What's the point of going back to "normal"? Tourism’s unsustainable recovery.
I see a tourism industry that has clearly changed after the pandemic but still aims to go back to where we were in 2019 before the crisis. What's the point of going back to "normal"?
Two years have passed since the pandemic started and now it seems we’re going back to "normal". Predictions for tourism recovery were that in 2023 it will be reactivated and it looks like that is correct. I recently boarded a plane that need no mandatory mask and in the airport, people were not wearing it either, even when it was very crowded. It’s spring but it feels like summer because of the crowds and the particularly hot temperatures.
In June 2020 I wrote some blog posts about redesigning tourism with contactless experiences and how intelligent automation is transforming this sector. I wrote that the trend would be “the less human contact, the better”. I thought that a contactless experience could be a competitive advantage for tourism destinations to be prepared for the next health crisis because the point was to avoid unnecessary touchpoints between visitors and tourism workers. Now, I believe that we do not need to focus only on contactless experiences, but on ethics and quality. It's more about how we as tourists act at the tourism destination, how tourism and service providers will treat their employees, and how technology providers will design the solutions taking into account all stakeholders.
Do we really want to go back to overtourism?
I see a tourism industry that has clearly changed after the pandemic but still aims to go back to where we were in 2019 before the crisis. What's the point of going back to "normal"? What’s the point of going back to the same number of arrivals, when there was a clear problem of over-tourism? According to the World Tourism Organization, the recovery for the sector is uneven and tourist arrivals in January 2022 were still 67% below 2019 levels. If we are experiencing the negative effects of overtourism, maybe this time we should aim for stability or degrowth instead of growth.
The economy of many countries depends on tourism, but I think tourism shouldn’t aim to keep growing at the pre-pandemic pace. Some people are talking about a Great Reset aka Feudalism 2.0 where people do not own anything and create an apparently more sustainable way of living. I’m still unsure of what is my opinion about it. I wonder how tourism will work with this initiative. It reminds me of the tourism certificates that Tanja Mihalic and David Fennell proposed, a concept they compare with pollution emissions certificates where the rights for polluting are assigned for free and can be traded if there are companies that are in the need of more. So, with tourism certificates, nation-states will be assigned tourism rights and if they need more they’ll have to buy them from countries that have excess rights, countries that have fewer people traveling internationally, the Global South. This means that privileged countries whose inhabitants travel more will compensate the deprived countries by buying certificates from them. For me, it sounds both scary and interesting.
In this tourism rebirth, I have seen how inequalities are growing again because developed countries' tourists are spending their money in less developed countries, activating the economy again, yes, but also influencing the emergence of other issues like higher rents. Tourism is recovering but locals have to migrate because of the high prices. In some places in Spain, for example, restaurant managers are not able to find waiters and waitresses because the rents are higher than their salaries. They literally cannot afford to work there. Young people can't buy houses anymore, prices are too high because the target is the international retirees market. That’s how the economic system that we live in works, but again, what's the point of going back to "normal"?
The tourism workforce is not the same.
We’re going back to "normal", but things have definitely changed. Tourism and hospitality workers changed jobs during the pandemic and now the industry has serious staff shortages that are causing problems like in Schipol Airport, where people are experiencing 6 hours of queues for the security check. Why? Because security guards and luggage handlers are quitting their jobs and protesting for better conditions. People have been waiting two years to travel and explore the world, but service providers might not be well prepared for it. Maybe an intelligent automation solution for the security screening process will momentarily solve the problem at Schipol Airport, but then how can it be sustainable? How to make sure that the security guards are still able to develop skills and have meaningful work while the automatic screening process is partly displacing them? I think those are the kind of questions we need to start asking, instead of how to increase the number of people that will be able to enter the airport facilities with this AI system. We need quality over quantity.
The authorities at Schipol Airport just announced that the worker’s conditions will be improved, but that is not a quick fix for the labor shortage. Robotics and intelligent automation might be quick and effective solutions for staff shortages, but then, I think the aim should be not to displace humans but to make service and hospitality jobs more attractive. As a way to say “hey, the robots/automated system will do these tasks that seem inadequate for humans, so now this job is more attractive because you’ll be doing these other tasks. And of course, you’ll get a decent wage.”
What if this new "normal" is local-centered?
The narrative is always toward travelers’ needs and wants. I feel like we need to focus more on the locals because all tourists are locals somewhere else, and if we focus on locals then it's a more sustainable way of thinking. Why would we focus first on the ones that don't live here? Because they bring a ton of money. I have seen how Sevilla, Spain, was full of international tourists because of a football match and the locals had to deal with their disrespectful attitudes and visual/noise pollution. Why do we want to go back to this “normal”? I travel quite often and I don't want to be kept from doing it. We need to find new ways of traveling that involve intelligent automation and contactless experiences, but I think that the focus should be on ethics and quality with a local-centered perspective that puts the tourism employees and inhabitants of the tourism destinations first.