Tourism NEXT

Daniel Egger: I have been working with collaborative product development for more than 15 years. That means listening to people honestly. While mentoring an innovative start-up in the tourism industry, I realized that a lot of people talk about tourism, but few listen to tourism professionals. So I set up a completely different type of conversation, design interviews, with 53 excellent practitioners. I listened to what topics really and spontaneously move them and what they see as NEXT in tourism. During this time, I was also surprised by Corona. However, I used this opportunity to validate which opinions of tourism professionals have changed as a result of the pandemic.

Daniel Egger: The interviews resulted in 30 important topics that were spontaneously mentioned by the tourism professionals. Probably the most important finding is that the majority of those surveyed honestly believe: "No way we can continue like this." Our hard work has brought us much success and tremendous growth over the last few decades, but at the same time also a sameness, market saturation and "fragility". These statements went hand in hand with the desire to break out of a lack of vision, the discovery and active promotion of new "bellwethers" and new "lead meadows", more courage to take tougher decisions, a stronger entrepreneurial perspective and the need to position ourselves more sharply and authentically in tourism.

Daniel Egger: Many topics came up in the discussions. It was about changing in order to break out of blind growth and towards increasing added value. I would like to highlight two topics in particular. Firstly, many of the practitioners believe that we need to learn to be human again in tourism; not hospitality or even more hardware, which are all part of the basic equipment today. Rather, tourism professionals see the future in a new human relationship between guests, employees and locals. The second topic is the rediscovery of regionality with its values, customs and rituals. This means a return to the origins and less of a Disneyland in the Alps like signs saying "to the left is the cow". Rather, some believe that it is important to rediscover regional values and offer guests new authentic experiences. As a result, we see the new old regionality as a way out of saturation, of sameness, as an improvement in the spirit of tourism and as a new growth driver for the coming years. But of course with high quality.

Daniel Egger: I was lucky enough to have an honest exchange with many different tourism professionals. I saw that the desire for change exists and that statements such as "employees are more important than guests" are becoming more and more of a reality. For me, the most important thing is that many of the practitioners realize that it is possible to break out of sameness, that every crisis offers opportunities and that less "I" and more "we" can change tourism together. Many of these ideas were realistic before coronavirus. After the crisis, it seems that many of these wishes will give way to the need for financial compensation.