What's Fresh in Tourism Innovation and Sustainability?
My key takeaways from the Tourism Innovation Summit 2023.
This week I spent 3 days at the Tourism Innovation Summit in Seville, looking for new business partners, networking and learning about what’s new in the industry.
The main premise of the summit was innovation and sustainability in tourism. Companies, NGOs and tourism destinations were showcasing new technologies and new solutions for the sector - how to make it better, more sustainable and how to use technology to make our processes easier.
As one would expect, many presentations were about generative AI - how it’s transforming the industry and how we can make it work better for us. The other most prevalent topic was sustainability - how can we make the industry work better for the planet and not against it.
While some talks were inspirational and opened new perspectives, I do feel most were quite standard and it didn’t feel that you were part of an innovation summit at all. Especially the talks about AI, where I expected more in the pragmatic sense.
Either way, it was useful to see what is going on and meet people behind the biggest companies shaping travel.
In this post, I’ll talk about the things that did caught my eye and I found interesting. Here’s some of the latest trends, fresh from the Tourism Innovation Summit 2023.
Generative AI
“AI is just a tool”, was the sentence I heard the most. The other one was that we all want personalized recommendations from ChatGPT and that’s when is going to be useful.
While it will be the most useful when it will be personalized, it does raise the most questions about privacy then. Who handles our data, how they handle it, etc. Lots of questions still unanswered about this.
We know it still doesn’t know more than a (good) local travel guide. It doesn’t yet have deep knowledge. It can though expand the knowledge of travel agents and make them work faster and more efficient. But it doesn’t yet replace them. Experts are also confident that it “never” will.
OTAs everywhere
It seems like today everyone wants to be an OTA (online travel agency).
1/5 of all travel services are booked today through an OTA. But the OTA market is highly consolidated. The big winners are brands such as Booking.com, Expedia, Hopper and Airbnb.
Even more so with their white label offerings which are now being used on a big scale by financial institutions entering tourism.
If yesterday everyone could own a restaurant or a bar, today everyone can be an OTA.
Banks and investment firms such as JPMorgan, Revolut, Mastercard, etc. are seeking to retain their users and gain their loyalty by offering them more than the basic services. They want them to book their travels through their apps. And they’re doing it by using white label services of Expedia, Booking or Hopper.
This to them offers easy access and low risk in entering tourism. They do not need to own any inventory or take care of the technology. It’s a plug&play solution which improves their brand image.
This in turn further fragments the travel market. Only from B2B collaborations, Hopper makes 40% of their revenues. Not bad I would say.
Is Web3 still alive?
It seems Web3 got swaped with AI also at tourism conferences. There were only a handful of talks dedicated to Web3 and even this was kind of low-key.
Although interesting and promising, it’s not sexy enough for the legacy tourism brands or it doesn’t yet convince them that it could drive higher revenues.
I still think it will prove it’s value in the sector, but not while things are running smoothly and business is thriving. Though aspects such as direct distribution, lowering the cost of payments and secondary sales could be interesting for big tourism brands even in this moment.
Green travel
A lot of talks about sustainability, regenerative tourism and green travel. Some projects like Byway Travel feel like they’re truly moving things on the ground and changing travel habits in an entrepreneurial way. For other sessions, it was more conceptual or viewed from a policy perspective.
One of the speakers, Pablo Castillo, set an interesting example about regenerative travel from his time when he was working at a travel agency .
He said that 25% of customers who booked their travels in person in the travel agency opted for lowering their carbon emissions.
From the ones who booked online, only 1% did it.
People will not be sustainable if they don’t get caught. It’s a classic selfish human act. - Pablo Castillo
This to me is a great example and says a lot about sustainable travel. It’s compared to the fact that only about 1% of donations are NOT anonymous.
It’s easier to ride the wave than to create one.
It’s easier to adapt the current travel habits than to create new ones.
Other interesting topics
Flight travel & eVTOLs - airlines are investing or purchasing eVTOLs (electric vertical take-off and landing). It’s kind of like a flying taxi/Uber which is supposed to revolutionize urban mobility. In China they were already approved, while in the EU and in the US it might not happen soon.
Data usage - the key trend is data and what to do with this data. We need a roadmap for consumers of this data.
Hotel operations - they want to optimize labor productivity and performance. Especially now with a big lack of the hospitality workforce. They also need to adapt to the new upcoming workforce, GenZs. They’re doing this with social media apps, online schedules, etc.
That’s my key points. Probably there was more to it, but I used most of my time talking to people and not going to every presentation. All in all, I’m hyped about what the new trends will bring to us in the industry.
Expect another similar post like this from WTM London, which I’ll be attending in 2 weeks. Are you going there? Let’s meet up!
These are interesting trends. Curious to see how the travel ecosystem will effectively embrace AI moving forward.