An Golden 🌟 Opportunity for Transformation 💡
This period has been a very transformative one already. It’s forced a lot of business owners, travelers and even government to have to re think how they view their economics. It’s sort of impossible for me to not have my economics background show and with this situation I’ve found myself re visiting old lectures, notes and readings that I had throughout my student career as an economics major. But, instead of analyzing and scrutinizing our past actions let’s look toward the future and see what good can come out of this (Of course always having a good grasp of what has already past).
As every other crisis of situation opportunity rears it’s head to bless us with whatever it may bring, but, where’s the opportunity now? This situation has brought up corpses to the surface that we did not know where a problem or at least we thought that such a situation would not arise for it to be one. To give you an example, due to the lack of public education or the lack of initiative for the public to educate themselves on simple economic matters (that we use every day) like scarcity is why our toilet paper dilemma occurred.
It may seem silly and trivial but, the lack of understanding for scarcity is a very concerning thing since it triggers ancient survival mechanisms built in to us to overcome our situations. If a person feels that there is not enough of something they will stock up on the product as much as they can to ensure their supply for as long as they can leaving other people to acquire very little or maybe even no product ensuring their demise. On the other side over production is a problem of it’s own and not by a long shot a viable solution to scarcity for a multiplicity of reasons.
Now that we have our concepts out of the way let’s bring the conversation towards hospitality and tourism. These corpses directly influence the traveler’s decision at the time of making a choice to travel or not, since one of these corpses was job security the traveler may be very weary in terms of decision making maybe prioritizing other goods and services before a flight and stay at a tropical destination.
Yeah, we can all agree that in the time of a cash shortage the vacation drops to the bottom of the pile. So what’s to become of leisure destinations which are the ones with more to lose. I read a very interesting skift article on tourism marketing and I’m very much on board with what a particular source said.
“In proving their value, DMOs must also move sharply away from the mindset that ever-increasing arrivals — and thus ever-increasing hotel taxes — is a valid raison d’etre. That unsustainable mindset, which led to overtourism in some places, has now also revealed itself to be extremely risky in the context of coronavirus.”
If you don’t know what a DMO is, it’s a destination marketing organizations are non-profits tasked with the marketing efforts of a travel destination. It has always been hard to justify the existence of these entities, probably because their efforts and results are more intangible than any other thing. The main measuring stick that these organizations use are arrival arrival numbers which let’s be honest are highly untelling of actual impact from the DMO’s efforts. It’s very probable that they will pivot aggressively just as the rest of the industry (Pivot into a slightly different way to do business more lean, agile and easier to manage). They are probably sweating heavy, thinking how will they now justify their existence. Even though the need for marketing efforts are needed the way to now go about it and the results will probably have to be measure ddifferently. Here’s the link to the full Skift article: https://bit.ly/2VmiM7g
- Gian from Hostpitality
