Translator: Annika Bidner Reviewer: Mile Živković
Travel has gone from this --
brave, uncharted, unique and authentic destinations
to this -- (Laughter) --
safe mass market destinations and big business.
And by big business, I mean 1.4 trillion dollars last year,
in international travel alone.
OK, it's making money.
But let me ask this: are we making travel better?
Better for the traveler,
better for the destination, better for the stakeholders?
My theory, and what I plan to demonstrate today
is that we can use some of these driving forces,
uniqueness and authenticity, and a profitable business model,
more profitable than the one they use today, to help fix
some of the key problems with travel.
And by the end of this presentation, you're going to learn what you can do
as travelers to have a more enriching and unique travel experience
no matter where you go.
OK, so if you look at the trends,
travel's gotten a lot cheaper.
In 1939, a basic transatlantic economy ticket cost 12,000 dollars,
if you injust for inflation.
Today you can get basically the same flight,
with improved flight safety, a movie of your choice,
for less than 10% of the cost.
You just have put up with this.
(Laughter)
It hasn't just gotten cheaper, it's gotten faster and more comfortable.
You can now get from your ice-cold apartment in Stockholm
to the heart of the Amazon rainforest in less than a day,
where you can ride around on a jungle boat, in a jacuzzi,
and sip mimosas.
I'm not making this up, you can actually do this.
(Laughter)
And the longest part of that entire journey
could very well be in the airport, where you had connecting flights.
Getting back to my original question about making travel better.
Comfort and convenient are nice, but these things have some side effects.
Just 50 years ago, if you went to any of the major destinations of today,
you had to learn the local language.
Not just to ask for directions,
but to order a meal, even check in to a major hotel.
And today there's this super highway of tourist-friendly stuff,
English signs everywhere, guidebooks,
apps, tourist information centers.
All these things, by the way, done with the best of intentions,
but they keep visitors
from having any real organic reason to interact with the locals.
And when I mean organic interaction, I'm not talking about this.
(Laughter)
Let me pause for a second and ask a really important question.
Why do we travel?
The reason I do, and I don't think I'm alone here,
is to experience something different.
Something we don't have at home.
And destinations want to offer something different.
That's their unique selling proposition.
The reason you should visit them,
and not any of the other hundred thousands of destinations around the world,
that also have sun, beaches mountains and good food.
So we want something unique, and they want to offer something unique.
But what really happens?
Well, it may be easier for us to get there,
but it's easier for everything else to get there as well.
So it's not surprising that destinations get a tourist wheel,
hop on-hop off bus, water slide, convention center, historical museum,
aquarium, Madame Tussauds wax museum, Hard Rock Café, H&M, Starbucks,
Hilton, Dunkin Donuts, Fridays, Marriott, Subway, 7Eleven, KFC, Pizza Hut,
McDonalds, Benetton, GAP, Disney Store, Häagen-Dazs, Burger King, IKEA,
and of course, a segway tour.
Ladies and gentlemen -- (Laughter)
I present the modern unique tourism destination.
(Applause)
There's another interesting trend you'll probably spot as well.
Here's how many Pizza Huts are currently in Manhattan.
Here's how many are in Beijing.
Here's how many KFCs are now in Manhattan,
and how many in Beijing.
Here's how many Walmart superstores are in Manhattan
and how many are in Beijing.
Yes, it would seem that Chinese don't seem to mind
Americans selling their own crap right back to them.
(Laughter)
(Applause)
The one place you won't see any of these chains
is on the Beijing tourism website.
They understand that you might venture into a KFC while you're there,
but you're not traveling to China to experience a KFC.
They're not alone in this, I'm not picking on Beijing,
this is just standard operating procedure for any DMO,
a Destination Marketing Organization.
They're the ones tasked with inspiring you to go visit them.
And there are over 4,000 of them around the world,
and it's growing all the time.
They understand not every destination has a Sistine Chapel or pyramids of Egypt
to attract people, so when they hire an ad agency
to help bring people in, they might dress up the destination a little bit,
show things that you might have a hard time experiencing
when you're there.
Like a rainbow on their website or brochure.
Hard to replicate without a rainbow machine.
(Laughter)
Or they might show synchronized whale breaching.
It happens probably once every 50,000 whale tours.
(Laughter)
Or they might show this color for the ad in India,
when the water actually looks like this.
(Laughter)
Too many tourists on the beach?
Just crop them out.
Or in this low pix resolution image, of an actual brochure from Brazil
of the same beach,
they simply hid the tourists on top of a hill.
(Laughter)
Of course it's hard to live up to the advertising,
partially because no one's policing it,
but imagine how this would work with a real company?
Could you imagine, you see the ad for this,
you go out buy one, you get it home
you open it, and it looks like that?
(Laughter)
You take it back to the store,
"Hey, this is just a piece of cardboard! It doesn't do anything."
And they go, "We're just a marketing organization.
Can't help."
How is that any different from showing that on your website,
and providing that?
That's why I believe the DMO
is going to have to evolve into a management organization.
And some places already are.
This is the island of Guam.
This beach was cleaned with tourism promotional funds.
And it's already paying off.
They've already gone to number one on Trip Advisor.
And they're getting great word of mouth.
I think I have shown that diversity and quality control can go out the window
as a destination grows.
But let me take a second to look a little closely at the growth.
Here's how much the world population has grown over the last 63 years.
184%.
In that same time, international travel has grown over 4,000%.
So there's over a billion international arrivals today.
In just ten years, that's expected to double,
to nearly two billion.
Now you've been to Gamla stan, old town here in Stockholm,
you've seen how busy it is in the summer,
you can barely walk on some days,
what's that even going to look like with twice as many people?
It's hard to imagine.
And forget about Stockholm for a second, what will Rome look like
with twice as many people?
Or Barcelona, with twice as many people?
It's tricky.
And as professor Östberg just explained,
sometimes we can't even see it,
because our views are so shaped by the marketing.
Here are two cruise ships, the Escape and the Getaway.
Nothing against the cruise line, I just like the names of the ships.
You see, the population density is about a million people per square mile
on these ships.
In some of the most crowded slums in the world, like here in India,
it's 800,000.
The cruise line has managed to convince us that we're getting away from it all,
in some of the most crowded conditions in the world.
(Laughter)
(Applause)
And that's not the only marketing oddity.
You might wonder, how do the small guys compete,
how does this little place compete
with a marketing powerhouse like Paris or Las Vegas?
Often they go this route, they say how unspoiled they are,
or undiscovered, and even when they don't,
the media likes to jump on to that as well,
and also tout how undiscovered or unspoiled it is.
What are they trying to say?
Hurry in and help spoil what's left?
(Laughter)
What kind of strategy is that?
If that's our clever approach to tourism,
why not just come out with something like that?
(Laughter)
Visit China, shoot a panda, while supplies last.
(Laughter)
Wouldn't it be better to help protect some of these cultural treasures?
And if not just for us, what about for the locals
who suddenly wake up and find they're living
in an overpriced and overcrowded tourist center?
The airline see trendy new places, and they add more flights.
The hotel industry
see strong occupancy rates and they add more hotels.
And these two segments of the industry are very influential,
and can help grow a destination quickly.
The thing is that they don't really care how many visitors are
at the tourist centers, or at the attractions, as long as
the number of people in their hotels and on their airlines is just right.
In fact, you'll never see a hotel suddenly jam more people into your room.
And you're not going to see an airline selling standing room only,
or tickets to sit on someone else's lap.
Except maybe Ryanair.
(Laughter) (Applause)
But even Disney closes their doors a couple of times a year
when they hit maximum capacity.
The thing is, they're not alone.
It's not just the airlines and the hotels.
Other stakeholders want more tourists as well.
The thing is, they've taken their eye off the ball.
Which is in this case, a quality visitor experience
that starts the moment they arrive in that place,
and lasts until they leave.
And not doing that can shortchange the visitor
and mean it's not a great long term strategy for growth.
Now we've all seen night clubs lose popularity and go under.
We've seen entire shopping malls
get abandoned.
We've seen hotels go bankrupt.
And despite the general growth in tourism,
we've seen entire destinations go into decline.
In fact, here's a report from the European Commission
called "Destinations in decline."
And the number one reason: congestion; it's another word for overcrowding.
Go to Trip Advisor, put in overcrowded,
you'll get almost a hundred thousands results.
You can see what they're saying,
it would have been good, but it's overcrowded.
Even at resorts where people go into so called "beach rage"
from other people putting their beach towels too close to them.
And academics paint an even gloomier picture.
It gets popular, and then it goes off.
Or this one, that came about six years later,
by professor Richard Butler,
which shows that you get in this overcrowded range,
and then it either goes down, or somehow, it goes back up.
So how does it go back up? What's the magic formula?
What can destinations do to keep it going back up?
Here's the first step: be unique.
That means standing up to the franchisers, especially in your cultural city centers,
we don't need to have a McDonalds in downtown Milan.
It means that if you are creating a destination,
make it unique to the place it's in.
Like this one, the Stockholm's relatively new Abba Museum,
a great example.
The other thing is growing organically.
Wouldn't it be great if you could claim your destination was never overcrowded?
The first step in doing that is figuring out how many visitors
your destination can actually hold.
And it's not as simple as just adding up
the number of people that fit into the hotel rooms in the city.
Which is the traditional way of doing it.
You want to think of it more like this:
you could jam a hundred people into your home,
if you had a dinner party and everyone held a paper plate,
and you did it buffet style, and everyone stood like this.
But if you want to have people sit down right there,
and you've only got eight seats and eight plates,
there's your capacity.
In tourism, capacity is getting defined
by how many airplanes can land on the runway.
Or how many buses they can jam into the parking lot,
without much regard to how many tourists can actually get into the attractions,
or that the city centers are starting to feel like tourist ant farms.
Go back to this little dinner party analogy,
they're thinking standing room
when they should be thinking seats and silverware.
It doesn't matter how culturally sensitive the visitors are.
You could put 500 eco travelers into your town,
and it's going to feel overcrowded.
There's a tipping point, from when it goes
from being really cool and authentic to feeling touristy.
And it's largely due to the number of visitors per local
or per square kilometer.
Let's take these examples, Reykjavik, they get
5.7 annual visitors for every local,
San Gimignano, Italy, gets 43,000.
Which do you think was recently described as a cool authentic place to visit
in a travel magazine?
And the thing is, here's the trick.
But how can we grow tourism and limit it at the same time?
That's what's going to worry these places.
But wasn't this a tough sell?
We're going to speed up traffic by stopping it.
Certainly we can, with smart ideas,
we can learn a lesson from Reykjavik or Iceland, in their fishing industry,
which became extremely lucrative
once they self-imposed a quota system to limit the catch.
And like fish, tourists belong to everyone and no one.
And they often go after them to the point where it becomes unprofitable.
Spending too much on marketing
to attract visitors that are reluctant to go.
Too many hotel rooms that stand empty in off-peak season.
And these long lines - people aren't just tired and upset
that they have to stand in a long line,
they are also not able to eat, shop or otherwise inject
their precious tourist money into the local economy.
We have think carefully about providing a better experience.
And if tourism hopes to have a lucrative future
we have to treat tourists and visitors with respect,
not jamming them in to different situations
of manufactured experience.
(Laughter)
So the solutions to this -- One is just to impose visitor permits.
It doesn't have to be a rich club where you have everyone
paying a lot of money to get in.
You could give them away, or have some paid,
some for students that are cheap,
free ones that go with a lottery, or very cheap passes
that go to people who've taken the time
to learn the language or have family in the area.
I think a more interesting solution
is simply this, the free market.
Plus a little transparency.
When you're booking a flight like this to Stockholm,
you have the supply and demand right there.
You can see it, make a smart decision.
Same when you're purchasing a hotel.
The thing is, when you're booking here,
what you can't see, say six months in advance,
or even next week, is how busy the attractions are going to be.
We don't know.
So maybe you show up,
and there's an awful lot of demand and not much supply.
And we couldn't make an informed decision.
But imagine if we could.
If we could know that, and see they were full
on the date we were thinking of going, so we just change the date.
Its availability, we book it.
Yes, that does mean more advanced planning,
but isn't that better than going to an overcrowded destination,
maybe waiting all day and not even getting in,
or just using up your whole day in a queue?
So what can you do to have
a more authentic experience, no matter where you go?
The first step is to look inward, at your interests.
Say you like whatever.
Ultimate frisbee. You're going to Stockholm.
Look online for an ultimate frisbee club.
They happen to have one - the Stockholm Syndrome.
(Laughter)
They even have a map where they practice, and a calendar.
You can get in contact, ask if you can join!
You like fencing?
See if you can join a local fencing club wherever you're headed.
Just shoot them an email in advance.
And hotels can get in on this.
Ask your guests what their interests are, and help connect them.
Oh, you like birdwatching?
Let me connect you with a local birdwatching club.
For free!
Make friends with people, in an organic way.
And you're going to create a unique and enriching experience for everyone.
Travel like a guidebook writer, not a guidebook reader.
Let's say here in Stockholm,
you want to go out to a new, cool place to eat,
are you going to buy a guidebook?
I hope not.
The information here is nearly two years old, at best.
What do you do, you look online, or you go to a newspaper.
You can do that when you travel,
even if you go where you don't know the language.
Go to a local newspaper, and there's something
called Google Translate.
One click, and it's in whatever language you want.
Book a table, you'll be the only travelers there.
Is doing everything I explained today
going to solve everything that is wrong with travel?
No, of course not.
But I hope it can serve as a framework
to fix some of the key things, and create long-term sustainable
and profitable growth for the tourism industry,
and help you get an enriching and authentic experience,
no matter where you go.
Thank you so much.
(Applause)