How to save tourism from itself | Doug Lansky | TEDxStockholmSalon

[Music] [Applause] in 1950 there were 25 million international travelers last year 1.4 billion tourism now one of the world's largest industries it's amazing when you think about it it's come an awfully long way and i can sum up global strategy for tourism with one single word more more wait for it more we've been driving this tourism bus with a gas pedal for way too long if you want to get where you actually want to go avoid the obstacles get there safely even get there quicker you got to pump the brakes every once in a while and we've been neglecting that so it's no real surprise that we've hit a tipping point in a lot of ways too many visitors at attractions in cities in national parks on hiking trails and beaches ruining coral reefs clear cutting forest to make golf courses pumping sewage into our beautiful oceans and polluting our beautiful blue skies by ship by plane and leaving trash just about everywhere we go how do we put a stop to this insanity if we don't come up with a better strategy than more we're not going to be able to save tourism from itself and without a strategy we're likely to fall for the next attractive thing that comes along only to regret it soon after so what i want to do today is redefine what success means in tourism so we have some real goals to try to go after so we know when to hand out the bonuses i've got a plan for four things that are going to improve tourism for the traveler and for the destination in other words they're going to improve things for you whether you're traveling or living in a city that gets travelers so here's the game plan protect the quality of life for locals that's number one they've been left out of the equation for far too long in my mind if tourism doesn't work for locals it doesn't work now i'm going to go ahead and assume that you all like to travel but let me ask you this do you like to travel so much that you wouldn't mind if say 50 tour buses pulled up on your street and parked there right in front of where you live every single day kept the buses running offloaded about 1500 tourists they walked up and down your street were loud in the morning loud late at night threw trash in your bushes took over the playgrounds where your kids played took over your favorite cafe on the corner but they left a little extra money in that cafe and they gave a nice economic boost to your neighborhood would that be worth it is that trade-off worth it i don't think so i don't think it's worth it for any of us the thing is this is what's happening everywhere we go cities around the world the most beautiful cities and the most beautiful parts of those cities have been handed over to the tourists and what have the locals done we just kind of backed off we're like ah that's a tourist areas now we're not going to go there just down the street from where we are now this is happening in stockholm in old town tons of tourists and the locals kind of stay away it's happening in copenhagen it's happening in bergen just to name a few nordic examples it's happening in places all over the world what are we going to do about this i don't think it's okay do you it's not we need to do something a city can have tourists but the tourists shouldn't have the city i'm going to say that again a city can have tourists but the tourists shouldn't have the city so here's the thing this is the word that describes it over tourism it's a phenomenon but i don't think it's quite the right word it makes it sound like there's too many tourists everywhere and that's usually not the case it's not like this it's more like this where that one road that takes you to the center of town that's rush hour traffic that everybody needs is the one that's crowded and that's like those must-see super popular attractions and the rest of the capacity those other roads those are like the attractions you never heard of probably didn't want to go to and the thing is would you drive on those roads just because they're empty even though they don't take you where you want to go would you be happy traveling halfway around the world and then not see the attractions you most want to see this is what's happening everywhere right now and this is where it gets to destination capacity and here's a really simple way to think about it think of it like a dinner party right you want to have 12 guests so you do a quick inventory check you're like okay we got 12 plates but we only have two forks we have seven spoons and seven knives etc etc you could run to the store but if the guests showed up right now would you say you were over guested or under forked and this is why i don't like the word over tourism i prefer unbalanced tourism it implies you can have an action to fix the problem and this is exactly what's happening in cities there's a balance right if you want to maximize the passengers and planes that can come into an airport well maybe that means there's too many people for the hotels or the walking street or the parking lots or the attractions same thing if you max the hotels maybe that's too many for the airport or for the walking street and the hotels et cetera et cetera if you want to grow a destination it needs to grow organically and this is what i try to help destinations do around the world and you know who does it really well theme parks if they want to grow they had a new ride if they had a new ride they had a new ticket counter they had a new ticket counter they had a new bathroom a new snack stand a new restaurant and they grow organically and this is how it works the thing is there are some people who are doing it right there are some stakeholders like here in utah the wave it's called this beautiful rock formation they only allow 20 people per day and they give it out lottery style at the tourist office because they want everyone to have a really cool experience and get a picture like this or here in the cinque terre in italy on the coast before they didn't have any tickets and about 2.5 million people walk that trail between these beautiful villages every year and they just implemented a ticketing system but they only printed up 1.5 million tickets they intentionally wanted one million fewer visitors that's a bold move or here in the island of fernando de neruna off the coast of brazil they only allow 460 at one time can they even earn more money this way by capping it by putting the cap back into capitalism can they become more profitable all the other stakeholders do it airplanes do it they have a max capacity so do hotels so do tour groups so do attractions why not entire destinations this gets me to point two maximizing the local economic impact presumably most people in this industry are in it to earn some money but instead of looking at number of visitors or revenue why not profit they're not looking at it now and they need to because they need to look at some important costs and leakages costs like electricity water picking up the beach after the tourists cleaning up the streets and all these international franchises the money doesn't always come in like a hotel for example those international franchise hotels about 16 goes straight to the mothership in the international headquarters never even arrives in the destination or those really convenient booking sites about 25 goes right to their corporate headquarters never enters the destination now i'm not saying these things are bad they're evil that they should not have them i'm just saying a destination needs to be smart and factor it into the calculation because after all it's the tourists who are there sorry the locals who are there who are paying the price by having all those tourists that they have to put up with and this is another problem destinations can grow too fast it's happened just recently in iceland the global average for growth and tourism is four percent they were growing at 24 per year i spoke to the ceo of their tourism cluster she said they were growing so fast having to build so much infrastructure to handle all the additional visitors they had trouble earning money they were growing so fast they couldn't earn money it's a crazy phenomenon and it doesn't need to be that way this is an attraction you've all heard of in orlando florida one of the world's most famous they went down three years ago they went down in visitation and they went up four percent in profit fewer visitors more profit how did they do that here's how they did it and this is something that destinations can do right now this is the trick you want to have nice bathrooms all over the place cleaned after every use because with the most affluent travelers and maybe some of you are among them they go back to their hotel room and use the bathroom there and while they're there they turn on the tv they take a nap the kids start playing on their phones and they're out of the consumer loop you want to keep them shopping which means you also want great opening hours 30 to 40 percent of the shopping occurs after 6 p.m and so many places close at 6 p.m the other thing you want to do is get rid of queues when people are in lines they're not spending they're out of the consumer loop and they're miserable there's something called time ticketed entry that is available to all attractions it means you book a specific time you show up you go straight in there's no waiting for anybody the other thing is advanced spending so when you're booking a ticket for a museum maybe they can sell you a lunch while you're there or an audio tour and the more you spend in advance that's last month's budget you booked it last month when you show up that day you're not reaching for your wallet for the entry fee you're more likely to impulse shop at the gift shop and spend more money and then you want to separate spending from the money this is why casinos make you change your money to chips doesn't feel like real money it's why hotels let you sign drinks to the room doesn't feel like you're buying anything if you use these tricks you can get more money with even fewer visitors this is the low hanging fruit of tourism third you want to elevate the visitor experience here's the thing for about the last 200 000 years or so we've been hunter-gatherers we've been only doing this modern tourism thing about the last 75 years and we're not really hardwired for it you know the thing is if you look at the thing that it's evolved most easily hunting and gathering has evolved to dining and shopping it's what we're best at it still feels like what we're best at it's crazy because tourism is travel without a purpose we're not fleeing from a disease outbreak we're not fighting a religious war we're not opening new trade routes we're just walking around and looking at stuff and the thing with that is it's kind of hard to know when you're done there's no clear beginning and an end and so you got your kids are tugging at your sleeve saying can we go now after five minutes and we've created this little funny tourism ceremony you may have done this yourself in fact many of you probably have you've said take a picture and let's go not that you're trophy collecting it's just a nice little ceremony that adds closure to this thing with no beginning and no end and another thing that's happening is we're copying too much best practice you're probably familiar with this as well you saw the london eye was a huge success and everyone saw that so they said oh well we should put one in helsinki we should have one in singapore we definitely need one in seattle and we need one in cape town and we need one in chicago and we should have one in shanghai and there's another dozen that i could have put up here it kind of waters down the travel experience doesn't it takes away some of that motivation to leave home strange that way but there is an opposite there is a success story and here's just a little nugget of what that looks like this is just a food hall in brooklyn but they have an interesting policy if you want to be here you can't be anywhere else they want a unique one-of-a-kind experience so people have to go there to experience it it's a smart idea and the last one is protecting the key assets this is so simple i can't even believe i have to say it out loud but you got to protect the things that tourists are coming to see and so many people aren't you see the headlines for this all the time this thing's in disrepair this resorts and just in real they don't want you to swim in the water the beaches are nasty all this stuff is crazy we're damaging reefs even unesco signified resorts are getting unescocied this is insane and the reason this happens is that tourism organizations are set up to be promotional only that's what i meant when i say driving the bus using only the gas pedal what we need for politicians to do around the world is start new organizations to manage the destinations or they're not going to have anything to promote very soon so these are the four things again they're not just for the industry these are things that affect all of us but you might be wondering what can we do right now to help let me just um start with a funny survey it's kind of interesting 69 percent of people in this survey said that sustainable tourism is very important to them but in that same very survey 75 said they don't even know what it is it sounds crazy but in a way it's hard to know it can mean just about anything these days but the thing that might be most topical should we be flying this is the big question we have the co2 guilt that we're talking about and some people are saying that we shouldn't be well i kind of feel two ways about it part of me says we definitely should stop flying and there's another part of me that says well i can kind of still imagine that someone's going to be flying in three years from now and five years from now and 10 years from now there will be planes in the sky and wouldn't it be great if they were all hydrogen powered or electric powered eco-friendly sustainable energy planes how cool would that be and how do we get there if we stop flying if too many of us do how are an airline suffer financially how are they going to get the money for research and development how are they going to buy these really cool eco planes and we actually have come a long way so far this is an electric plane that actually flies nasa is working on it there's lots of companies developing these things right now we may be closer to this than you think but it's going to go out of business if everyone stops flying it's kind of a weird catch-22 that way and norway has this brilliant idea they have a nationwide plan for electric planes for their domestic flights in the near future how cool would it be if more governments signed on with such a plan and more airlines started investing this and we the customers started demanding it that's something we can all do today and here's the other good news in the last 10 years airplanes long-haul flights have gotten more fuel efficient by 27 but this also creates confusion right because there's planes in the sky that are less efficient and more efficient and when you go to book a flight like say from new york to singapore you can see how much it costs when it leaves and how long the flight is but you can't see how much petrol they're burning and that's a really important question because there's a huge difference between planes currently servicing that route between 1.3 tons per passenger or 0.9 it's hard to know that's a huge difference if we're looking at a round trip for two people that adds up to 1.6 tons of co2 and if you're not sure what that looks like here's what one ton looks like it's hard to imagine that there's anything we can do once we get to that destination like reusing our towels and taking an ecotour that's going to add up to that much co2 but we can do a few things for starters we don't have to fly really really far to get to a beach we could choose one that's a little closer to home and if we're flying or if we want to travel closer to home we don't have to fly we can take trains or buses when possible there are other things we can do to have a better effect on the environment but not everything has to cost money or require technology this is one of my favorite solutions the island of palau puts a stamp right in your passport and they ask you to sign it and take the palau pledge it's beautiful it's almost poetic if you look there at the bottom it says the only footprints i shall leave are those that will wash away how amazing is that what a great and cost-effective way that is to get us to help commit to this thing of course we should be doing it anyway whether they put a stamp in our passport or not now i said before that tourism is travel without a purpose but that doesn't mean we can't make it more purposeful it doesn't matter if you're responsible for an entire destination or responsible for booking your next trip why not be part of the solution a solution that brings us to a better future in a future that allows the next generations of travelers to see this amazing planet in the same way that we have and that is how we save tourism from itself

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 155,957

Keywords: TEDxTalks, English, Global Issues, Future, Society, Travel

Id: Imbj0F-gUSw

Length: 17min 49sec (1069 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 02 2019