The business life and the private life, just like nature is, actually very simple and integral systems. The basic knowledge we have; everything is interconnected and interdependent with each other.

If you are doing business with the direct or indirect point of the travel industry, you are also a part of the Destination eLearning Ecosystem.

While “Destination e-Learning is already a new definition on its own, what is the ecosystem that encompasses it?

Basically, the destination e-learning ecosystem is the comprehensive structure starting from the promotional decision of a city, country or region, to the two travellers completing their travel by touching a minimum of 50 different suppliers in their travel story.

In the past, all operations were on the basic marketing ways and destination promotions were standard in general marketing activities for both B2B and B2C.

But today, with the uncertainty in tourism, the promotion and the marketing activities of destinations are carried out in hybrid solutions with classical methods and with the help of new technologies.

So for the future, we have to ask some questions first before choosing a direction;

1. You can make your destination more valuable if you create demand. So how are you going to create tomorrow’s demand starting today?

2. Who is the final decision maker you need to educate: Traveler? Travel advisor? Tour Operator?

3. On the one side, there are tourism offices that have not fully utilized the power of digital marketing yet, and on the other hand, tourism offices are trying to adapt to the new normal. So, what will be the new standards in destination promotions in this competition?

4. Technology is now going faster than ever. Each of us liked or got bored in webinars and video conferences so far. What will a long-term destination marketing investment be like to keep the engagement alive?

The Answers within The Questions:

Tourism offices need to add digital learning to digital marketing strategies and create their own ecosystems. But remember, an ecosystem may be healthy or unhealthy, able to survive on its own or needs help, just like nature itself.

From the hotels to the airlines in destinations, the city guides, restaurants, museums and suppliers, tourism has a very large impact on capacity. Now, we all know by our hearts, the domino role of tourism in the whole economy. Therefore, the responsibility on the shoulders of tourism offices, NTOs, DMOs, CVBs is very heavy and critical. Spotlights are now turning on them.

Digital learning is a new industry if we compare it with tourism, which has been developing for 20 years and has created giant awareness in the last few years. As with every new development, there are lots of trial versions available in ed-techs. Therefore, it is very important for tourism offices to closely follow the digital learning market due to their critical positions.

Let’s take a look at the future of the destination learning ecosystem, which is going to be based on present trends:

Curated Content

Destinations have their own cultural colors, and so do foreign travelers and their tour operators. Destination content will be the key factor to inspire B2B learners – so that they can inspire B2C learners to get the expected tourist profile and the highest ROI.

Social Connection

Tourism is a human-based social industry, so destination learning has to be social too. Tourism offices may need to focus more on returns in the destination marketing activities.

Focus on Practical Result

In the real world, what matters more than destination knowledge is the sales competency for the related destination. That’s why the major focus of NTOs, DMOs and CVBs will shift from general destination knowledge to practical and scaled competency. Make sure if your destination is on the sales list!

Personalization

Every person has their own learning path and capabilities. Personalization of content has slowly been a trend; however, it needs to be much more focused. Soon, we will discover more personalized B2B content with tailored destination concepts.

Self-Paced Learning

There are always highly motivated B2B buyers who wish to learn more and design new programs. The new Learning Management Systems can give this opportunity to NTOs, DMOs and CVBs to create new big potentials while allowing them to concentrate on their other works. Please check the Top 9 Benefits of Digital Transformation in Tourism Related Corporate Training article to learn more about it.

Conclusion

The destination e-learning ecosystem now exists. It is a must to get familiar with it and understand the existing ed-tech tools. I hope tourism offices can solve their heavy workload effectively with the right choices. It is important to thoroughly investigate which solution and which application is compatible with the tourism industry and B2B destination marketing.

The online learning tools will surely play a giant role in shaping the Destination Marketing Ecosystem for every sized region, city, and country.

A word of caution must be said here, some local economies are 85% or more dependent on tourism revenues. And each one’s ability and capacity to get the most out of the future depends on the choices made today.

1. Timing

Learning when to start promoting your destinations to the B2B market is going to be essential for success as we are still experiencing the backlash of the pandemic. Today’s decisions must contain long-term solutions.

2. Targeted efforts

The ability to focus your efforts on your target audience is going to be crucial if you want to see any conversions. Digital marketing, and social media are the kings, but what is the ROI to your B2B efforts?

3. Using platforms

Learning of using marketing platforms and virtual event strategies will help you to achieve better results by building rapport with your audience, but the selection of the right tool is critical in terms of spending your time, money, and effort.

4. Direct support

Engaging your audience with direct support to help them decide how to plan their vacations and destination is going to give you an edge over the competition. Are you able to reach the true buyers anytime this is required?

5. Return on investment

Your marketing efforts should always allow you to see the kind of ROI that makes the expenses worth your while. Breaking even is not good enough. Today, every single marketing activity should work for a real business development potential on the ground.

6. Follow up

The art of being able to follow up on any type of communication with your target audience is going to prove to be of paramount importance for your longevity. How to solve the follow-up capacity to see and track the results?

7. Unity inbound

Being able to unity inbound all product and service providers is going to be just as essential as any other aspect of the campaigns. What is your tool to unity local professionals?

“Where there is unity there is always victory”. Publilius Syrus

8. Content design

Outstanding educational content design is essential in order to ensure that conversions are high and that your target audience is being trained with accuracy and convenience. This is an important but undervalued point if the business targets B2B audiences.

9. Business development tracking

Being able to track real business development is going to be extremely important for any destination strategy in the tourism industry. This is going to help the destinations establish what needs to be done in order to correct any issues that are causing the business to stop moving forward. The critical question is; how to measure the travel expectations and develop them with the inbound partners?

Final thoughts

These 9 critical facts are all equally relevant and they should be taken with the same level of commitment and dedication. The good news is that digital learning technologies are growing fast. We all need to implement the right tools for the right jobs through our specific knowledge in the travel trade. Old-school days are over and adapting to the new world matters in our industry.

When the pandemic hit, the hotel industry was in a total shutdown therefore directly affecting the ground-handling tour sector as well.

Even with the slow restart of the industry, cash flow is still quite limited. It means every decision has to be a carefully calculated one. All sources of friction need to be reduced.

This is to protect the financial integrity of the hotel and extension the ground handling tour industries.

“It’s no longer the big beating the small, but the fast beating the slow.” 

Eric Pearson, CIO, International Hotel Group (IHG)

For survival in those difficult times, the industry has to become more connected with each other. Even though the competition has driven innovation within this sector, now is not the time for that. Because you cannot compete with each other if your industry does not exist.

1. Be proactive, not reactive.

Hotels, DMCs, and suppliers need to become proactive if they are willing to survive during these challenging times. Being updated with the local and global industry trends is the only way to adapt. Understand which markets are opening back up or which ones are closing down. For example, if your region and a neighbouring region are open, expect more business. To manage the inflow of tourists properly, you need to be well-prepared ahead of time.

Preparation ahead of time involves close contact with resource suppliers and travel agencies. The tour operators cannot make it without the assistance of the travel agencies.

So support them with a pincer approach. This involves the use of commercials and word of mouth. The latter is not as flashy, but it is a far more powerful advertisement tool and saves costs.

2. Digitize your business

“At least 40% of all businesses will die in the next 10 years… If they don’t figure out how to change their entire company to accommodate new technologies.” 

John Chambers, Executive Chairman, Cisco System

All this requires networking. Understand that networking does not mean contacting through calls or texts but using other digital tools to provide all members of the industry with data. Allowing everyone involved to make decisions that are helpful to each other.

Accommodation and Food and beverage service activities as a proxy for the tourism sector

Source: OECD

Use as many digital tools as you can to prepare yourself for any rapid adaptations. They could be something as simple as digitally calling in deliveries of your supplies based on your inventory. What we are trying to do is saving costs. So use any digital tool you can find to reduce your losses.

Everything right now is hazy and difficult to predict. But what you can do is prepare yourself. If you want to be in and ahead of the game when everything opens up, then contact us at LVG learning.

We love to do good things for a great society.

Turns out, in this age of digital everything, virtual events and webinars are more accessible than ever before. But if you want to get actual results, you just need to take the time to consolidate what was learned after the event.

I’ve been a part of the destination management field for thirty years. Now I put my effort into developing the travel trade through learning. Why? One thing is for sure: the future of the tourism industry is digital and learning is going to be a huge part of it.

The goal of destination marketing is to create a seamless experience for travellers. To me, it seems like the need for destination management has been replaced by the need for destination learning management. And I wonder if it is a transition period from DMO to DLMO?

Destination learning means more than just meeting people, planning the marketing and having things done as before. To strengthen this experience and make it meaningful, we found these five tips after having series of events in the last whole year.

5 Tips to Make Your Destination Training Session Stronger and More Meaningful!

1. Your final destination training session may seem like the end of a long day, but it’s actually the beginning. Surveys show that you might end your destination training sessions by reminding tour operators and travel agents to use the resources at their disposal (as well as the market intelligence you provide) to devise a plan of action. We suggest you ask the audiences; tour operators and travel agents, what they will do differently when back at work?
2. The more you rehearse, the better you remember.” Keep the momentum going! We noticed that following-up training is a great way to reinforce what was learned at the original workshop or webinar. There are many ways you can follow up – synchronous or asynchronous, meeting live or online, and in-person or through self-paced modules. It’ll help the audiences remember what they learned about your destination, your news and updates. In a recent study, it was found that spaced out training sessions are more effective than one long session. If you haven’t created self-paced learning modules on LVG yet, then schedule live meetings where everyone logs on together, with your stakeholders, and conduct a discussion.

3. You know the feeling when you’re trying to remember something really important, but you can’t recall it? Well, that’s what reinforcement emails are for. As a destination marketeer expert, you know what it takes to be successful without having a doubt. However, we wanted to share again how polls we ran with our membership taught us the importance of reinforcement emails. Email may be outdated, but it’s still one of the top three marketing tools. In order to keep the audiences’ memories fresh, send regular reinforcement emails. The email should complement the webinar and could include things like: Repeating key concepts or summaries. Suggestions for ways to use the information in their program, and itinerary. Motivational quotes or jokes – everyone needs a smile on their face at work. Sending these emails over a period of time spreads out the audiences’ interactions with your destination brand.
4. It might be time to rethink your approach to networking. In the age of information overload, it’s important to create a culture that values new attention. Creating a culture of inbound attention in B2B networking is crucial to a business’s success. New knowledge, if not supported by a travel agency, tour operator or a buyer company, will be useless information. The only valuable knowledge for traders is if it relates back to their business. We are delighted to share our experimental results with these suggestions for you: You might try these steps to make the transition easier: create a forum where suppliers and stakeholders can ask questions and audiences receive coaching from inbound experts; set up goals for training so you can track progress in quarterly or annual reviews.
5. When it comes to your ROI, the last and simplest way to hit the target is to take a coffee break with the LVG team to learn what we do and how LVG improves your benefits. How can we help you? We have a long list of benefits! The educational technology field is evolving very quickly, and surely more quickly than the tourism industry. There are many great solutions on the market today, and even more on the horizon. And the question is whether you know enough to make the right decision and not be left behind.

Tourism marketing and destination branding is the transfer of information to potential buyers. As an expert, we know that your main goal is to help B2B audiences who are already experts in the tourism industry glean new information. Business development and sales professionals want to understand how to apply your destination’s new and exciting details in their own programs and sales. Your hard task is to make it easier for them to transfer the right information for the right sales and business development—to understand how and when to apply their new knowledge and put it into action when the tourism movements start.

This article was written to show that in this day and age, online education in the tourism industry will prevail. We are here to share the benefits of an online learning destination with you, and what pros and cons you can expect to find when shopping for one. It’s a small price to pay for an enlightening conversation; a 30-mins catch-up for a coffee online.

Here is a nice article if you are interested in learning more about the general impact of the learning industry on our lives: https://elearningindustry.com/impact-of-the-elearning-industry-on-our-lives

How to find your target audience among hundreds of platforms?

The tourism sector has all kinds of professions available for those who are interested in getting involved in this industry. Some people choose to become destination marketers, others get involved in accommodation services and another group prefers to focus on selling specific products and DMCs offer to those who have already picked a destination and a place to stay. And, the common work is promoting the destination by building good, effective and consistent networking.

Effective networking isn’t a result of luck – it requires hard work and persistence.

Lewis Howes

Regardless of your specific type of job in the industry, you should network with every single one of those professionals. Tourism is human-oriented. Even your competitors should know about you because alliances can always happen with other people that share the same profession that you have.

Exhibitions and roadshows are good occasions besides the fun of one-to-one sales visits. But now we must admit that time has changed. International brands do great work in adapting to new technology through virtual exhibitions, and events. But the question is how to select the most effective one that suits your real needs and budget.

This is where ed-tech helps – if you are a trailblazer tourism pro!

The key is to get involved!

One of the biggest mistakes which people make while networking is that they expect individuals and business ventures to reply to them just because they sent them a message with their contact info. The truth is that networking requires that you build rapport.

This means that you need to get involved in forums, topic discussions, and all kinds of interactive activities on a physical or virtual platform. You have to become part of an active community if you wish to be acknowledged. Otherwise, your message might be lost among the other thousands.

Persistency in networking is a must in the travel trade.

I know there are hundreds of platforms and solutions nowadays. One of the biggest challenges I experienced was to select the most effective community to build my network with visible results way and never forget the password!

If you want to get good at networking, you need to reflect on yourself as a person, who is looking for long-term relationships with others for mutual benefit. This is the best way to become a valuable addition to any travel trade network. And this is where the persistence in the networking challenge begins!

“Your network is your net worth.” Porter Gale

No one can compress the whole travel world into one digital platform. But some people can design innovative, community-first, platform-specific, B2B strategy-informed learning contents that cut through on learning and delivers industry-leading marketing ROI. The new world is full of ed-tech changes and business potential in every corner!

Are you looking for a long-term and cost-effective digital solution for a real-world networking problem? Don’t wait for the paid stone to become precious. We bring you the diamonds.

The industry could have fared much better in its shutdown phase if it had sufficient cash left over, which is only possible if it operates with maximum efficiency. With travel and tourism restarting themselves, even though it is on a much smaller scale, it needs to

realize that there are no possibilities to operate in the same old and tired ways they used to.

Firstly due to the pandemic, the industry will be operating with minimal staff. It cannot operate like before, where one person had the skills to do the only task. The human resource section of the industry has to adopt a more skills-per-employee approach.

Developing skills through education.

“The roots of education are bitter, but the fruit is sweet.” Aristotle

The adoption of multi-skilled employees may sound like a wasted exercise. In reality, equipping someone with more skills instills confidence within them. This allows them to look at the bigger picture.

For transformation, the travel and tourism industries must focus on educating their people. This re-education can be a tricky task to develop and deliver. Because there is no use in signing up your entire team to a poorly developed and delivered course, that will only result in time and waste of financial resources.

What is needed for the travel and tourism industry is a bespoke, versatile and innovative ed-tech solution. Great education technologies can significantly enhance learning, and they are something the industry must embrace.

Out with the old in with the new

For this revolution to occur, there has to be a paradigm shift at the executive level. It needs to realize that everyone has to adapt to this vastly different landscape. Furthermore, if they are the ones to adopt an education first approach proactively, this will lead to spreading culture throughout their respective businesses.

“When digital transformation is done right, it’s like a caterpillar turning into a butterfly, but when done wrong, all you have is a really fast caterpillar.” George Westerman – Research Scientist with the MIT Sloan Initiative on the Digital Economy.

Think of it like this: When important decisions are made at an executive level, they have to be implemented by the team supporting them. The more in-sync their understanding of the industry, the less oversight a team needs. Fewer oversight results in an efficiently running industry.

All this is only possible if everyone in the travel and tourism industry rejects the old “we know what’s the best approach” to “we need to learn what’s best” At LVG learning we can assist and ease you through this transformation.

International tours, some cruise tours are on sale in June. Several Southern countries and charter operators, who take serious measures regarding the vaccine, are also fully prepared. You can buy a one-week vacation for €200 to €2000, and we know that vacation is necessary for everyone and never an extra necessity. So, will everything be the same when tourism starts to revive?

The topic we want to talk about here is a large sector such as tourism can benefit from the developments of the current era? Even most importantly, which point do senior officials focus on? When you look at the banking, pharmaceutical, finance, and agricultural sectors, we see that technological developments are advanced by creating supply from the industry itself. Currently, we have crypto money in our lives, and we meet new technology and a new application every day.

In tourism, which focuses on human and human happiness, how much investment is made in the technology, and more importantly, in people, apart from “Online Booking” and hotel-agency automation? If you have more than ten employees, do you know how well they know the simplest use of Excel, Word, the most basic communication techniques, the most important time, and business management rules? In other words, do you have reliable data on how far your hotel, agency, and organization can advance after the pandemic? After this year, each year will be filled with information that increases exponentially, such as Fibonacci numbers.

Hotels that do not need a receptionist for check-in, airports that do not need a counter for tickets and luggage. Big data is growing gradually, robotic systems are getting bigger. So, during and after this process, what job will the tourism workers in the middle section, where there is the most workforce, do? Who will train them for new missions? How will the profitability reports of companies be affected by this?

Tourism schools, universities, and educational associations still do not get enough attention in the tourism industry. Your degree in tourism is not a requirement to get started, and still, the most critical field of practical learning is “on-the-job training” with tourism companies, hotels, and suppliers that earn staff in their own way.

Unlike other sectors, tourism needs practical training in the field. Experience is more valuable than the knowledge that is learned by exam papers. This means that for tourism to develop systematically and dynamically, the information provided by universities must be supported by tourism companies by providing a “field of study.

While tourism companies are experiencing losses, as shown in the table below, which enterprise can support the training of employees to improve existing staff and prepare for the next generation?

Source: https://wttc.org/Research/EconomicImpact#:~:text=In%202019%2C%20the%20Travel%20%26%20Tourism,to%20334%20million%20in%202019

We are at a time when we come to a red line.

Whether we are talking about the climate crisis, new financial systems, or what life will be like on Mars… Whatever we do, we may not have work to do in a few years if we close our eyes to technology and what it brings to our daily lives. Moreover, we have experienced that our lives may become upside down, and it should be accepted that the next generation’s learning is inevitable. Even for the tourism industry.

The year 2021; clearly shows us that tourism companies need to train their existing staff and work closely with universities in the long run. We may have a genial robot receptionist in the years to come, but we need old receptionists to do new tourism projects with new equipment.

“The skills for 2030 as defined by the international group of stakeholders involved in the OECD Future of Education and Skills 2030 project, skills are the ability and capacity to carry out processes and to be able to use one’s knowledge in a responsible way to achieve a goal.

The skills are part of a holistic concept of competency, involving the mobilization of knowledge, skills, attitudes, and values ​​to meet complex demands. The OECD Learning Compass 2030 distinguishes between three different types of skills:

• Cognitive and metacognitive skills, which include critical thinking, creative thinking, learning-to-learn, and self-regulation
• Social and emotional skills, which include empathy, self-efficacy, responsibility, and collaboration
• Practical and physical skills, which include using new information and communication technology devices”

Source:

OECD, 2018 [1]): https://www.oecd.org/education/2030-project/teaching-and-learning/learning/skills/Skills_for_2030_concept_note.pdf

Whichever tourism field you are working in, whatever position you are in, it’s time to take the initiative and catch up with the future with education. Collaborating with educational institutions is a long-term task, but new educational initiatives that you can start today are available and easily accessible.

Developing does not always require a lot of money. You can find cheap but effective, supportive education together. It doesn’t matter how prepared you are for change because it’s not an emotional issue anymore. It’s a current necessity. Remember, we need visionary, forward-thinking, and innovative leaders today more than ever.

Do you have thoughts on the above to contribute? We’d be pleased to speak further at LVG Learning.