Perspectives
Perspectives on tourism strategy, travel trade development, destination management, and the broader role that travel plays in connecting people, supporting communities, and creating good experiences. Written for tourism professionals who believe the industry can, and should, do more than generate arrivals.
Featured
For decades, the primary mandate of destination organizations was straightforward: attract more visitors. More arrivals meant more hotel nights, more restaurant covers, more ticket sales. Growth was the metric, and marketing was the means. That model served the industry well for a long time. But it is increasingly clear that it is no longer sufficient on its own.
When we talk about the economic impact of tourism, the conversation tends to focus on headline numbers: total visitor spending, hotel occupancy rates, tax revenue generated. These figures matter. But they can obscure the more human story of what tourism actually does for the places it touches.
All Articles
For all the excitement surrounding artificial intelligence and digital transformation, it is worth remembering that travel remains, at its core, a people business. Technology has the potential to improve the visitor experience in extraordinary ways. But there is a difference between using technology to enhance hospitality and using it to put distance between organizations and the people they serve.
Artificial intelligence is generating a great deal of enthusiasm in the tourism industry right now, and for understandable reasons. The potential applications are genuinely interesting: personalized itinerary planning, real-time translation, predictive crowd management, smarter distribution. But it is worth being clear-eyed about where the technology adds real value and where it does not.
There is a version of travel that is purely transactional: you pay for access to an experience, consume it, and move on. And there is another version that is genuinely transformative, the kind that leaves you with a different understanding of the world and your place in it. The tourism industry has a role to play in encouraging the latter.
"Sustainable tourism" has become one of those phrases that appears in nearly every destination strategy document, conference agenda, and marketing brief, often without a clear definition of what it actually means in practice. That vagueness is a problem, because the underlying challenge is real and the stakes are high.
The traditional measure of a successful travel trade relationship has been straightforward: how many bookings does it generate? That is a reasonable starting point. But organizations that think about travel trade partnerships only in terms of volume are leaving a great deal of value on the table, and potentially creating problems they will have to manage later.
Topics Covered
If there is a topic you would like to see explored — or if you would like to discuss how any of these ideas apply to your organization — reach out. Every conversation starts with a question.