THE GLOBAL TRAVEL INDUSTRY'S FABULOUS 60 YEAR JOURNEY
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Virtual tourism may be the travel and tourism industry’s saviour

10/22/2020

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Intellectual property could make destinations rich without harming their precious tourism assets.

An alternative world has appeared through the looking glass…

With any luck, an enormous battle will take place after the lockdowns - you need to take your side now.

Now we all have a little taste of things to come. Covid-19 has, quite literally, changed our entire world. Generously distributed by global airlines at no extra cost, carriers of the virus spread it to every corner of the globe.

And suddenly... The fact that people are now travelling much less has let us all have a peep into another possible world. The air we breathe is much better, there is much less noise, fewer planes in the sky, carbon emissions have dramatically decreased. We hear the birds once again and are reminded that nature can, and will, take care of itself – even if it means that the human race will be exterminated.

The fact is that in travel terms here we are again in 1992 - the clock has been put back to the year of the Earth Summit with 500 million international passengers a year. Even then we were worried that tourism was overheating.

Global mass homogeneous tourism may not be the cause but is, without doubt, a symptom of a way of living that is doing tremendous damage to environments, to human beings, to our cultures and our societies.

Shortly we will have a critical choice to make if our governments begin attempting to put an incredibly expensive sticking plaster on an unsustainable system that was never fit for purpose.

If so, they will use cynical meretricious phrases like “full employment” and “tourism for our economic development”. They will assert that “air travel builds economies and transcends borders” that “tourism brings massive opportunities for all”

And they will be right. Tourism has the opportunity to do all these things and more.

But, over the last 40 years or more, however many tourists travel, however big the tourism economy, however many hotels have been built or apartments let - the vast majority of tourism-related jobs have been rubbish, the vast majority of destination communities have had terrible deals.

Soon it will be time to build a new travel and tourism industry. An industry that may use the term ‘sustainable’ - not just as a buzz word, but one that implies responsibility in business practice, quality training and employment, sustainable tourism economies and businesses, social integrity, cultural and environmental respect, resilient sustainable destinations. Places that are good to live in first and good to visit second.

All that means destination communities that have actual ownership of their tourism assets and have the power to manage them.

Let us not forget the powerful brands that generate tourists like "Montmartre", "Paris", "da Vinci". "Times Square", "Thailand", "Venice" "stunning beaches", "wonderful climates", "New York". These and more represent the brands' massive power to attract visitors. Who owns the moral and intellectual rights to these brands and their images that serve airlines, tour operators, OTAs so well for free?

Virtual tourism could have answers, reducing actual travellers to lower numbers and higher prices and giving others the possibility of fundamentally understanding the destination they wish to visit through Virtual Reality.

Just imagine a confluence of the $ mega trillion gaming industry, the amazing Google Arts and Culture  the augmented reality that TUI are now pioneering

Together they may change the world of tourism.

Valere Tjolle

It's all in the 2021 Sustainable Tourism Report due to be published on 5 November. Price £200
A few review copies will be available for subscription now for £50 - a saving of 80% Subscribe HERE
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    Valere Tjolle is the travel and tourism insider. An entrepreneur, consultant, developer and journalist, he has been in at the beginning of almost every tourism development for the last sixty years. There is no one better placed to expose the seedy side of tourism nor its enormous opportunities to unite people across the globe.

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Tourism in the 2020s – will it delight or devastate the human race?
New book starts at the beginning and predicts the next 60 years of tourism.

 
 
In 1960 did we believe that an international travel industry would increase from just 25 million passengers a year to 1.5 billion?
 
Did we believe that the economic opportunities promoted by dictator Franco’s government would sweep the world, promoted by the World Bank?
 
Did we believe that travel would become both a friend and a foe to many destinations and that it would help to threaten our Earth’s ecosystems, cultures, economies, society as a whole?
 
If we didn’t believe all that then, what do we believe now?
 
You Lucky People sets out the past, the present and a future for tourism - all very irreverently!
 
Could global tourism be totally subject to Chinese demands, could it become entirely virtual, could it be so hampered by world disturbances, diseases, violence in destinations and other curses that it could change its nature dramatically. Could it actually be stopped because of its environmental and social damage?
 
Or ... could it be managed harmoniously and effectively by local destinations and marketed by really responsible business entrepreneurs so that its great benefits could be available to many more millions?
 
The author, Valère Tjolle, has been in the travel industry for almost all of these last 60 years. His story is that of real experience in the industry all over the world, and in-depth understandings and involvements with all the innovations and transformations over that period.
 
It was his annual Sustainable Tourism Report that pointed to the growth potential of the ‘Sharing Economy’ and tipped every other major development; his Greenwash Report that rated companies and activities according to their actual sustainability performance; his Global Top 100 Sustainable Destinations that picked out the real destination winners
 
From the ‘Mom and Pop’ businesses of the 50s through the devil-may-care entrepreneurs of the last decades of the 20th century to the massively powerful tech businesses of today - the real story of the travel industry is pithily portrayed with humour and realism.
 
‘You Lucky People’ is not an academic history of the industry - it is a warts-and-all story of a deep insider’s experience at the heart of the industry.
 
Come for the ride! See it here:

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