“Overtourism” and the neglect of demand generation

A couple of years ago I did a tiny piece of pro-bono consulting for Project Cordillera, a social enterprise promoting community-based trekking in the Andes and alternatives to the oversaturated Inca Trail.

The problem was that although there’s enormous demand for trekking in Peru, consumer awareness is concentrated almost exclusively on the Inca Trail and Machu Picchu. Operators offering a new activity, even for the same audience in the same destination, find it hard to get their product in front of their target market.

There are roughly 33,000 Google searches a month for the “Inca Trail”, which makes it easy (if not cheap) to advertise via SEO or Adwords. The market exists, people are proactively searching for the product, and marketing is about demand capture or, in simple terms, being in the right place at the right time.

It’s hard to sell something if people don’t know it exists.

But if you’re developing a brand new trekking route, say the virtually unheard of Qhapaq Ñan trail, SEO and Adwords will be of little use — the market is too small (or nonexistent). No one is searching for the product, and there isn’t enough demand out there to capture.

In this scenario the challenge becomes one of demand generation, or creating a new market entirely from scratch. You have to reach the target audience(s) and educate them about locations and activities they weren’t previously aware of. Only then can you nudge them into the consideration phase of the purchase decision and, hopefully, get them to book something.

Good content strategy anticipates and answers questions throughout the customer journey. Great content strategy addresses things they didn’t know they didn’t know.

But travel marketing is uniquely challenging, and large-scale demand generation is beyond the abilities and budgets of most tour operators. In reality the lion’s share of travel marketing expenditure goes into demand capture, with advertisers slugging it out in competition for consumer awareness and attention.

And because mainstream travel publishing is now an unofficial branch of travel marketing, the entire problem seeps out from advertising and into the media that people see and consume, further stimulating demand where it already exists.

This is one of many contributing factors to the “overtourism” crisis. The industry as a whole has neglected new markets in favour of chasing easy money and pageviews. The result is unsustainable consumer demand in a relatively small number of destinations, while lesser-known locations struggle for visitors.

Stuart McDonald, cofounder of the Travelfish website, charges people for travel consulting, helping them figure out where to go and what to do. As Stuart puts it:

“One of the biggest challenges is steering people away from place A to place B — not because B isn’t as “good” but because Aunt Nancy went to A, so my client has to go there too. There’s a big part of ‘keeping up with the Joneses’ to this. It’s not all the fault of the industry, but there’s this self-perpetuating cycle that keep popular places popular.”

This is a gap that tourist boards and DMOs will need to cover. Rather than trying to drive ever greater visitor numbers, tourism authorities in popular locations will have to shift towards managing and spreading demand within their destinations.

But this represents a fundamental retooling in content strategy. And although we’re moving in the right direction, the execution is not always there:

This opens up some blue ocean that independent publishers and startups can occupy. Everyone wants a solution to this problem:

• Consumers are fed up with mass tourism and saturated destinations.
• Travel companies and tour operators find demand capture too competitive, while creating demand for new products is difficult and expensive.
• Tourist boards will need new approaches to destination marketing to make their local markets more sustainable and differentiated.

This is something we’re very interested in at Horizon Guides. Our marketing solution for tour operators and tourist boards straddles the boundary between demand generation and demand capture.

We acquire most of our readers in the early stages of travel research when they’re in-market for a destination, but aren’t entirely sure where to go, what to do, or how to do it. This means we can do the heavy lifting in demand generation to promote new and emerging activities and locations.

We’re starting with our guide to trekking in Peru which we’re re-releasing with a heavy slant on alternatives to the Inca Trail and Machu Picchu, along with some new partners who offer amazing experiences that most people will never have heard of.

In the era of overtourism, “getting off the beaten path” has changed from a pithy but empty marketing slogan into an imperative that affects the entire industry. We think that by rectifying the systemic neglect of demand generation, Horizon Guides can help make a difference.

Tour operator trying to launch something new? DMO seeking to spread demand? We can help you reach and inform your audience — get in touch to find out more!

Originally published at ianditravelmedia.com on March 11, 2018.