Travel to Tomorrow: An Emerging Vision for the Tourism Industry
“Could tourism possibly create more value with fewer visitors, giving them the space to discover the things we want to share, the things that make us unique?”
This is the provocative question offered by Peter de Wilde, the director of regional tourism authority Visit Flanders. For the past two years, this inquiry has been at the center of the organization’s quest to reimagine their industry — a quest they’ve been calling “Tourism Transforms” in acknowledgement both of tourism’s potential to transform us and of the need to transform tourism.
And indeed, there can be no doubt that transformation of the industry is urgently needed. More and more areas around the world are suffering from over-tourism, with accompanying destruction of ecosystems and heritage artifacts, as well as disruptions to local quality of life. On top of that, the industry contributes 8% of carbon emissions globally, prompting a growing call for a halt to non-essential flights. Yet despite these pressures, international tourist travel continues to grow at a rate of 4% per year. In the first half of 2019, that meant 30 million more trips than the same period in 2018, according to the UN World Tourism Organization. Clearly, something has to give.
