Tour Operators Propel Tourism

Why do destinations not understand what the market wants?

In an ideal world, tourism destinations would be cohesive, respected, dynamic entities, consulting with their local stakeholders, agreeing what they want from tourism and what they are prepared to invest. Then they would integrate their activities and market their offers. Sometimes they would succeed and sometimes they would fail and try again.

Why not, after all? The potential benefits are so huge and the potential dangers are frightening.

On the plus side, properly managed destinations could put together tourism offers that:

Level out peaks and troughs leading to an efficient, profitable local tourism industry.

Get good employment and training for young people.

Create small local enterprises and foster a beneficial entrepreneur economy.

Use tourism as part of a destination brand and create opportunities for other sectors bringing even more money into the local economy.

Through tourism create educational opportunities for local people to enhance local pride in local culture and local environment - thus providing the underlying understandings to protect and steward both for future generations.

So - more money, more opportunities, more solid, joined-up managed sustainable destination growth.

On the other hand, without good, cohesive management tourism destinations are always in danger.

Danger of falling out of fashion, danger of getting too many tourists, danger of leakage, danger of losing pride of place and confidence in the future.

UNEP puts this quite clearly:

Negative Economic Impacts of Tourism

Because the destination communities have not taken charge of their own activities, they lose any voice in their futures and are completely at the mercy of the marketplace.

The fact is that foreign people and organizations and governments make decisions that affect destinations fundamentally without any cohesive, thoughtful destination input.

So what happens without powerful destination management and marketing? Somebody from outside does what's necessary. Someone without any commitment to the destination takes charge.

The key powers in tourism are connection, understanding and relationship with the market (ie the tourists). This is REAL power often backed up and solidified with datacapture and databases.

Outbound operators of all sorts - including tour operators and OTAs like Tripadvisor and Priceline and AirBNB have this power and they can choose how they use it.

In an ideal world, they would use this power in partnership with destinations. Why? Because the better the destination experience, the better the tourists are satisfied, the more they depend on their operator to deliver the goods and the more they trust them.

In a ideal world strong destinations would seek out such partnerships, but actually the moving forces are outbound operators who will always have the most powerful hands, because there are very few strong destinations who know what they want.

The fact is that the intellectual, the marketing and the entrepreneurial capital reside with the operators and partnerships will always be in their interests.

Because of this, the great sustainable tourism destination innovations are engineered by outbound operators.

The advantages for everybody involved are enormous (including the destinations) - download the latest TUI/Travel Foundation/PW report on Cyprus

Top marks to the Travel Foundation and TUI and Cyprus for creating this worthwhile document.

There are of course other far-sighted operators and NGOs creating sustainable destination initiatives such as Exodus, G Adventures, Intrepid and Planeterra amongst others.

And whilst they, rather than the destinations lead progress the power remains with the operators.

And they can go where they want, constantly improving, constantly seeking guilt-free profits.

But destinations have nowhere to go.