One of the key benefits of using elearning in destination marketing is that it allows you to reach a wide audience. Unlike traditional marketing methods, which are often limited to a specific geographic area, elearning can be accessed by anyone with an internet connection, regardless of where they are located. This means that you can use elearning to promote your destination to potential buyers all over the world, and to reach people who may not have been aware of your destination before.

Unique Ways to use Elearning in Destination Marketing

Another benefit of using elearning in destination marketing is that it allows you to provide potential buyers with a more immersive and engaging experience. Traditional marketing methods, such as brochures or posters, can only provide a limited amount of information about a destination. With elearning, you can use interactive elements, such as virtual tours, quizzes, or games, to provide potential buyers with a more in-depth look at your destination, and to make the learning experience more enjoyable.

To use elearning effectively in destination marketing, it is important to focus on creating high-quality content that will be of value to potential buyers. This can include information about the history and culture of the area, as well as details about specific attractions, events, or experiences. You can also use elearning to showcase the natural beauty of the area, by providing virtual tours of popular hiking trails, or by sharing photos or videos of the local landscape.

The Power of the Media for Engaging Content

To create engaging elearning content, it is also important to use a variety of media, such as videos, photos, audio, or text. By combining these different media, you can create a more dynamic and interactive learning experience, which will be more likely to capture the attention of potential buyers.

One way to use elearning in destination marketing is to create an online course or series of videos that provide an overview of the destination and its attractions. This could include information about the history and culture of the area, as well as details about specific places to visit, such as museums, parks, or restaurants. The course could also include interactive elements, such as quizzes or virtual tours, to make the learning experience more engaging and immersive.

Another way to use elearning in destination marketing is to create a series of short, engaging videos that showcase the destination’s attractions and experiences. These videos could be shared on social media or other online platforms to attract the attention of potential visitors and encourage them to learn more about the destination.

Overall, using elearning in destination marketing can be an effective way to promote your destination to potential buyers, and to showcase its unique features and attractions in an engaging and interactive way. By providing high-quality, informative, and engaging elearning content, you can attract more buyers to your destination, and generate economic benefits for your area.

Go beyond the pdfs and websites! Tell your story to B2B buyers in new ways and become more known. Contact us now.

First and foremost, digital learning offers a convenient and flexible way for tourism professionals to learn. With e-learning, employees can access educational content anytime and anywhere, as long as they have an internet connection. This is especially useful for workers in the tourism industry, who may not have the time or resources to attend traditional in-person classes. Digital learning also allows employees to learn at their own pace, which can be beneficial for those who have busy schedules or who learn best at different speeds.

Another key advantage of digital learning in the tourism industry is that it can be highly personalized. E-learning platforms often allow users to tailor their learning experiences to their individual needs and preferences. For example, employees can choose the specific topics they want to learn about, and can even select the learning format that works best for them (e.g. videos, interactive quizzes, etc.). This personalized approach to learning can help tourism professionals stay engaged and motivated, and can ultimately lead to better learning outcomes.

Benefits of Digital Learning Comparing to Traditional Learning

Digital learning also offers a cost-effective way for tourism companies to provide training and professional development to their employees. E-learning courses are often less expensive than traditional in-person classes, and can be accessed by a large number of employees simultaneously. This can help tourism businesses save money on training costs, while still providing their employees with the skills and knowledge they need to succeed.

In addition to the practical benefits, digital learning can also help tourism companies stay competitive in today’s fast-paced and rapidly-changing industry. With e-learning, employees can easily access the latest information and trends in the tourism field, and can stay up-to-date on new technologies and best practices. This can help tourism businesses stay ahead of the curve and provide high-quality services to their customers.

Furthermore, digital learning can help tourism companies foster a culture of continuous learning and professional development. By providing employees with access to e-learning courses, tourism businesses can encourage their workers to take ownership of their own learning and career growth. This can help employees feel more invested in their work and the success of the company, and can ultimately lead to increased job satisfaction and retention.

Effective and Productive

Elearning can also improve employee productivity and efficiency in the tourism industry. By providing employees with the skills and knowledge they need to perform their jobs effectively, elearning can help workers complete tasks more quickly and accurately. This can lead to increased productivity and efficiency, which can ultimately benefit the bottom line of tourism businesses.

Overall, digital learning offers a number of benefits for the tourism industry. It is convenient, flexible, personalized, cost-effective, and helps companies stay competitive and foster a culture of continuous learning. As the tourism industry continues to evolve and grow, digital learning will become increasingly important for providing training and professional development to employees.

So why would a hotel chain, which like so many other tourism businesses are battling in the post-pandemic environment; put such a high priority on education? In short they realise the critical value of developing skills in the business; positioning themselves as an employer of choice and hence becoming a magnet in attracting talent.

Yasmin Diamond,  Corporate Affairs EVP, commented, “With 6,000 IHG hotels in over 100 countries … Our IHG Academy programme has been invaluable in connecting our hotels with their communities, providing thousands of jobs … we’re committed to making a difference on an even larger scale … with the help of our incredible partners [and] a new digital format.”

New challenges require new solutions

The IHG Academy has been running since 2004. So what is new? The clue is in the word “digital.” They realise that new challenges, require new solutions and moving away from a legacy approach. Modern LMS (Learning Management Systems) or next-generation LXP (Learning Experience Platforms) use automation and personalization to make skills-building experiences engaging. Match the right course to the right person; allow the learner to take courses at a time that suits their lifestyle; and track progress with state-of-the-art data collection. Such platforms enable the creation of effective and valuable skills development programmes. Also, they do not cost nearly as much as you may fear, with prices having plummeted in recent years.

Why the emphasis on skills?

Recent years have shown a clear trend in skills-based learning becoming the future of talent development. Educational guru Donald Taylor, Chair at Learning Technologies Conference, runs an annual survey of priorities in the learning field. In the last two years “upskilling and reskilling”  have dominated the survey at #1, well ahead of all other elements. This correlates with a massive increase from 2019 in Google searches for “upskilling and reskilling.” LinkedIn CEO, Ryan Roslansky also states that his company has seen a 21% increase in companies asking for skills rather than qualifications and positions. This reveals that companies are increasingly unwilling to trust a CV, i.e. honing in on actual skills, rather than hoping that previous posts will act as a proxy for the skills they need.

Moreover, companies who have successfully created a culture of skills development are consistently outperforming their peers. Not only do they become better at recruitment, they also excel at developing existing staff. Your people understand your unique culture and how to work. Critically you already know key facts about them, both as to their technical and behavioural strengths. Such employers give themselves a massive head-start. Skills can be deployed cross-functionally, with staff satisfaction growing as they see their personal development optimised.

What about smaller businesses or SME’s who make up over 90% of travel’s ecosystem?

So should such initiatives be the preserve of giant enterprises, with matching resources? What about smaller businesses or SME’s who make up over 90% of travel’s ecosystem? How can they compete? After all, we are all fishing from the same talent pool. Won’t they lose out? The problem is worsened by the fact that even businesses considered “large” in travel sector terms have slimmed down over the pandemic. So, unfortunately, resources previously responsible for strategic forward planning of talent management, have likely been axed. In such circumstances, travel leaders risk weakness in one of the most critical battlegrounds in the future competitive environment. A reactive short-term approach likely will not cut the mustard for your business in the future. To make matters worse, stats show that post-covid, the over-50’s are the largest demographic dropping out of the workforce. So if your strategy is to rely on passing knowledge down informally from this grouping, you may well be further disadvantaged.    

In light of this, what can the vast majority of companies in the visitor economy do to compete?

Here are some simple rules to follow:

• Take advantage of the digital (or hybrid) learning mega-trend. LMS/LXP’s no longer cost the earth and they can springboard your efforts by acting as a delivery mechanism. 
• Share resources: Build-your-own can be a long, slow and expensive process. Off-the-shelf solutions are available and provide a framework. The sector is burgeoning and you can always tweak over time to meet your specific needs. By joining a network you’ll meet many other businesses facing similar problems, many of whom can chip in with a speciality you can benefit from. N.B. even IHG rely on partners to deliver their strategic objectives.
• Bottle your super-power: get to the bottom both to the skills your business has, any gaps and what will be needed to thrive in the future. Don’t let your unique skills fritter away. If your business has a super-power, make sure you capture that “grey-hair” knowledge for future generations of your employees; whilst also evolving to meet future challenges. General Motors is a classic case, as they reskill their staff from a petrol past to the electric future.

Finally, you may be worried as to whether your staff will buy into a skills development programme?

Be assured that your teams won’t take much convincing of the merits of investing in them. The Wharton (University of Pennsylvania) MBA found that 92% of employees say that in work professional development is either important or very important to them. LinkedIn echoes this urging employers to, “Support new career paths for your employees.”

Finally, great customer service lies in the DNA of so many travel & tourism companies and simultaneously is one of the skills most in demand on LinkedIn. So you may be tapping into your own goldmine!

Patrick Richards is a Director of LVG Learning www.lvglearning.com. If the above is of interest please feel free to reach out to us at info@lvglearning.com

By understanding ourselves and becoming more aware of these differences, we become more capable of adjusting to new situations throughout our lifetimes as learners.

You might have heard the saying; “Anyone can learn, not just on the same day or in the same way.” So, every individual’s learning style, speed and capacity are different, and everybody can learn when a proper learning environment is provided. What should be done is to identify how learners learn the best and make it easier for them to learn efficiently. The learning environment should also be arranged according to the learning style. In this way, personalized learning experiences can be offered accordingly.

So can we say; Your “learning style” is the best learning style? Yes, indeed. Each individual has a unique learning style and a preferred method of learning and remembering.

What are those different learning styles?

VARK learning styles aim to reveal how individuals exchange information and how they prefer to process that information. It is a valuable model that educators should keep in mind when trying to create a variety of learning content to attract attention.

• V: Visual learners: They conserve new information through visual representations of concepts (ie. graphics, pictures, photographs and diagrams)
• A: Auditory learners: They receive information through sounds, stories, discussions, lecture-style presentations, and podcasts.
• R: Read/Write learners: They use lists, written descriptions, note-taking and articles to learn.
• K: Kinesthetic learners: They simply touch, try to feel and move around to absorb information.

One learning style is not better or worse than the other. Everyone uses all learning styles throughout their lives but prefers the one more.

Would you like to discover your learning style? The questionnaire is here!

How can you create learning experiences that appeal to different learning styles?

Some researches have shown that the learners learn best through “multi-modal” learning if educators address different learning styles at the same time. Multi-modal learning incorporates the brain into more than one learning style at the same time using different formats and environments.

For example, a video lecture with captions and a downloadable pdf, use visual, auditory, and written learning styles. By combining learners’ different learning styles, educators can create an ideal learning environment for many learners at the same time.

David Lazear, an author and a multi-intelligence expert, summarizes the importance and the value of the multimodal learning strategy as follows;

“What does multi-modal learning mean? In a nutshell, it means that the more different ways you learn something the more you will really learn it! The more different ways you learn something, the more you will remember it! The more different ways you learn something, the more you will genuinely understand it!”

David Lazear

At LVG Learning, we know that tourism professionals can learn at their own pace and through a range of formats is the fundamentals of effective learning. In our ‘learning experience’ design processes, we use a multimodal learning strategy to increase understanding and recall of the information.

We care to offer learning opportunities through visual, auditory, written and kinesthetic ways rather than one-dimensional learning experiences. For more information, please read the destination learning journeys page.

Sources:

• https://www.enocta.com/blog/farkli-ogrenme-stillerine-uygun-ogrenme-deneyimleri-yaratmak/
• https://vark-learn.com/

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

The visitor economy is threaded throughout a destination’s economy; accommodation, restaurants, retail, attractions, heritage, cultural centres, the list of damaged businesses goes on. This impact is then felt by the communities hosting visitors; jobs disappear, incomes shrink, upkeep of buildings and landscapes hampered, and tax income shrinks.

So what does all this mean for a destination’s promotion agency?

In a word- leadership!

We are witnessing the transformation of a DMO’s focus from marketing, through management to leadership. No longer is it good enough to say a DMO job is to build a destination brand and promote it. Tourism officers who focus on market segmentation, brand execution, PR and travel trade engagement are doing a disservice to the destination they represent. Sure, marketing can get you on the map but much more is needed today to sustain a destination’s success.

Tourist boards over recent years have developed their offering to embrace management. The M in DMO switched from marketing to management – as written well by Patrick Richards in his blog.

The Cambridge English Dictionary defines management as “the process of dealing with or controlling things or people”. DMO’s have been trying to manage their destinations. For example, by engaging with suppliers to get a better product-market fit to ensure visitors are served products and services they want. The river trip company that has tied up with local restaurants to provide picnic baskets or the B&B that sells all the bits and pieces in the house as well as arranging shipping of the goods to the guests’ homes.

The DMO is trying to manage the offer by influencing the shape of the tourism experience. And of course, marketing the destination continues alongside this.

Over the last few years there has been rising awareness about the “problems” of tourism centred around over tourism where tourism impacts have harmed local communities, the landscapes as well as leaving visitors unhappy with their experiences. This calls for leadership. The DMO is ideally placed to provide this.

DLO: Destination “Leadership” is the future of DMO

There are three dimensions the DMO needs to consider; community needs, place needs, and visitor needs. A DMO needs its local population accepting and welcoming of visitors, destination experiences that respect the natural and built environment, and tourism offers that excite visitors leading to lasting memories of the destination. This is a tall order but necessary if a destination is to prosper economically and societally. The aim is to ensure tourism has a net positive effect on the destination. How to do this is perhaps the subject of another blog.

One group of stakeholders that can help the DMO in this leadership role is the travel intermediaries (B2B) that represent, package, and sell the destination. Tour operators, travel agents and other firms still play a big role, and will for many years, in getting a destination in front of potential visitors’ eyes.

A core element of the DMO’s leadership opportunity is to build a supportive B2B community. Building destination awareness and preference sits at the core of this.

LVG Learning www.lvglearning.com has some great B2B training and development solutions and a global B2B network that can help. We’d like to help you, so please get in touch keith.beecham@lvglearning.com

“We don’t need no education…” so said rock band Pink Floyd back in 1979. Unfortunately for the travel industry this has too long been the case.

I remember an old boss haranguing me years ago for including a £15,000 training budget, to support £2 million of headcount, as a waste of money. Of course, over the last decade, in many respects, tourism has been the star pupil in the classroom of the global economy. As the WTTC reports, tourism accounted for one in ten jobs globally; one in six new jobs created; and according to the UNWTO from 2010-19, its growth in G20 economies of 32% outstripped overall growth by 300%.

These rosy headline figures mask deeper problems

Tourism consistently lags behind the rest of the economy in productivity. In 2015 the UK’s Office of National Statistics (ONS) released stark figures on travel’s poor performance.

As stated in terms of Gross Value Added (GVA) on similar levels of employment, tourism produced only 55% of the value of the construction industry and a (truly awful) 28% of the manufacturing sector’s value. As a consequence the payment was on average one-third lower.

Tourism and hospitality are great at providing first jobs for young people

The ONS reported that 34% of jobs in the sector were occupied by under 25 years old; compared to 12% in the UK economy as a whole. However, we fail to build on this great start. Staff turnover in the sector is up to 30%. Young people fail to stay in an industry which too often doesn’t invest in them. Career paths are ill-defined, especially compared to more professionalized industries with benchmarked attainment standards.

The UNWTO found that 41% of travel companies don’t have a training budget

So by failing to invest in education, does the sector treat its people like cannon fodder? Given these realities of underperformance, no wonder politicians have failed to take us seriously, leaving us feeling undervalued against other industries.

And then came the pandemic…

The WTTC estimate that since March, 174 million jobs have been destroyed in a global sector, previously employing 330 million. So now the spell has been broken, tourism can no longer be seen as an unstoppable job-creating machine. Great people have left the sector permanently, taking crucial skills and experience with them.

Additionally, young people looking to build a career may well decide not to join a sector which neither provides job security nor (sufficient) long-term progression.

This is creating a significant problem for the future. Most pundits forecast the industry will return to 2019 levels by 2024/5. So jobs will come back, but in a different form.

How on earth will we attract talent into the industry when the rebound arrives? The problem may well be exacerbated, by the other major factor impacting travel’s productivity – technology. Until this year travel was also a laggard in IT. The pandemic has changed all this. Tech adoption has seen a dramatic acceleration, nowhere more than in the uptake of contactless.

But what of the other half of the equation i.e. the people to staff this technology revolution? 73% of World Economic Forum (WEF) delegates, sited machine learning as critical. Yet the OECD also reports that 40% of AI jobs globally remain vacant, as they cannot find the right skills.

Once again, tourism has not woken up!

The UNWTO finding that 45% of travel companies have no plans to adapt “robotization,” meaning jobs that are both highly skilled and durable remain unfilled. This is not the only area of future growth.

The millions of green jobs will be created in the transition to a carbon neutral economy and 85% of WEF delegates agreed that skillsets in Big Data were in the highest demand.

It might be gathered from the above that all future employment is destined to be tech-based. However this is not true either. Good old customer service skills remain in short supply. This deficit pre-dated the pandemic, with again tourism and hospitality being a poor-performer; the UK ONS finding that 61% of tourism employers struggled to find these skills, compared to 47% in the economy as a whole. The way the wind is blowing, this situation is likely to get much more acute.

Tourism is set to become a lot more complex, with pre-existing trends only being accelerated by Covid. Consumers now want unforgettable experiences. Demand is also increasing for rural, less populated and thus less well-known destinations. Travel professionals are well placed to deliver these experiences, but only if they are able to grasp the opportunity to expand their knowledge.

In part 2, we’ll examine the opportunities for tourism to rise to these challenges.