchette and Dimmi restaurant sites, Tripbod and Viator excursion providers.

So there are 4 major challenges for the independent outbound industry of travel agents, tour operators, group organizers, airlines… and the inbound industry, accommodation providers, tourism attractions, tour operators restaurants in destinations:

• Emissions constraints,
• sustainability constraints,
• efficient use of resources
• and the OTAs.

And these challenges, in turn are making available a great swathe of massive opportunities…

SustainableTourism2015 sets these challenges out in detail in its folio and vodcast – and offers the opportunities with updates on a weekly basis.

Make sure that you get yours now… find out more at http://www.SustainableTourism2015.com

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