The future of tourism

Perry Hobson: My part of the module focuses on what the future of tourism will look like - in the year 2050. Why do I choose the year 2050?

Firstly, because it is still around 30 years away and therefore a timeframe that is relevant for my students. After all, they are about to enter working life and will only be around 50 years old in 2050. That means it has some potential relevance - whereas if you look too far into the future (say 50 or 100 years), it's probably not relevant. It also gives them time to reflect on what they are learning in this course and still make decisions that may affect their future.

Secondly, it is also a year that attracts a lot of attention because it is the middle of this century. People and organizations are focusing on this date for many issues - for example, the climate goals.

Why look to the future? Albert Einstein once said: "I am more interested in the future than in the past, because I want to live in the future". I think that looking into the future and considering likely future scenarios is a very worthwhile and interesting activity for all of us - and unfortunately I don't think we spend enough time doing this systematically.

Perry Hobson: I like to start by talking about how there are different types of futures - like probable, possible and desirable futures. First, I ask students to take a blank sheet of paper and imagine their desired future. Some may think this is a bit idealistic, but if we don't have a vision of a better future, how can we ever hope to improve things? When Elon Musk launched ...., he clearly had a vision. We are all familiar with the terms 'foresight' and 'predictions', but the problem with this is that we always move from what we know to what we don't know. In conjunction with a vision, I also like to get students to "backcast". In other words, I want them to work backwards from that vision. So what needs to change over a thirty-year period to achieve their desired vision? If you want to have a zero-carbon tourism industry by 2050, what do you need to have done by 2040, by 2030, by 2025 and by tomorrow to actually achieve that vision and that goal?

This may sound a bit abstract, but I want students to focus on things that are comprehensible to them. I also have them write a vignette about a day in their life in the future where they imagine what "going to work" (assuming we will still be doing that) might actually look like. How might technology, people and the climate have changed by then? How will they live? So we are moving into the realm of the possible future, not just the desirable.

Perry Hobson: As I said before, we can move from what we know to what we don't know. That's where we move into the realm of probable futures. For example, we know a lot about our current demographics and birth and death rates. This means that we can predict with a fair degree of accuracy what populations will look like. Believe it or not, this can be quite controversial. China, for example, delayed the release of its latest census data for a long time. The reason for this was that China's population was starting to shrink, while India was getting bigger. This in turn has all sorts of economic implications.

Another example: the Japanese government recently pointed out that the birth rate in Japan has fallen dramatically. There are currently 125 million people living in Japan, and it is estimated that there will be fewer than 800,000 births in 2022. In the 1970s, this figure was still more than two million! Of course, this has a huge immediate impact on companies selling baby food and the need for elementary school. But these people would then grow up and become tourists and workers. Except they won't, because they were never born. Then we look at the economic impact this could have on a country in terms of expected taxes and the ability to pay pensions if the population pyramid is reversed. In the past, the prosperity of different countries has risen and fallen. So where will prosperity be in 2050? Let's remember that China only started to open up in the mid-1970s (that was just 50 years ago), and today it is one of the richest countries in the world. What could happen in Africa, where the population will continue to grow rapidly? Will Austria welcome more Nigerians than Chinese in the future?

We look at climate change in a similar way. As with demographics, we can look at the available data and the known models and examine the predicted changes that are likely to occur - and what this could mean for tourism by 2050. After all, many coastal towns will disappear - and let's not forget how much tourism infrastructure is located on the coast or on rivers. While it can be argued that some areas could even benefit from longer and warmer seasons, what about colder climates like the Alps? And the increasing severity of storms and other weather-related events around the world? How will this affect tourism flows and future investment? After all, investors and banks will not invest in places where their assets could be destroyed or lost".

Perry Hobson: Well, technology is an important focus. Of course, this is a topic that is evolving so rapidly that it's hard to predict with any degree of accuracy what will happen in 2050. After all, the iPhone hadn't been invented when I started teaching at MCI - and that was only 15 years ago! Do you remember Nokia? Before the iPhone, we all had one, which we might have used on the way to an ATM to get cash. Can we imagine going back to a world where we didn't have Pay-Wave, facial recognition, Spotify and Instagram? Well, they will seem like Nokia and VHS tapes to us and will be truly "old technology" in 2050 - just like gasoline-powered cars. We take a look at the Internet of Things (IoT) and artificial intelligence (AI) and imagine what will happen if data and AI improve five or tenfold by 2050.

Then we look at the likelihood of accompanying social and cultural changes. Again, the pace of these changes is much harder to predict - and it will vary by country and region of the world. We look at how social patterns have changed in relation to work and leisure and what this might mean for travel in the future.

Finally, we look at political, legal and regulatory issues. After all, we used to not have to wear seatbelts in cars and could smoke freely indoors. That is now a thing of the past. We are looking at how society, governments and then laws could change and how this would affect travel and tourism. Will people travel more as a result of the reduction in working hours? Because they have the time. Or will they travel less if the cost of living increases in line with the environmental impact we are causing. Of course, many of the factors we look at are interlinked. I like to have students create different scenarios to allow a more holistic view of probable and potential futures.

I often find that students find it surprisingly difficult to imagine a more distant future such as 2050. That sometimes worries me. We really need people who can imagine a better world for humanity - after all, we don't have any other planets to live on. I also tend to think that younger people, who are more tech savvy, are more able to understand the likely changes and what the future might bring and what impact it will have on travel, tourism and hospitality. But sometimes I also find that older people with a longer perspective are better able to envision such change as they have already experienced many changes in their lives. Looking to the future, I think the challenge will be the speed of these future changes (whether in terms of technology or climate) as they are likely to be much faster than many of us are prepared for. After all, no one had heard of ChatGPT until it launched a few months ago, in November 2022, and that just broke all records as the fastest update to a consumer technology.