First tango in
Buenos Aires

In the weeks following her appointment as CEO of the World Travel & Tourism Council last October, Gloria Guevara and her staff had one-on-one meetings with 80% of the chief executives, managing directors and chairs of global airlines, hospitality companies, tour operations, travel agencies and other industry enterprises that make up the organization’s impressive membership roster.

Her first question to each of them was the same: What are your needs, challenges and priorities?

“What was interesting,” she recalled, “was that three priorities were repeated over and over: security and travel facilitation, crisis management and sustainability.”

She had her marching orders.

“The No. 1 priority, by far, was security and travel facilitation,” she said. “Previously, we were more focused on facilitation, but the realities have changed, and the challenges around security cannot be separated. Some governments are thinking that by closing borders or decreasing the number of visas or by making it more difficult to enter, they can increase security. The reality is there’s technology that can help us increase security and at the same time increase the number of travelers, improve their experience and create more jobs. Technology like biometrics can lead to a win-win for governments, the travel industry, destinations and their communities.”

The second priority was related to crisis management in the event of natural disasters, terrorism or outbreaks of disease. For the most part, the private sector has dealt with crises after the fact, but Guevara discovered there was a desire to be engaged with governments in crisis-preparation initiatives.

“We’ve done a lot of research,” she said. “When the private sector is engaged early, the impact of a crisis is lessened. This has a significant impact for travelers and for jobs.”

The organization has had several ongoing, high-profile initiatives around sustainability, its third priority, over the past decade, and Guevara believes that the organization needs to be more vocal about those. But there are also projects that are more of-the-moment, particularly addressing overcrowding at some attractions and overtourism to certain cities and sites.

On those topics, Guevara said, “We had two options: do nothing or be part of the solution. This is very important for our members. So we partnered with McKinsey & Co. last year and are working with destinations to find a path to move forward and overcome that challenge.”

Summit attention will also be focused on initiatives against human trafficking and illegal wildlife poaching and trafficking.

One area of sustainability that is important to members has less to do with environmental concerns than with the jobs that keep the industry growing.

“We provide lots of opportunities,” Guevara said. “You don’t need a lot of skills or training to find [an entry level] job in travel, but there are mobility opportunities you don’t find in other sectors. Someone can start in reservations at an airline and become a country manager for that same airline. Or someone starts at the front desk of a hotel and is now a general manager.

“The focus on jobs is critical. How do we make sure employees have the right skills for the jobs that will be needed in the future?”

For all three strategies, Guevara said, it is crucial to engage with governments. To plot a path forward, she leans on her experiences in the private and public sectors; she was both head of Sabre in Mexico as well as that country’s secretary of tourism.

In Buenos Aires, she will try to replicate one of her major public sector successes in her current private sector role: In 2012, as Mexico’s tourism secretary, she organized a “T-20” meeting of tourism ministers of the G-20 nations. That was in Merida, just prior to a WTTC regional meeting. The T-20 group forged a declaration, later adopted by the G-20 heads of state, that countries would “work toward developing travel facilitation initiatives in support of job creation, quality work, poverty reduction and global growth.”

Argentina is the host of the G-20 this year, and Guevara has organized a T-20 summit of ministers on the day before the summit opens.

The location of the summit in Argentina is also meant to support that country’s movement toward WTTC goals.

“Argentina was pursuing a very protectionist path,” Guevara said. “Tourism was not a priority. But since president [Mauricio] Macri and tourism minister [Jose Gustavo] Santos came in, they have made connectivity and initiatives around travel facilitation a priority.”

The full WTTC agenda can be found at WTTC.org, but we’ve spoken to some of the speakers to give Travel Weekly readers a sneak peek of what to expect in Buenos Aires later this month:

TACKLING OVERTOURISM

Ninan Chacko, CEO of Travel Leaders Group, discussed the role that travel agents can play in helping to address many of these issues, particularly overtourism.

“We know we can identify the right kind of demand that would be interested in destinations that historically haven’t seen that marketing,” he said, citing as an example Venice, which has become the poster-child destination for overtourism.

“It’s intelligently taking that demand and shifting it from a geography-and-time perspective and pushing it into regions that people haven’t historically thought of.”

Advances in marketing and a growing appetite for experiential travel are pushing companies like Travel Leaders to expand tourism to lesser-known parts of the most popular countries. Being able to more highly target and quantify guests, Chacko said, enables travel agents to expose clients to a country like Italy “at a breadth and depth that is beyond that two-dimensional Rome, Venice, Florence picture.”

Shifting that demand puts less stress on places like Venice, he said, and more importantly, “brings some of the economic impact to those lesser-known destinations and during less busy periods.”

Travel agents are responding to travelers’ growing demand for alternative experiences and destinations by using their expertise to help market those off-the-beaten-path areas, ultimately benefitting the location and producing happier customers.

“Not many tourists want to be in a place where it is crowded, expensive and there’s nothing remotely local or authentic about that experience,” Chacko said.

Threats to inclusive travel

For the last few years, the travel industry has had to fight the perception that security and travel facilitation were incongruous pursuits.

Panelist Manuel Muniz, dean of the School of International Relations at Madrid’s IE University, has been studying the forces behind recent calls for building walls and closing borders, and he finds that the motivation has more to do with economic inequality than with security and that the populist rhetoric that has been unleashed, which has led to what he calls the “political oddities” of the Trump election and the Brexit vote, will have an impact on travel.

“The first manifestations will not necessarily be on tourism but on actual movement of people to settle and work in different places,” Muniz said. “But the tendency is in a direction that runs contrary to the interests of an industry that is built on exchanges of cosmopolitanism and open borders.”

Muniz has found a correlation between anti-immigrant sentiment and “tourismphobia, a fear of tourists and rejection of tourism,” that has already taken hold in parts of Europe, most notably in Barcelona, where elected officials have taken action to control tourism.

Proponents of both, he said, “drink from similar sources” and ultimately want to “reject free movement and open borders.”

“If we think that the tourism industry is isolated and protected from these trends of anti-cosmopolitanism, I think that is short-sighted,” Muniz said.

DEALING WITH CYBERTHREATS

Although it’s often a behind-the-scenes issue for the travel industry, many believe that cyberthreats need to be addressed more seriously. Speaker Nick Fishwick, an adviser at HSBC said, “In the same way that some hostile organizations would want to launch physical attacks on tourist locations, airports and other facilities, there are also cyberthreats to the same institutions. There needs to be an awareness in the travel and tourism industry of the fact that people would want to use cyber to disrupt them and to understand what the different threats might be and what reasonable measures they can take to neutralize these threats.”

Fishwick said travel companies can also be the targets of financially motivated criminal cyberattacks that can put a company out of business.

“That’s very bad news for the customers, particularly if they’re halfway through their holiday or they’ve already paid for it,” he said.

However, as important as it is to take cyberthreats seriously, Fishwick also warned against scaring people.

“I wouldn’t want people to panic about this,” he said. “I wouldn’t want people to start canceling trips because they’re worried about cyberattacks that might take the plane out of the sky or send their travel agents bust halfway though a journey.”

An appropriate response, he said, is for people who are responsible for the trips — airlines, travel agents, etc. — to have a certain level of awareness about cyberdefense to protect their customers and companies.

Cybercriminals can also harm the travel industry at large, Fishwick said, by using cyberattacks to damage a company’s or industry’s reputation.