How to save tourism from itself _ Doug Lansky _ TEDxStockholmSalon

In 1950 there were 25 million international travelers last year .

1.4 billion tourism is 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 wanna go , avoid the obstacles , get there safely , even get there quicker .

You gotta 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 gonna 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 need to regret it soon after .

So what I wanna 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 gonna 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 gonna 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 off loaded .

About 1500 tourists .

They walked up and down your street were loud in the morning , loud , late at night through 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 in 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 , uh that's a tourist areas .

Now , we're not gonna 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 .

What'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 gonna do about this ?

I don't think it's ok .

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 gonna 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 of 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 wanna 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 wanna have 12 guests .

So you do a quick inventory check .

You're like , ok , we got 12 plates , but we only have two forks .

We have seven spoons and seven knives , et cetera , et cetera .

You could run to the store .

But if the guest 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 , 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 wanna 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 and etcetera , etcetera .

If you wanna 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 .

If 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 , 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 1 million fewer visitors .

That's a bold move or here in the island of Fernando de ne 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 0.2 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 tourist 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 .

Are 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 or evil that they should not have them .

I'm just saying a destination needs to be smart and factored 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 in tourism is 4% .

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 4% 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 wanna 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 wanna keep them shopping , which means you also want great opening hours .

30 to 40% of the shopping occurs after 6 p.m. And so many places close at 6 p.m. The other thing you wanna 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 isn't 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 wanna separate spending from the money .

This is why casinos make you change your money to chips .

It doesn't feel like real money .

It's why hotels let you sign drinks to the room .

It 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 hard wired 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 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 , kids are tugging at your sleeves 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 wanna be here , you can't be anywhere else .

They want a unique one of a kind experience .

So people have to go there to , 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 is in disrepair .

This resort is in , in Rio .

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 unesco side .

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 , 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 gonna 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% of people in the 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 gonna 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 , ecofriendly , 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 gonna 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 ECO tour that's gonna 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 and 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 .