Covering the Inbound Tourism Industry Since 1996
Connect Travel’s RTO Summit East in New York City was a “thumbs-up” success for everyone who attended and took part in the sell-out event. New York City & Company made sure delegates were in an upbeat mood with their opening night reception. Enjoy the slide show of photos taken at the Summit.
It took almost the entire calendar year of 2010 for pharmaceutical companies to get a virus that works. It will be this month or next when the first recipients will have their upper arms ready for the small prick of the needle that delivers the vaccines that have been developed to contain and eventually eliminate the COVID-19 virus. The new vaccine has been heralded as a savior for the world’s travel and tourism industry. Relief is on the way.
For the millions worldwide who have been laid off, furloughed or otherwise re-routed from their careers in tourism as a result of the COVID-driven global pandemic, the presence and potential of a vaccine will help to facilitate a shift in attitude: Instead of wondering, with little hope, if they would ever get back to the industry they know, there is now the hope that they might be able to return to selling, marketing, promoting and operating the tourism product.
What does all this mean? Here are some thoughts.
• If there has been one lesson that the team at Connect Travel’s INBOUND Report has had underscored and amplified for them in the past nine-plus months, it is that the professionals and managers who lead the industry remain the most resourceful and innovative of professionals of any other economic sector.
• Realizing the interdependence of the industry’s many components, tourism managers have pressed for, and receive from, federal government lump-sum payments and loans totaling in the scores of billions of dollars to help long-haul carriers weather the pandemic storm.
• Receptive tour operators, both small and mid-size, have been especially hard hit by the pandemic. But many are family owned and/or have small staffs. They cannot just lay off, furlough or make themselves part-time. So, as have many other components of the tourism industry, receptives have been reducing expenditures by operating remotely—”attending” virtual meetings and making sales calls online.
• Strapped for cash, international tour operators have already started selling, and seeking deposits for, long-haul travel (not just for 2021 and 2022) in 2023! Even before the word “vaccine” became common parlance in the industry, receptive tour operators and their partners began bravely preparing product for Q2 ‘21and Q3 ‘21, gambling that progress on getting the pandemic under control would be made. Such activity turns out to have been a good bet: once more destinations and activities roll out more product, these operators and their partners will already have had their pipeline open and ready to operate.
• No business, no matter how big they are, has been immune from the pandemic’s economic squeeze. TUI, Europe’s largest tour operator, recently announced that it was delaying payments to hotels. (This suggests, naturally, that if TUI is feeling the financial crush, then others must be feeling it as well. And they are.)
• Destinations accustomed to the revenue stream driven by international visitors found themselves with no long-haul air service to bring customers and clients to the USA. As a result, over the course of this past summer and into the fall, some DMOs and airlines have been successful in patching together short-haul “travel bubbles” that emphasize in-country or close-in regional travel product.
• If they’ve left the tourism industry, where are they going? We can’t come up with a reliable figure on the matter but, on the basis of the number of personal notices we’ve seen on the social media, it seems that more than a few former travel sales managers or directors have found a new job and home within the large services sector that include, for example, insurance, real estate and health care facilities (Does the latter suggest the hotel GMs and/or COOs at attractions and travel experiences have what it takes to long-term health care facilities, retirement homes or retirement communities?)
• Beyond Zoom. While the Oxford Dictionary has other English words as candidates, the mostly widely-known new word in the tourism industry is Zoom. Some businesses and organizations have taken the use of Zoom to new and higher levels in pacing, timing and fresh dialogue. Go to YouTube and take a look and listen at anyone of the three dozen or so programs in Connect Travel’s series of virtual roundtables on far-ranging subjects particular to the travel and tourism industry.
Connect, which last month in Orland held the first-of-their-kind series of tourism industry in-person and live marketplaces and conferences, is working on state-of-the-art meetings that incorporate some of the features that were well-received in Orlando into its schedule of events for 2021.
• Safe Bets—China and the UK: For 2019, before the pandemic crisis threw itself at the global travel and tourism industry, China and the UK, were the number three and number two overseas source markets for inbound tourism to the USA. The UK is about to inoculate its citizens with vaccines that neutralize COVID-19 virus, and Americans will be next. Most recent surveys of UK travelers tell us that there is a tremendous amount of pent-up demand for travel to the USA. Meanwhile, the people of China, which has reduced COVID-19 to a point at which new cases are near or at zero, are—by all indications—ready to resume long-haul travel. The key to opening the sluice gates for tourism from China and the UK to the United States will be airline lift capacity.
• To be continued … Join the dialogue by writing us and letting us and our readers know what you have been doing to respond to the damage of the global pandemic and how you have prepared for a return to (a new) normal. Just leave a reply below.
The U.S. Travel Association has announced that Joe D’Alessandro, president and CEO of the San Francisco Travel Association, and Ernest Wooden Jr., former president and CEO of the Los Angeles Tourism & Convention Board, will be honored as the 2020 inductees into the U.S. Travel Association Hall of Leaders.
Distinguished individuals are named to U.S. Travel’s Hall of Leaders for “sustained, noteworthy contributions that have positively impacted the travel industry and raised industry-wide standards. With these two inductions, 102 travel industry leaders have been named to the U.S. Travel Hall of Leaders since it was established in 1969.
D’Alessandro has led the San Francisco Travel Association as president and CEO since 2006. Prior to joining San Francisco Travel, D’Alessandro was president and CEO of the Portland Oregon Visitors Association from 1996 to 2006 and served as executive director of the Oregon Tourism Commission from 1991 to 2006. He was recognized as State Tourism Director of the Year by U.S. Travel’s National Council of State Tourism Directors in 1995.
D’Alessandro has served numerous industry boards, including the board of directors of the U.S. Travel Association, Visit California and San Francisco’s Super Bowl 50 Host Committee.
Wooden’s career in tourism and hospitality was concluded with seven years as president and CEO of the Los Angeles Tourism & Convention Board, from which he retired in June. Wooden also served as executive vice president, global brands with Hilton Hotels Corporation, where he was noted as the world’s highest-ranking African American hotel executive, spearheading initiatives for 3,000 properties in 80 countries. Wooden also held senior positions with Sheraton Hotels and Resorts, Omni Hotels & Resorts, DoubleTree by Hilton and Promus Hotel Corporation.
• New Thomas Cook OTA expected at any moment. About a year to the day (Sept. 23, 2019) that it collapsed, the tour operator Thomas Cook, it has been reported, is about to be revived by its new ownership, the Chinese conglomerate Fosun, which acquired the Thomas Cook brand last November for £11 million ($14 million). The acquisition also included Cook’s hotel brands Casa Cook and Cook’s Club, in addition to rights, title and interest in certain trademarks, domain names, software applications, social media accounts and licenses. Fosun’s portfolio of tourism interests also includes Club Med. As a part of its preparation for a Thomas Cook reboot, published accounts report, Fosun has retained a team of tourism industry professionals who are ready to launch and operate the new OTA.
• Saga’s Former Owner Trying to Save Brand: Sir Roger de Haan, the former owner of Saga is returning to the over-50s travel and insurance group by investing £100 million ($128 million) to shore up the company’s finances. Sir Roger, who sold Saga for £1.35 billion ($1.73 billion) in 2004, injected the funds in return for a 20 percent stake in the company, which suffered a pre-tax loss of £55.5 million ($71 million) in the six months up to July 31 after a £60 million ($77 million) impairment charge in its travel business as COVID-19 hit its operations.
Alongside his investment, Sir Roger joins the Saga board and serves as non-executive chairman, taking over from Patrick O’Sullivan, for an expected term of three years. In a statement, the company said: “The proposed equity raise is intended to strengthen the company’s financial position against the backdrop of the Covid-19 outbreak and the ongoing suspension of travel and to better position Saga for longer-term recovery and growth.” De Haan, whose father Sidney founded Saga in 1948, took over the business in 1984 before selling it to a management buyout team funded by the private equity group Charterhouse.
• Former STA Travel branch manager launches a specialist youth travel brand. Arron Mitchell, director of travel agency Platinum World Travel, says the new company Syte (an acronym for Student & Youth Travel Escapes) will target “18-30-ish” clients. The unstated hope is that Syte will fill a void created with the closure of STA Travel, a specialist youth travel agency and tour operator with 49 retail stores. STA, which was owned by Diethelm Keller Holding, with headquarters in Zurich and London, had almost 2,000 employees working in over 200 stores worldwide. Last month, the Swiss parent company filed for insolvency.
• Michael Barkoczy, one of the most widely known executive-level professionals in Brazil’s travel and tourism industry, has launched his new travel company— Easy Travel Shop (ETS), populating it with some other well-known senior management types. Barkoczy, who served as director of international for CVC for nearly a dozen years, then as president of the tour operator FlytourMMT Travel, had been operating his own consultancy for nearly two years before launching the new company, which will focus on selling tours and activities. Barkoczy told the Brazilian trade publication PANROTAS, “Our focus is on tours, tickets, attractions, experiences … We will have day use in hotels, but not room night.”
• Hays Travel acquires Tailor Made Travel after the latter folds. The deal will cover Tailor Made’s retail estate of 20 shops and about 100 employees. A statement from Tailor Made, said “Hays Travel had been contacted and made an expression of interest. Our offer to acquire all 20 shops was agreed, as was the retention of approximately 100 employees, late Friday afternoon (September 4th).” Three weeks ago, Tailor Made Travel chief executive Simon Morgan indicated that he was planning to close 15 of the Welsh business’s 20 stores in order to save the company.
Speaking after administration and subsequent acquisition of his business, he said that the experience was “devastating, but I take consolation in the fact that this protects the future of the 100 employees.” Hays Travel, meanwhile, has continued with its expansion plans—even during the COVID-19 crisis, including the opening of its 50th shop in Scotland. Hays also plans to open a Glasgow office to support its growing tour operation.
It is difficult to gauge just how significant the impact will be, as there is a putative way out of the situation, but for the moment, it appears possible that WeChat, the omnipresent and omni-functional app used by more than a billion Chinese and millions more in countries throughout the world, might be unavailable in the U.S. beginning in mid-September to those travel and tourism companies that rely on it for its marketing, promotional and sales programs.
There are still details to come, but the basic “who-what-when-where-and-why” of the situation is this: U.S. President Donald Trump earlier this month signed an executive order that would ban the use of the app in the U.S. The ostensible reasons are/were that WeChat (Trump also issued a nearly identical executive order for TikTok,) censors some content on the app and that it has the capability to manipulate content in ways that could influence U.S. elections. The Trump Administration’s way out of the situation would be for a U.S. company to buy the app from its current owner, Tencent. This hardly seems likely, as Tencent, headquartered in Shenzhen, is a corporate conglomerate behemoth that is one of the world’s largest venture capital firms and investment corporations with nearly $1 trillion in assets and stakes in some 600 entities. Should there be an attempt to acquire WeChat, it is clear that Tencent would dictate the terms of such a transaction.
Impact on Tourism Industry: George Cao, co-founder and CEO, Dragon Trail Interactive, a global digital marketing firm that specializes in helping travel suppliers and national, regional and city DMOs and destinations promote and sell their tourism products, provided INBOUND this brief statement explaining the role that WeChat serves in promoting tourism from China, which is the world’s largest source market for overseas tourism:
“Overseas tourism brands, including DMOS, airlines, hotels, and museums, all use WeChat to provide useful information and marketing content, to attract Chinese travelers, help them plan their trips, and improve their experience once they’ve arrived. WeChat is also an irreplaceable platform for Chinese to communicate with friends and family while abroad, and to share their travel experiences. On the B2B side, it’s an essential communication tool for anyone doing business with the Chinese travel industry. To lose it would have profound consequences for any business or brand to be able to welcome and communicate with the largest outbound tourism market in the world.”
We received another take from Sally Davis Berry, who was instrumental in greatly increased Chinese visitation to the Corning Museum of Glass during her tenure at the attraction. Berry, who keeps busy as a tourism industry consultant and who has conducted numerous programs aimed at helping U.S. travel suppliers to better understand and use the WeChat application, told us: “Politics aside (if that is possible in 2020) the limitations of WeChat in the U.S. will make it even more difficult to capture that market post Pandemic. Many of us were using WeChat daily to stay in touch, build relationships and make the language barrier much easier to overcome.”
She added, “Tourism professionals with little to no marketing budgets could promote their business with key operators and influencers. Seeing how it made daily life easier in China gave me a glimpse into the future of mobile payments and online bookings. I will personally miss being able to stay in touch with friends if we lose the ability to use this ‘Superapp’.”
Where to Go from Here: The path ahead on this matter is not clear. There aren’t many other paths to a solution, because there is another important reality that makes WeChat both popular and unique in the USA: It provides tourism businesses in the U.S. and elsewhere in the world with a channel of contact and interaction unavailable to users of Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest and other popular channels because these sites are banned in China.
In sum: How this plays out is still TBD … unless it’s already been determined and we don’t know about it.
