Revitalise: Empowering inspired hospitality
Hospitality needs to be revered and revitalised if travel & tourism is to become a constructive and transformative force for good, according to K Michael Haywood.
It’s a “Good Tourism” Insight. [You too can write a “GT” Insight.]
Hospitality demonstrates transformative power when people embrace the other and contribute to the overall well-being of communities, citizens, and customers.
By providing a sense of affiliation that builds trust and feelings of importance, hospitality is the essential building block for repeat business. It determines the long-term survival of all communities-as-destinations.
Today, however, destinations face mounting challenges in their quest to revitalise as, post-pandemic, they struggle to turn the tide by achieving healthy growth, and circumventing the inevitable hospitality systems gaps and hidden stressors of emotional labour that have been allowed to fester.
As a contribution to resolving these and related problems, Destinations International is mounting a campaign in support of community shared value. From a strategic point of view, however, shared value has to extend far beyond the belief that “… our local residents are our ultimate customers”.
Communities-as-destinations must consider the interests of entire communities, their citizens and customers, all of whom want and deserve to be treated with respect. Obviously everyone needs to share tourism’s benefits, but far more needs to be done to clarify what outcomes are desirable and of importance to individual stakeholders.
Don’t miss other “GT” Insights by K Michael Haywood
Fortunately, by reclaiming our personal power, independent thought, and action, we can encourage our individual communities and organisations to flesh out the rhetoric and determine how best to honour and achieve community shared value; value that originates from the notion that hospitality represents the vital foundational principle and ingredient.
To do so we need to work more closely with all our tourism-related enterprises, DMOs, individual neighbourhoods, and tourism clusters to form high-impact coalitions; coalitions that, as exemplified in Europe, demonstrate DMOcracy instrumental in helping their communities revitalise and serve as guarantors of principled hospitality.
Hospitality in service for others, not simply provision of service to others. Service that stems from responsible, responsive approaches to planning and policy-making that serves to change and improve the game.
What is ‘vital’?
For the most part, travellers are … continue reading this “Good Tourism” Insight in full and for free (and many other perspectives) on The “Good Tourism” Blog.
