Empowering Women to Future-Proof Travel
This week I had the pleasure of presenting my book ‘Future-Proofing Travel’ to a cohort of women tour guides in Edinburgh, part of a training programme created by Women in Travel CIC in partnership with TUI Care Foundation. The initiative is to drive diversity and inclusion, as well as give destinations fresh new tour guides with their own unique stories from a diverse range of backgrounds from Mexico, Croatia, Albania and beyond.
Shifting megatrends at play
One slide that resonated was regarding the world’s shifting megatrends. On the one hand, the global south middle class is rising, whilst the global north is ageing. As Alessandra LoTufo Alonso, CEO of Women in Travel put it, the industry is missing a trick by excluding the older generation where those in their 80s and 90s continue to travel like they always have. So ageing is not a threat but an opportunity. This is especially true where universal design has been considered from the get-go and where accessibility is baked in from the outset not as an afterthought.
One of the major threats on the near horizon is AI, where consumers are a tiny bit wary, but businesses are all in on its applications, and how it can help to drive efficiencies, time savings and reduce costs. All in the room agreed that AI is helpful yet will never replace the human interaction with a tour guide, sharing their story in the place they love.
Another important question was what entrepreneurs can do to mitigate the impacts of geopolitics such as the war in the Middle East. My response was that people are resilient when it comes to travel, where there is a crisis playbook. Not everything will happen in the same way, but similar trends are apparent when one part of the world is in conflict, people will shift to safer destinations, especially closer to home. This creates new opportunities for intra-regional demand and staycations as was prevalent during the pandemic. Equally, those luxury travellers not travelling from Asia to the Middle East could be enticed to travel to safer destinations closer by, or where safety and security are more guaranteed. I know that this year will involve a staycation with my family and I cannot wait to head up north to explore the beautiful coastlines of Aberdeenshire, Moray to Wester Ross.
From entrepreneurship to education
This week I was also invited to speak to the tourism students at Surrey University by Professor Xavier Font, to share my experience of data sources and research methodologies.
One major challenge we discussed is the accuracy of data that the sector traditionally uses – such as the number of women in travel which historically has been stated as 50% but this is incorrect as it refers to women working in accommodation only. Instead, it’s around 40% based on WTTC/Oxford Economics, if not less.
There also tends to be a historic lag when it comes to tourism data due to the number of surveys used to collect inbound visitor data. Research companies like Oxford Economics are leading the field when it comes to socio-economic and environmental impacts like DEI and carbon footprint at a national tourism level. While real time travel data is in the hands of the big tech titans like Google. My response was that data – like AI – will only be as bad as it is now, due to the speed of technology.
So, it has been an interesting week of women in travel for tour guide training and a full house of women in tourism for education. This representation bodes well for our industry in terms of diversity and inclusion as well as emotional intelligence-inspired management and service.