Origins of a Divide That Still Haunts Tourism Today

Once you turn off the country road toward our place on Mayo Lake there is a mile of gravel road before you reach the last stretch of pavement leading to our lakeside retreat.

It is what was called “macadam” when road surfaces in America first started to be improved in the 1820s (as depicted in the image below.) 

Many so-called paved roads in the countryside today are macadam bound together with a little asphalt tar.

By 1909, just as what is now called North Carolina Central University was founded, Durham, where we alternatively live a part of each week, was being heralded for already having laid 82 miles of macadam road.

Nationwide at the time, only 700 miles of road, about 10% of the total were as good or better than those in Durham.

By that year there were almost 306,000 cars and a few more than 6,000 trucks registered in America, up from 8,000 overall in less than a decade. 

Those known as “highway progressives” were already shifting the economic impact rationale for good roads from “farm to market” to “tourism.”

But ironically, roads had long been politically, as well as ideologically, controversial.

Other than military roads, Founding Father progressives on both sides of the isle, such as Washington and Jefferson, had only been able to push through the first “national road” along what is now I-40 as a means to open up western settlements for Revolutionary War veterans.

Conservatives argued that roads were too expensive and that they should be a state issue.

Then at the state level, such as in North Carolina, they were often able to pigeonhole roads as a county-by-county issue clear up until the eve of the Civil War.

It was about this time that pleasure driving/riding in carriages took hold, usually limited to grand city parks such as those created by Fredrick Law Olmsted or in cemeteries.

But in 1888 the re-invention of the pneumatic tire, which had been unsuccessfully introduced in 1846, galvanized a grass-roots coalition of activists to push for good roads.

The coalition was spearheaded by bicycle riders who teamed with “farmers, nature-lovers, conservationists and tourists” to spawn a national movement not only better roads but a national network of “hard-surfaced, all-weather roads.”

Soon they were joined by nascent automobile manufacturers.

The roads envisioned were a means to an end such as farm to market or home to resort but all roads were intended to be scenic along the way.

Then as the movement gained steam between 1911 and 1926 “highway progressives” were overwhelmed by commercial interests who coopted the movement.

It created a schizo-polarization of tourism that persists today.

At one end are those with a deep respect for sense of place, authenticity and scenic preservation. 

On the other is a hawker-huckster form frenetically enabling billboards, developer churn, mainstream mega-facilities and other forms of cookie-cutter architecture.

To overcome conservative opposition to a system of national roadways, “highway progressives” had begun to tout tourism as a rationale.

To enlist communities along proposed roadways they encouraged them to “manufacture” reasons for tourists to stop along these routes.

Rather than look to innate qualities, community boosters egged on by a chamber-of-commerce mentality fell instead for hyperbole, thus the manufacture of roadside amusements along with monikers such as the “Grand Canyon of the East” or the “Paris of the South.”

By 1930, many states, including North Carolina had begun to fight back against blight but the forces of blight this has fueled including a faction of tourism that had found political cover among a wing of conservatives.

This wing of conservatives, which cut across party lines, has consistently and inexplicably argued that blight is good for economic development, something still being repeated by a candidate running for governor in the last election.

Tourism, if it was more open to introspection as well as critical and strategic thinking would align in such a way that it could shift this paradigm.

But don’t hold your breath. 

It isn’t just that one side of the schizo-divide is somewhat superficial.  More problematic is that the other side lacks the moral courage and passion of those early “highway progressives.”

All Trends Worthy of Strategy Have Historic Roots

I smiled as I read a report of a new study showing that “advanced” DMOs are leveraging their community’s intellectual capital to draw meetings and conventions.

In my personal experience that strategy has been used for at least 45 years.  Only the terminology is new.

That’s when I signed on with my first destination marketing startup, an office at Brigham Young University, in part for the purpose of marketing the campus for summer youth conferences.

In part, the objective was to keep housing and foodservice staff employed through the summer months as well as to tap into faculty expertise as a means to draw the attention of future students.

It was a part-time job for me,  When I moved on to law school at Gonzaga, which I attended full-time at night while working full time during the day to help start the new Spokane Area Convention & Visitors Bureau.

We borrowed an idea from Hartley Krueger and Dave Heinl in Seattle.  They were producing monthly breakfasts called GABFAST which stood for “Get A Boost Fast” in an effort to help Seattle recover from a horrible recession brought on by Boeing layoffs.

Remember the famous billboard near SEATAC with the now iconic message put up by two real estate agents for 15 days in April 1971 that read, “Will the last person leaving SEATTLE – turn out the lights?” 

We called our adaptation “AM Spokane,” but it had the same function.  We would invited business and university talent from a particular sector each month, say medical, and rally their support to help SACVB bring meetings to which they belonged back to meet in Spokane.

Soon we learned that site decision makers were as drawn to the local expertise this approach revealed as they were due to local connections with the association or corporation sponsoring the meeting.

We just didn’t use the terms talent or intellectual capital back then.

Even as more cost effective means of communication evolved, this continued to be a one-on-one group sales strategy I would go on to use in two subsequent startups, a completion in Anchorage and one from scratch in Durham, NC before finishing my career.

The new study by DMAI’s empowerMint initiative finds that it is very important for a DMO’s sales staff to alert a planner of relevant “local knowledge clusters” during the selection process.

Over half considered the existence of this local expertise a “competitive advantage.”

We know now that meetings and conventions as a segment of visitation tipped into a long slow decline back in the early 1980s but it still represents 10% of all person visits nationwide.

Recruiting meetings where attendees will have exposure to local talent is also a good means of drawing the interest of relocation scouts who are seeking areas for businesses, often to expand.

Of course, today, an even more strategic approach is to weave that information into communication to leisure visitors.

More than 8-in-10 executives looking to relocate  or expand a business visit a potential destination as a leisure visitor before making official contact.

I am using this trip down memory lane to show that trends we view as relevant today can almost always be found much earlier by “looking back to see forward” as a means of gleaning strategic intuition.

Hidden in the semantics of today’s trends is “strategic rootedness.”  But a DMO doesn’t need to wait.  Strategic intuition gleaned from looking back to see forward is most fruitful if done before trends become trendy.

10 Ways Tourism can Earn the Respect it Deserves

At least since at least the 1960s and including my now-concluded four-decade career, many in travel and tourism have repeatedly whined that this sector of the economy doesn’t get the respect it deserves.

Some are individual businesses who just want a pat on the back.  Others feel they need special treatment or shouldn’t have to pay their fair share of making places visitor-worthy.

It can be annoying and proposals rarely seem to go much beyond chest thumping.  Later in this essay I’ll take a stab at some more systemic ideas for how the travel and tourism sector could earn more respect.

But primarily, complainants are referring to the fact that most elected officials and administrators don’t grasp that the function of visitor centric economic and cultural development is to drive tax revenue.

Focus in government is typically only about dividing up the pie with the mistaken view that generating it comes only from a political decision to levy taxes.

The validity of the tourism sector’s concern is often visible when elected officials, often pushed by developers and advocates, are all too eager to drain resources shouldered for that purpose away from tourism promotion for their own uses instead.

These folks are better known as TINOs or “tourism in name only” and identifiable by their siren song of “build it and they will come.”

It is true that worldwide the travel and tourism sector now generates nearly 10% of the world’s gross domestic product (GDP) including 1 in every 11 jobs.  It is projected by economists that this sector alone will generate 3% of the GDP in America this year.

That’s bigger than the automotive sector, to add perspective, or for that matter agriculture, education and mining too.

Even down to the county-level, visitor-centric economic development generates a similar percentage of GDP in places where it is actively promoted, such as Durham, North Carolina where I live.

Instead of incessantly complaining that officials just don’t get it or care, here are 10 simple behaviors professionals in the travel and tourism sector could adopt to earn the respect it deserves:

Deep Six the widespread misuse of the term “industry.”  Tourism has never been an industry.  It is an economic sector composed by as many as seven very different industries that happen to rely in part or in whole on a common consumer, visitors.  Remember: industry is small, sector is many industries together.

Distinguish demand-driven visitor centric economic and cultural development from more traditional forms of supply-based economic development.  Tourism is on the demand side and truly generates value-added to a community.

Adopt an all for one and one for all approach.  Too often tourism tolerates actions and positions that throw one industry under the bus while protecting those that don’t want to pay their fair share.

Grasp that respect isn’t won or demanded, it is earned, not from tooting your own horn or chest thumping but by patiently and continually explaining how the economy and tax generation works and how travel and tourism is a means for community destination and cultural development

Stop killing the things visitors love.  Avoid cookie-cutter architecture that only homogenizes communities and adopt zero tolerance for use of tools such as long-obsolete roadside billboards that create sign blight (aka litter on a stick,) desecrate scenic vistas and mar sense of place.

Embrace design thinking beginning by performing a “Drano” operation on tourism organizations and models that having achieved their purpose have become obsolete given changes in the tourism ecosystem.  These only serve as a drain on resources and engagement.

Respect and encourage preservation of the unique sense of place in each destination beginning with place-based assets, traits and values.  Encourage communities to differentiate rather than become generic.  Protect them from being hollowed out by mainstream events and mega-facilities.

Root out intra-sector hypocrisy.  Remember that the tourism sector flourishes as a public-private sector partnership.  Discourage public subsidies of mega-events and facilities that will not generate a return on investment to the public treasury.  Refrain from win/lose issues such as forcing restriction of local school calendars.

Take a prominent lead in solutions to societal inequities such as business models based on paying less than a livable wage, vestiges of institutional intolerance and bias as well as gentrification that is insensitive or imbalanced.  Earn a reputation for win/win facilitator.

Encourage widespread adoption of best practices.  Demand that destination marketing organizations earn accreditation.  Cross populate best practices across all industries in the sector including special assessments such as Tourism Improvement Districts or prepared food taxes dedicated to self-funding promotion, wayfinding, cultural landscape and destination clean up and beautification.

It is complicated to form one voice over an entire sector of multiple industries but it can be done and one of the first steps should be to develop a reliable metric.

It all begins by acting like a sector not just an industry.  It is possible only when the sector is as concerned with the overall ecosystem (including the pubic sector) as it is with individual bottom lines.

If these 10 areas are not of interest, just stop whining about respect.

Before Adios, A Word About Engagement

Regular readers know that over the course of a year I manage to research and write one of these little essays every 1.4 days.

On average, it takes me four or five hours to research and write each one, which is about the amount of time Americans spend working and commuting each weekday.

It’s what I do in retirement; one of the things I enjoy for fun.

I take some extended breaks each year and one of them, give or take, will be over the next four weeks, as I do about this time each summer.

According to a Harris Poll, 90% of Americans take breaks this time of year, one-in-five over last week’s July 4th holiday.  Nearly a third of us (31%) take a plane and 75% of us use a car to travel.

One of ours will be in the Jeep and the other a cross-country flight.  Both will involve family in various parts of the country as will 46% of trips this summer.

Americans traveling this summer will, on average, travel 660 miles round trip.  Each of our trips will far exceed that.

Even though my career involved marketing destinations to potential visitors and then encouraging them to circulate as much as possible, it took the fun out of travel for me.

I’ve always been more of a homebody-lake-excursion person anyway, but in retirement I am now free to enjoy a trip without it feeling like work.

It is probably higher by now, but a 2012 survey found that 71% of travelers are attempting to make more environmentally-friendly choices when it comes to transportation, lodging and food sources.

While there are still some destinations and visitor features that hypocritically practice desecration marketing (such as using roadside billboards) while claiming be eco-friendly—a  few even featuring exhibitions about the environment—they are more noticeable now as exceptions.

I’ve had my eye on a UK company in particular that offers water management solutions and software to hotels and other customers called Waterscan.

The company has found that a hotel, for example, will typically use about 53 gallons of water per day for each occupied guest room.

That can be reduced 30% by harvesting rainwater which can be treated and fed back into the building for non-potable purposes such as irrigation, vehicle washing and flushing toilets.

The amount of water used can be further reduced another 40% by recycling gray water from showering and bathing.

This involves an ultra-filtration membrane system using three underground tanks.

One collects and treats the gray water and feeds it to a filtration tank while the third is a reservoir from which it is fed back into the hotel, again, for non-potable uses.

I suspect it could also be used to treat storm water.

This is especially efficient for hotels because there is an equilibrium of uses and a cost savings of 70% on water use.

For nearly a decade now, Gallup has studied what makes some customers engaged while others are indifferent or even actively disengaged such as being passive aggressive.

Fully engaged customers, researchers have found, are “emotionally attached and rationally loyal” as contrasted to those who are indifferent or neutral with a take it or leave it allegiance.

Activity disengaged customers are detached emotionally from a product or service and may become virulently antagonistic.

I believe those who actively seek out environmentally-friendly brands are likely to be fully engaged and it makes a big difference to the bottom line.

In visitor-related industries, for instance, Gallup found that fully engaged patrons of casual dining restaurants make 56% more visits per month than actively disengaged customers.

Even for fast food restaurants, it is 28% more visits per month.  In hotels, guests who are fully engaged spend 46% more per year than actively disengaged guests.

While many many brands hope to change consumer perceptions by “embarking on big traditional advertising and marketing campaigns,” even social media, according to Gallup has a great deal of influence on only 5% of purchasing decisions and no influence at all on 62%.

But it is the currency of actively disengaged consumers.   Fully engaged consumers are far more attracted by concerns that are aligned with their values.  Fully aligned brands also have double the “share of wallet.”

Communities, businesses and features such as museums, athletic teams and theaters should take note, especially those using desecration marketing such as billboards or those that flippantly cast aside sense of place seeking to be mainstream.

For hotels, as an example, only 28% of guests are fully engaged while 25% are actively disengaged.  The other 47% are indifferent.

Nearly half (45%) of economy hotels as well as 38% of those in midscale properties and 22% of those in upscale properties are actively disengaged.

Even in luxury properties where 38% of guest are fully engaged, 13% are actively disengaged.  Recently, the Ritz Carlton in Charlotte was called out for discrimination after it applied a special service charge during a tournament for a league of historically black colleges.

Some called it a “black tax.”  The hotel apologized and made a charitable contribution to the tournament when challenged.  But there, most likely the service charge was added because studies have shown that black people are notoriously poor tippers, even when holding constant for social economic factors.

While the hotel was probably trying to watch out for its service staff, many of whom were probably also minorities, it may have strayed from its values.

One way or the other, it will now have a lot of actively disengaged consumers over those dates next year.  There is only room for one person at a time to stand on principle.

It is clear that the road to differentiation and alignment begins with knowing who you are as a community, business or organization and then remaining true to that brand.  That doesn’t include paying huge subsidies to attract groups for whom that makes little or no difference.

Unfortunately, only 46% of managers and 37% of non-management employees strongly agree that they know what their organization, business or community stands for and what makes it different, or in other words, a staff that is aligned.

More on this when I get back but read Gallup’s State of the American Consumer.

When Organizations Are Not Given A Proper Burial

One of the uniquely American traits observed at the founding of our country was the propensity for creating associations.

We’ve just never been very good at shuttering them.

Instead of celebrating a mission well accomplished and retiring them, we tend to keep them hanging around on life support while desperately scrounging to find another “parade” hoping it can leap in front and lead the band.

But this never works.

Instead, as we foster new, more relevant organizations, we weigh them down with those that have outlived their relevance rather than giving them a proper burial.

I am not referring to a failure to evolve or repurpose.  I’m referring to organizations made obsolete either by the successful completion of their mission or eclipsed by paradigm shifts.

In a twist of irony, the failure to let go of outdated organizations is often due to the fact that those involved with these transitions fail to understand patterns or distinctions.

Take cable television for example.  Now caught on the obsolete side of a paradigm shift, it hastened its demise during the paradigm shift it created decades ago by then dragging along the baggage from outdated broadcast notions of advertising.

I first became aware of this phenomena in the early 1970s as I began what would be a four-decade career in community destination marketing and found a layer of tourism-related organizations across the country back then that seemed superfluous.

They had words such as “association” or “council in the name.  A few had “travel industry” even though it was already clear there is no such thing.

Travel is a sector of at least six distinct industries (plural) that have only one thing in common.  They share the traveling public or visitors as customers.

Some of these organizations were statewide and a handful were regional, as in “Pacific Northwest.”  While nearly all had only formed in the 1950s, they were all struggling for membership.

That meant pleading to community destination marketing organizations to keep them alive.

It caused me to examine and wonder how they all came to be obsolete in less than two decades, meaning they had lost appeal and relevance to their original constituency, a condition I found repeated in each of the three states in which I worked before retiring.

In fact, in retirement I still run across states that are trying to keep these organizations on life support nearly 50 years now after they should have been phased out.

Communities first formed Destination Marketing Organizations way back in 1896 along the routes of various railroads, inspired and adapted, in fact, from the destination marketing railroads had done for National Parks.

It was during the Progressive Era when cities and towns began to realize the importance of being culturally and scenically attractive.  This was also when the notion of leisure became more acceptable.

Yes, it may come as a surprise to many in tourism today but it owes its widespread emergence to liberals (OMG!)

These earliest destination marketing pioneers also understood from observing railroad marketing that the true future of travel was point to point, not serially from one community to the next.

From 1897-1915, most tourism was in the form of attending conventions and expositions, that is until an avid Pierce Arrow enthusiast, President Woodrow Wilson, changed things in 1916 by incentivizing the states to begin building or cobbling together roadways.

That’s when the paradigm shift to community destination marketing organizations took off as automobiles made tourism mainstream in the late 1920s and early 1930s, opening the way for many more towns and cities to benefit.

There was just one problem, though, well actually two.

As public roads were built or cobbled together into highways back then they were immediately blighted by billboards, often with one coming into view every 4 to 5 seconds even at the relatively slow 35-45 mile per hour speed limits back then.

Many governors such as O. Max Gardner in North Carolina commissioned surveys of roadsides, such as the 1930 report for his state at this link.

These scenic, or lack thereof, surveys led to billboard restrictions inspired by those that had been pioneered in Massachusetts under conservative Republican Governor Calvin Coolidge.

Coolidge’s restrictions had withstood numerous challenges in the courts during the 1920s resulting in a declaration that aesthetics alone are in the public interest and prohibiting billboards on highways in “The Bay State” of “unusual scenic beauty.”

All of this concern about scenic preservations along roadways brought tourism front and center because citizens and businesses speaking out against billboards across the country were often led by those owning tourism-related businesses such as in the 1930s editorial at this link.

But communities in North Carolina and many other states still lacked the capacity or interest to form tourism promotion organizations so states began to fill the void.

To provide an umbrella until their respective communities were ready to go after tourism, states such as North Carolina after 1935 added visitor attractions to their highway maps and formed what were called advertising divisions.

These state efforts would serve as a sort of filter until specific areas for visitation were identified.  They still basically serve that function today.

But this early tourism marketing was premature and doomed to backfire, unless states could become visitor-ready by first restoring the scenic character of roadsides and conducting in-depth inventories of things for visitors to see and do.

Fortunately, between 1937 and 1941, the federal government stepped in again, just as as World War II was set to unfold.

To be continued tomorrow.

The Resiliency of Today’s Student Traveler

Bacchanalia grabs all of the headlines about spring break for colleges giving a distorted view of student travel, especially as it has evolved over the past decade.

According to analysis of various studies published recently in a white paper by Skift and StudentUniverse, student travel now represents “fully one-fifth of all International arrivals” in the travel sector and they go “far beyond the backpack-and-party crowd.”

In fact, history and culture rank as more important than parties for both males and females.  Of relief to parents of young daughters, several other experiences including local food rank higher than parties and nightlife.

Significantly, by more than three to one, females would have still traveled even without those social gatherings.

I found it interesting that 60% of this travel is female, and families pick up just over a third of the cost.  The students come from more than 4,100 public and private colleges.

Nothing replaces experience in the workforce during college but it is interesting that 97% of these student travelers felt the trip improved their self-confidence, and 99% believed the travel provided insights to personal strengths and weaknesses.

Nearly 9-in-10 of the student travelers surveyed felt the trip helped them get a job.

I had just turned 19 when I took my first cross country plane trip from my native Rockies in 1967.  I wasn’t ready yet, physically or emotionally, to make the most of my trip to Western Europe.

My daughter studied there for several months in high school and returned during her college years.

Students today are even more prepared for these experiences than either me or even my daughter were.

Of course, mobile devices are a game-changer.  My daughter, who is now the single mother of two grandsons and a chief privacy and ethics officer, often marvels with me at what it would have been like to have that access while she was growing up.

By 2020, the market value of this type of travel will reach $320 billion with U.S. destinations being equal beneficiaries of those inbound to this country.

Important to note is that student travelers are more than three times as likely to use various Internet devices for in-destination information as they are local hosts.

Today’s student travelers are also more resilient when it comes to “terrorism, political and social unrest, disease and natural disasters” requiring helicopter parents to lighten up.

Gallup’s Link Between Travel and Well-Being

I spent a four decade career helping people make decisions about where to travel, trusting if the fit was right for the three communities I promoted, that they would become a source of economic and cultural development.

The U.S. Travel Association, a trade group for the five or six different industries that benefit most from visitors has a website called Travel Effect that for my sensibilities comes across a little too guilt oriented.

But now Gallup has also established a link between well-being and taking vacations.  It finds that those who earn less than $24,000 a year and still take regular trips actually have a higher well-being score than those who earn $120,000 or more but don’t regularly make time for vacations.

About half of Americans regularly make time for vacations, a higher percentage of Asians and whites and a lower percentage of blacks and Hispanics.

Regular vacation travel is higher among those over age 65 (smile,) and descends by age group to 47% of those aged 18-29.

Most travel these days is for an extended weekend but Americans who can’t afford to travel abroad or on cruises get the same or an even greater uptick from short excursions or drives to see relatives.

Hopefully, questions can be asked in the future that distinguish the effects related to different types of travel.  I suspect it is much higher for visiting friends and relatives or leisure than it is for business travel, conventions or medical treatment.

Gallup is clear though that the causal path underlying the relationship between travel and well-being isn’t clear.  It is possible that Americans who travel had a higher well-being to begin with or were more inclined than those with lower well-being.

Good stuff.

The Decline of Business Travel & A Model To Replace It

I never enjoyed traveling during my career in community marketing, ironically a purpose of which is to attract and serve travelers.  This distaste earned me credibility with more than one mayor in the cities I served because they knew I wasn’t in it for the travel.

Of course, I’m talking about the ever shrinking proportion of travel that is business travel including attending conventions and meetings, now down to 1-in-5 visitor-stays in the U.S overall, less than 1-in-3 to Durham, North Carolina my last post before retiring.

A new study detailing the stressors of business travel trumps one a few years ago estimating that without business trips for face-to-face meetings, 28% of revenue would be lost to competitors, but at what cost?

This new study sheds light on why business travel has been in decline across all sectors for several decades.  It’s the human cost.  Later I will discuss an alternative view of logistics.

Unfortunately, too many people go into community destination marketing for the excitement of travel only to learn it revolves around skills such as critical thinking, creativity and innovation, community reputation management, shaping and preserving sense of place and highly selective use of low-intensity marketing.

Not liking travel during my career, especially business travel, made me ultra sensitive to the stressors it imposes on people and more empathetic to ways that destinations can help relieve them.

The study measure 33 different stressors, broken down by gender and placed in 3 categories, lost time (e.g. cramped flights, difficulty connecting to the internet etc.), surprises (e.g. lost baggage, delays etc.), routine breakers (weekend travel, changes quality of life etc.)

The study is of international travelers and focused mostly not on what happens at the destination, which has its owns set of stressors, but travel to and from and at the hotel.  These are things mostly unrelated to the destination that is motivating the travel.

Nor are they the only reasons business travel has been in long term decline but they have ramification for leisure travel as well.

The top four stressors are lost or delayed baggage, poor or no internet connection, flying economy and delays.

Each of the stressors take more of a toll on female travelers, now a huge portion of business travelers.  It isn’t because they are higher maintenance, as evidenced by the fact that they are less stressed by flying economy.

Maybe explaining my aversion during my career, business travel takes a higher toll on senior executives, particularly those involving loss of time.  Frequent travel doesn’t offer immunity to stressors.

The study, conducted by researchers in France, also ventures some ways to relieve these stressors.  But I am more convinced that as rapidly as technological alternatives are evolving, in short time the only ones traveling for business will be hyper-extroverts in search of an energy fix.

Much of what has been shriveling business travel is its inefficiency, nearly all of that self-inflicted by business models.

One area of business travel primed for major disruption is those driving freight trucks.  This includes more than 2.7 million drivers in the U.S. alone in 2012 and disruption would not just be from autonomous vehicles.

Many of the research papers generated at CIRRELT, a unique combination dedicated to the integration of transportation research and network design, are supported by several universities in Montreal, Canada.

Dr. Benoit Montreuil has proposed a much more efficient approach to trucking that would better utilize the 535,000 warehouses and distribution centers in the U.S. as though they were part of a physical internet.

A algorithm-driven hub and spoke system would get long haul shipments to their destination in a quarter of the current time at lower cost while reducing harmful emissions, increasing load factors from the current 60%, optimizing warehouse use and employing more drivers who would each drive only six hours or less round-trip.  That means they could be home each night.

This approach would minimize the stressors that come with driving a truck to family life, social life and personal health.  Fatigue is found a factor in 58% of accidents.

Soon, I suspect all logistics will mimic the internet, the development of which was funded by the U.S. government to insulate communication logistics from disruption during times of attack.

Corporations are now fighting transformation of the energy grid and elsewhere because along with more secure, lower cost deliveries comes lower margins and less control for private profit.

All of this is meant to suggest that those still reliant on business travel are better advised to stop digging in their heels in hopes of slowing the inevitable and begin exploring new ways of replacing it.

No Sympathy for Taxis

Across the globe, the taxi or vehicle for hire business was in steep decline by 1989 when Durham, North Carolina where I still live asked me to launch my fifth and last destination marketing start up.

As I was beginning my fourth destination marketing start-up a decade earlier, the dispatch-owner centric model that had reigned for decades (showcased in the sitcom Taxi) was already showing signs of implosion.

I had worked a taxi for a few months during college when this system was in its hey day.  Regulators had little to do then but help set fares.

But by the end of the 1980s, the taxi industry was descending into chaos.  The cars began to age and in most cities when you could find one, cabs were often pretty  grimy and smelly.

Soon cell phone technology meant you had to call each driver individually, which was a nightmare, and the few that would take credit cards griped about it incessantly.

Gradually, what had been a service culture gave way to an entitlement chip-on-their-shoulder culture.

Some cities like Durham implemented studies that resulted in updated ordinances, but in many cases they were undermined or micromanaged by elected officials.  Inspectors grew lazy and inconsistent.

I don’t feel the least bit sorry now that taxis are feeling heat from alternatives such as Lyft,Uber and Uberx.

As I’ll explain below, this is only the beginning of a revolution.

With these technologies, drivers and vehicles are pre-qualified and insured, and drivers who are closest to a requested pick-up bid on the fares.  Through an app on their smart phones, passengers request a driver, instantly see the reviews of prior riders, and with a click on their smartphone, pay via their debit or credit card including whatever tip they choose.

Some taxis complain because these low overhead, low capital cost alternatives lack traditional inspections but other ways of ensuring this outperform the vast majority of traditional inspectors many of whom have grow unenergetic.

Taxis owners brought this on themselves.  Instead of complaining, they need to either band together to adopt similar customer-friendly technologies or seek a tie-in with Lyft and Uber.

Local officials share the blame for being enablers of a dying and dysfunctional model rather than pushing drivers to adopt new practices and technologies faster.

This often happens when local governments forget who their real stakeholders are, such as resident and visitor passengers and the businesses whose patrons the taxies are meant to serve, especially restaurants, grocery stores and hotels.

Instead of pushing for continuing and never-ending improvement of service outcomes, comprehensive and speedy early adoption of new technologies such as credit cards and very strict codes of dress and vehicle maintenance, as well as requiring strict age limits of vehicles (many end run ordinances to use cars that are 15 years old,) officials have kept a dying business culture on life support.

There has always been a bit of whining in the cab culture but none should be tolerated regarding these new alternatives.  Any tweaks to incorporate them should be rapidly incorporated by local governments.

Rather than seeing this as a threat, taxi owners and drivers should use this as a wake up call.

It makes sense for passenger for hire vehicles to be regulated but local governments also need to see these new alternatives as a wake up call and shake the cobwebs from enablers.

This includes airports, especially those in polycentric service areas who did away with cabs sorted by destination community because it was inconvenient for them and a way to make money.

There is no longer any excuse for arriving visitors to learn that their ride to their final destination is also the first for the driver.  Airports serve as catchment areas of dozens of different communities and it is time to put the “local” back in cab services.

These new technologies make that easy.

For those of us irritated at disruption, this movement toward a sharing economy is not a one-off.  It is symbolic of disruptions now revolutionizing the entire economy.  In a two or three decades the commercial world as we know it will still exist but only as a remnant.

The revolution in taxis or vehicles for hire is just the beginning.  In five to ten years, we will order driverless cars to pick us up wherever we are and take us to our destinations.

While we go about our errands or work appointments or enjoy a visit somewhere, the driverless vehicle will then return to home port for recharging or go on to another assignment.

When we need another, we’ll summon it via smartphone.

In the not too distant future, we may not buy cars except as a hobby.  Instead of ownership we will rely on having access at a fraction of the cost including fuel and the miles of roadway used.

It isn’t too late but the new day for taxis is just beginning to dawn foretelling bright, sunshiny days ahead.

#2 – Really?

I may not be fair that travel and tourism is compared with true industries in the Harris Poll’s annual reputational ratings.

Tourism is actually considered a sector or cluster of six or seven industries that have customers in common.  Since several of these are listed separately, there must be more to the story.

But it is truly impressive that it ranks #2 right behind technology with only a few businesses ranked in the top 20 or 30, if you don’t count secondary suppliers.

More than that, it is amazing the general public isn’t nailing travel and tourism overall for the logistical hassle it is to travel, billboard blight along highways, communities that have sold their sole to be “Anywhere USA” and the crushing experience of mega-hotels and mega-cruise ships not to mention public health concerns.

The poll ranks on the basis of perceptions related to social responsibility, emotional appeal, visionary leadership, financial performance, workplace environment and products and service.

For anyone new to the “Triple Bottom Line,” it is clearly incorporated.

Significant for travel and tourism is that  positive ratings hovered just above 50% a couple of years ago.

More to the point that Harris must use a bifurcated notion of travel and tourism when it clusters the results by so-called “industry,” is that this year the positive ratings rest at 59% for retail (the activity with most tourist participation) and 34% for airlines.

Clearly travel and tourism taken as a whole would likely fall several places lower on the list.

Making every industry or sector feel good is that they aren’t government, which receives on 13% positive.  But of course that is more a reflection of the constant flood of pejoratives perpetuated by the Republican Party in general and special interest lobbies for these industries.

Lost now on the public is that without roads, bridges, airports, forests, parks, wildlife refuges, urban forest preservation, ordinances that reduce blight, litter cleanup including rivers and streams, water, curbs on air pollution, solid waste removal, consumer protection, community and destination marketing and dozens of other things facilitated by government…

Well, there would not only be little or no travel and tourism but very little reputation left for any of these industries to coattail.

In fact, blinded by hubris and egged on by partisan extremists, this is lost on much of corporate America as well, many who argue that government provides these benefits only through transfers called taxes.

My response is “and your point is?”  Clearly for all of its merits, the market is not capable or incentivized enough to provide these benefits on its own and “TBLers” understand that.

The poll also shows that this is also not lost on an increasingly discerning public.

A Best Practice Quasi-City

On October 27, 1969, my parents met my plane as it landed at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport.  Except for one or two weeks, I had been away from home for more than two years.

The world had changed.  I had changed too, and it was good to set foot again in the Pacific Northwest.

That day I was one of fewer than 14,000 people to pass through that airport compared to the nearly 100,000 who pass through it each day now.  By contrast, 24,000 people pass each day through RDU, the airport co-owned by Durham, North Carolina where I have lived the last 25 years.

In arrival greetings and other communication and marketing materials, airlines often confuse cities and the airports that serve them.  Airports are merely portals, and as it was for me that day in 1969, the final destination for most arrivals lies well beyond their primary cities.

But hosting 100,000 people a day and providing them with water, food, shopping, entertainment and security, not to mention solid waste and other sanitary disposal, makes a facility like SEA-TAC much like a city.

Most airports don’t make it convenient to recycle but SEA-TAC has been a leader in recycling over more than two decades, not just on the passenger side but also behind the scenes for its restaurants and what is called off-aircraft - the trash, food waste and other recyclables cleaned out of aircraft before they continue on.

Seattle, one of the cities the airport serves, is well known for coffee and not just as the home of Starbucks.  SEA-TAC collects more than 12 tons of coffee grounds each month from more than 60 airport shops using special bins.

The grounds are mixed with yard waste and sent to a composter, the results of which are then used on the airport’s landscape.  Cooking oil is collected and sold to convert to biodiesel.  More than 20,000 unopened meals are donated annually, and the scraps captured from passengers, shops and aircraft are recycled.

Airlines and concessionaries are charged for trash but recycling is free.  SEATAC is not only meeting the expectations of residents along the Puget Sound but they are saving nearly $200,000 annually in fees.

Since 1993 when the airport collected 112 tons, the amount of recycles collected annually has grown to 1,706 tons while solid waste sent to landfills is now only only 1,444 pounds more than it was in 2001.

The recycling rate at the nation’s best practice airport has increased from 9% to 30% in the past decade with a goal of 50% by the end of this year.  This will exceed the 34.5% of municipal solid waste now being recycled nationwide.

Most Americans have now learned to recycle at home.  The challenge is getting them to do so when they are at school, work, shopping, eating out and/or traveling.

Communities such as Durham, where residents have an extraordinary level of pride in their community, are lulled into complacency by resident values.  But 2-out-3 people working here don’t live here and another 9 million annually are visitors.

Studies such as those I have linked in this blog suggest that just as residents are less diligent about recycling away from home, non-residents may be even less so.  Strategies in communities must take the entire street population into account, not just residents.

More than 1-in-4 Americans make no effort to recycle including 1-in-3 Southerners.  Apart from home, 60% of Americans recycle often at work.  But the percentage who rarely or never recycle increases to 35% along town or city streets, 38% when out shopping and over 50% when dining out.

Over 60% of Americans try at least sometimes to recycle when they are traveling, 18% rarely do and nearly 1-in-5 Americans never do.  SEA-TAC has learned that the challenge is not just providing receptacles or making them ubiquitous (as shown in the image above) but also making them obvious.

The ones I see along city streets where I live seem far too subtle.  Even the ones being positioned in the new Diamond View III building that walls off the last remnant of the Durham Bulls Athletic Park from the Durham skyline may still be way too subtle.

SEA-TAC International Airport has found the right balance of integration, aesthetics, placement and communication with its receptacles but its success comes from a strategic commitment to sustainability overall including related infrastructure.

In fact, cities interested in studying this airport as though it were a community could find no better example to visit.

A Glimpse At Service Design

As I drove up to a resort in the mountains of North Carolina last weekend as the guest of a mutual friend, I pondered how difficult it must be to run a professional association such as the one for community organizations focused on visitor-centric economic development.

Of the 10 trends in that field that were recently highlighted for 2014 by one of its truly best and brightest, all but seven should have been engaged by members two decades ago and another over a decade ago.

The speed at which organizations such as this can propel members forward is lugged down by the inertia of old schoolers or worse, those so so eager to appear smart they don’t have time to get smart, which is now research-proven to be an either/or proposition.

Running associations is a tough job, perpetually hampered by the lowest or slowest common denominator.

To me, only one of trends noted, “service design,” qualifies as new, and even at that it is a nearly three-year-old concept or re-concepting of a concept that emerged from EU-funded research at the Management Center of Innsbruck, a very entrepreneurial institution of higher education.

As it somehow so often does, last year the tourism agency in Durham, where I live in retirement happened to not only be one of the first dozen destination marketing organizations in the U.S. to be exposed to “service design” but as is its culture, among the very first to start integrating it into action.

At the basis of this new way of thinking about service is mobile ethnography.

Instead of filling out comment cards or surveys, now in a way that is much much more useful and consistent than social media chatter or facility ratings, visitors with soon be empowered with an app that is now in the demo stage called “myServiceFellow.”

It empowers a traveler to rate service at every touchpoint of the entire travel experience and then upload it at the end of the trip where it can be accessed, aggregated and analyzed by individual businesses or organizations also concerned with the equally important service spaces between commercial interactions.

This goes far deeper and far broader than ratings apps and it will peel back a layer undetected by the businesses involved, but more importantly, it will be far more useful to those concerned with the entire travel experience spectrum such as community destination marketing organizations.

If I had remembered to download the app prior to my trip, or looked closely enough to see how easy it was to use the demo,  I could have noted:

• When we stopped for breakfast in Greensboro, the desecration of a sea of billboards on that stretch of I 85/40 and that my significant other’s hash browns weren’t crispy as requested.

 

• How sad it was to see on arrival that instead of celebrating foremost the iconic 100-year-old Grove Park brand as an Omni Resort, the chain sublimated the Inn’s identity below the chain name, a source of disgust overheard several times from other guests.

   

• How a misspelling made it problematic to retrieve my Jeep from valet parking.

 

• How cool it was that wait staff fastidiously and subtly substituted a black napkin for a white one to avoid napkin fuzzies on dark pants.

 

• How a plugged up drain marred the wonderful walk-in shower experience in the spa wing.

 

• How neglecting to wipe the windows of finger prints interrupted afternoon views of Asheville in the valley below.

 

• How the only one of many stores at the resort to carry batteries had apparently been out of AAAs for a couple of weeks.

 

• How irritating it was at a stop for gas and coffee that a convenience store stocked flavored half and half but offered only powdered creamer to customers wanting regular half and half.

 

• How arrogant Fairway Outdoor Advertising is to flaunt digital billboards, contrarian to Asheville’s unique sense of place.

 

• How phenomenally beautiful and billboard free major parts of I40 are through North Carolina, and how hideous parts that aren’t have become.

“Service design” is predicated upon a deeper, more empathy-based type of research.  It is determined to understand consumer motivation not just behavior and to understand actual specifics and patterns, not just general recall.

Unfortunately though, I suspect it will still show up on lists of “new” trends for decades to come.

Now So Much More Than Amusement

Maybe it isn’t travel per se, as initially publicized from a recent study, but where and why they travel that makes people more healthy.  Looking deeper into this scientifically-generalizable probe of Americans 25 or older sheds light on the importance of scenic preservation.

Of course, any positive health outcome or “joie de vivre” is specifically related to leisure travel.

Even business travelers who commingle pleasure time on trips are twice as likely to say they didn’t enjoy the trip, including a negative ratio of 4-to-1 who feel strongly that way.

Business travelers, including the 1-in-10 travelers attending meetings and conventions, are a minority among overall travelers (less than 25%) but this negative ratio must still be very alarming to everyone involved along the visitor experience continuum.

This certainly includes not only the modes and nodes of transportation, especially highways, but also the destination communities and states trying to reap the  economic, cultural and now public health value-added from tourism.

The business traveler turn-off becomes a huge drag on leisure travel potential contributing to the study’s finding that nearly 30% of Americans do not view travel as part of their enjoyment of life during any age.

But for anyone willing to look deeper, the significance of this study transcends mere demographics or customer satisfaction metrics.

Cities and states eager to draw visitors for economic and cultural reasons are well advised to note from the study that Americans who take the most trips during a year (averaging nearly six) are drawn to nature.

This aspect proves even more compelling when you add together other nature-related trips listed separately such such as those to be near water (3+,) to explore countryside including smaller towns (nearly 2.5) or visiting national parks and other outdoor sites (nearly 2.)

This by comparison, even when including day trips, is 2.4 times the number of annual trips taken to explore places such as cities or to shop or attend an event which is also about the average number of trips taken to stay with family and friends. 

But even on these trips, nature as a backdrop provides a key health benefit, leading more than 7-in-10 Americans to agree that regardless of what stage they are in, leisure travel is important to their ability to enjoy life.

Of course, this has dire implications for communities and states that fail to grasp and then safeguard the importance of green infrastructure such as urban forests, open spaces and nature places as part of their place based assets including trees and view-sheds along roadways.

These revelations about the central role of nature as an underlying element of leisure travel underscores that more than just mere amusement, is the “awe” it provides.

As another study published by scientists at Claremont McKenna and USC confirmed a few weeks ago, nature is an incredible source of “awe,” even when just glimpsed from the couch on a television channel.

According to a study published earlier this year at Stanford, we should place much greater value on “awe” such as that created by nature and by inference, all green infrastructure, because it enhances well-being, increases altruism such as volunteerism, compassion and other civic virtues.

“Awe” also slows down our perception of time.  Contrary to the old saw, time does not actually speed up with age.  Studies show that from youth and into our 50s, time feels like pressure.

Then, at age 50, as our horizon gradually shifts from days and weeks to decades, time pressure apparently peaks.

Researchers, according to an excellent overview in Scientific American, also attribute “awe” with a sense of increased “time-availability.”

Some studies seem to confirm that nature refuels our sense of “awe” because it gives us another way to view time including the changing of seasons as a metaphor, in my opinion, for the continuum of pre-life, life and after-life.

Travel is just one means to living a life “awe”-filled.  But the sector of industries known as tourism (whose adherents still insist on minimizing by utilizing the long-passé singular term “industry,”) is wise to dig down beyond mere commerce as does the sector’s association website “Travel Effect.”

This new study linking health to travel points out that Americans now enjoy almost equally weekend get-aways (78%) and traditional weeklong vacations (80%.)  But what should be even more enlightening to those promoting travel is the near-equal popularity now of day-trips (76%.)

Long after research methodology made it possible to exclude those commuting for school or work from the measurement of day trip visitation, this is an area still relatively unrecognized by the travel establishment, save for a few forward-thinking destinations such as Durham, NC, where I live, which began to closely monitor day-trips in the 1990s.

Those in my former profession of community destination marketing as a means to achieve visitor centric economic and cultural vitality are well advised to delve into this study with an eye not only to better protecting their brands but to even greater relevance.

It is clear from this study how important green infrastructure is to the vast majority of Americans who travel.  States, cities, towns and counties who ignore scenic preservation by enabling visual pollutants such as signs, roadside billboards and other litter need to connect the dots.

Billboarders demand the “right to be viewed” and lobby elected officials to surrender publicly owned trees, vegetation and view-sheds along roadways for their commercial use. But studies such as this beg the question, “But at what price?”

Scientifically, it is increasingly clear, thanks to new studies, that the “right to a view” in pursuit of “awe” is far more priceless to economic well-being, cultural vitality and now public health outcomes.

Highways, including scenic preservation along roadsides, are obviously the single most important area that states, cities, towns and counties must address in order to be appealing.

Failure to care for this aspect suppresses any other improvement such as livability or tax rate or efforts at revitalization.

This is not only because, as long shown by other studies, these corridors are the primarily mode of travel for 8-in-10 visitors nationwide.  It is also because disguised as leisure visitors are 80% of newcomers and 75% of relocating executives.

Along with an even greater proportion of those scouting to relocate or expand a business, these groups try out locations as stealth leisure visitors before making official contact.

“Old-schoolers” still view visitors only as a source of economic development but their equal value as a source of cultural preservation has been recognized for several decades now.

Today, studies such as this foretell that it will not be long before practitioners of visitor-centric demand-side economic and cultural development also add “public health” as a key objective.

As the study shows, regardless of how intense you travel, these journeys have been shown to improve your ability to get things done, contribute to physical health and well-being and advance your overall mood and outlook compared to non-travelers.

This certainly includes, but is not exclusive, to those of us in the stage of life mischaracterized as “retirement” where perception of time comes into very positive focus.

5 + 1 Insights For Young Community Marketers

While I am not a consultant and it has been four years since I’ve had any involvement in community destination marketing, I still receive questions from time to time from young people who think they might be interested in a career in visitor-centric cultural and economic development.

Below are a handful of the things I pass along:

Build work experience during college.

It doesn’t matter if it is with a destination marketing organization or even visitor-related.  Find something fast-paced and learn everything you can about data-driven decision making, critical thinking, technology and project management/process.

A recent study of employers shows that they rank internships and working during college as top attributes when evaluating recent college graduates, more than 40% higher than they rank college major or volunteer experience.

They also rank working during college more than 50% higher than they rank extracurricular activities and more than 60% higher than they rank college reputation or grade point average.

Get used to not being in control.

Different than marketing other kinds of services and products, when you are marketing a community, not only do you  have no control of any of the facilities, features or events, you don’t have control of the “manufacturing” process either.

In community destination marketing you spend as much time persuading local officials and visitor-related facilities, features and events to understand marketing as you do marketing to visitors.

The community’s brand (distinct personality) you will be sworn to protect and promote is influenced as much by the process of getting through the maze of highways, airports and means of transit needed to get to you as it is things like how easy it is to get around and the community’s overall appearance.

These are things no amount of quaintness or marketing alone can overcome.

Keep in mind that marketing is not as simple as fishing.

It is about helping people make the decision best for them, not just about proselytizing.  For every marketing action, there is also a downside.  Advertising is like “yelling at people” which if not very carefully used, is enough to turn people off.

For example, use a medium such as outdoor billboards and you turn off 7 people for every 1 who finds them useful.  Even Super Bowl ads, where the ads are touted mostly as entertainment, turn off 5 viewers for every 1 who finds them appealing.

Marketing is finding the sweet spot where the tactics you use have credibility and a high turn on to turn off ratio, such as earned media, sometimes still known as publicity.

Even there, the downside potential must be weighed whenever there is a temptation toward hyperbole to which the reality cannot measure up.

Good marketing is more than “me, me, me.”

A good product without good marketing is like “winking in the dark.”  You know you’re doing it but no one else will.  But marketing is also about understanding limitations.

Even the goal of “economic value-added,” which is at the core of community destination marketing, is subject to trade-offs.  A recent study of 2014 travel trends revealed that 88% of Americans will sacrifice other spending in order to take a trip including:

• 54% will cut nights out and related entertainment
• 48% will cut down on eating out
• 42% will cut down on clothes shopping
• 29% will cut down on buying gifts
• 23% will cut down on home improvements
• 18% will reduce charitable giving

Community destination marketing is a “pull” approach but marketers must recognize the “push” effect of tourism on residents making these reductions to travel elsewhere.

Even within a destination, areas such as arts and culture or sports can easily cannibalize another.  For instance, for more than a decade the proportion of the population attending popular concerts has hovered around 22%, including 5% of travelers.

Of this, 52.6% are attending rock concerts, 31.9% are attending country music concerts and 15.4% are attending R&B or Rap or Hip-Hop concerts.  All of the marketing horsepower in the world can move the needle a percentage point or two, but it will be at the expense of leisure dollars going to festivals and other cultural features.

The development of more facilities and programming has not been shown to change the mix of discretionary spending, only tradeoffs within a category.  The same holds true of spectator sports.

A destination is made up of many different silos, each desperately seeking a bigger share of the pie, but a community marketer must be sensitive to balance and what’s best for overall appeal.

Sometimes, the decision not to visit has nothing to do with competition from other communities.

At its essence, community destination marketing is about lowering barriers to a visit to your community by telling its story and then proving a platform for hotels, restaurants, stores and entertainment events to harvest their share using their own marketing.

But sometimes the barriers are more about what’s going on in people’s lives than it is about which destination to choose.  A recent vacation deprivation study revealed that 10% of Americans find they can never relax on vacation (I was always amazed at the number of people who called in sick after a vacation because they were exhausted.)

More than a third cancel or postpone trips due to something that came up at work, 24% find it a hassle to coordinate family schedules, but 44% either prefer to take cash instead or bank the days (most places no longer permit accrual because it shows as a liability on the books) ostensibly to cash them out later on, e.g. retirement.

If these young folks are still interested, then I get into what may be the biggest litmus test of all, ethical behavior.  By this I don’t mean just transparency, which is shown to have little effect on ethical behavior.  I mean the ability to do what is right in the face of powerful special interests or pressure from the news media.

The ability to treat others (including competitors and potential customers) as you would like them to treat you.

A Puzzling Resistance To Change

Dating to the late 1800s, communities began to use so-called non-traditional school years which varied from a tradition established to serve the lifestyles and seasons of the 43% Americans still involved back then in agriculture.

The so-called traditional school calendar is predominantly still in use today even though now only 2% of Americans live on the nation’s 2.2 million farms or ranches with 1% claiming it as an occupation.

Most are still family operations including 96% of crop farms, 700,000 cattle growers like as my parents were during my early years, and more than 80% of poultry growers.  Many of these operations are now part-time occupations and nearly all are much less reliant on the labor of children during summer.

Today, when polls show that the majority of Americans and businesses favor year-round schools, a tiny but extremely vocal minority in tourism stand out as the most outspoken in defense of the traditional school calendar.

This, even though the volume of domestic person-trips taken during June, July and August has fallen to only 17% of overall tourism and 22% of leisure tourism. It’s lower than the monthly average in the dominant spring and fall months.

I could never really understand why so many in tourism began to get so worked up about the length of the school year during the last decade of my career in community marketing. I’ve studied the realities involved more than most, including reading studies commissioned in support.

The arguments are clear enough.  But the downside risks to tourism in terms of lost political and social capital seem to far outweigh any benefits.  I lost that argument here in North Carolina where changes to the school year have been restricted by lawmakers.

Of far greater risk to tourism are threats to sense-of-place such as roadside billboard blight which some defend with similar rabidity even though few tourism businesses and and even fewer destinations still use them in what is now called “desecration marketing.” 

Of greater danger to tourism are small cabals that seem to exist in every community, usually limited to three or fewer individuals.  They typically seek to hijack funds meant for overall promotion to instead offset their own facility or event expenses even though these represent a tiny sliver of why people travel or what they do on trips.

Other than the tiny fraction of tourism businesses involved in purely seasonal tourism, most businesses now support longer and/or non-traditional school calendars because they make employing youth more practical.

Businesses also find longer school calendars are more convenient for the 40.4% households with school age children where women are the primary providers, including 63% headed by single moms for whom juggling day-care and camps during the long summer break a logistical challenge.

Many in tourism seem aloof to these issues or maybe are unaware that even year-round schools are not really year-around.  Families with student-age children still get 40% of the traditional summer free for vacations and travel.

While only 10% of students are in year-round schools, the number of these schools ranges from five in Durham, where I live all way up to 50 in Wake County, North Carolina’s largest system and the 16th largest in the U.S.  In Wake and other places, they have been used to relieve overcrowding.

Nearly 3,200 schools across America are now year-round. This is an increase of 544% since 1987 when measurement first began, following increased adoption by many cities 1970s.  They are typically in session the same number of days with shorter, more frequent breaks than just summer and usually the same number of holidays.

Overall though, according to the National Center on Time & Learning, there are another 1,000 districts in 36 states experimenting with expanding the traditional school day and year as a means of improving outcomes.

Nationwide, polls show that 3-in-4 Americans believe more learning time will better prepare students.  By nearly 3-to-1, Americans “strongly agree” this would be a benefit particularly in high-poverty schools.   The case for expanding the school year is pretty compelling.

There are good points on all sides but is this really where tourism wants to make a stand, rather than make adjustments?  To me, tourism has always been better off adjusting to societal norms rather than trying to obstruct them.

In my experience, far too many in tourism are predisposed to defensively “circle the wagons” over external issues anyway, when the far greater threats lie inside under its own tent or at least closer to home.

Take for example the summer staple of “going to the beach.”  While 39% of the U.S. population lives along coastal shorelines, only 26% of Americans visit a beach in a given year with only 2.4% doing so once a month.  This means they aren’t even drawing from close in.

The length of the school year is certainly not to blame for this under-tapped potential for beach excursions.  But the answer can be found in the fact that a similar percentage of Americans bake food in a given year or frequent a theater to see a concert as go to the beach.

For some time now leisure pursuits, with no thought to over-supply, have been cannibalizing one another, which is a far greater threat than school start dates.

The obstacle that restricts leisure activity participation either at home or on holiday is not some public policy or a failure to make converts but simply competition for time from other leisure activities.  Participation also declines in proportion to what behavioral researchers and economists call increased “access to opportunity.”

This is all to say that the more access people have to an activity, the less urgency they feel to partake.  Beaches and theaters face competition not just from other beaches and theaters but from activities like baking and reading a book.

The time and effort that some in tourism place on telling school districts what they can and cannot do, would in my opinion, be far better spent on innovation, more research and better customer service.

The time would also be better spent on ferreting out those “wolves” within who seek to cannibalize promotional resources and sense-of-place to merely benefit their own narrow interests.

Friendly Skies vs. Breaking Guitars

The recent throw-back marketing decision by an airline brought back a flood of memories stretching back over nearly six decades to when I was about the age my grandsons are now.

When I took my first commercial airplane flight at age 19, it was cross country in 1967 aboard a United Airlines Boeing 707.

The lyrics of the song Early Mornin Rain were clearly on my mind.  The song had been written and released a year before by Gordon Lightfoot on his first album but taken to #1 first by Peter, Paul & Mary:

"an aching in my heart…Lord, I missed my loved ones so…out on runway #9 big 707 set to go.”

United was in the first year or so of its iconic “Fly The Friendly Skies” ad campaign, launched just six years after it had first began jet service.  It was a campaign designed by Leo Burnett to replace the airline’s “Mainliner” series.

Burnett’s firm had already created many campaigns that have survived since the 1950s including Green Giant, Pillsbury Dough Boy, Charlie the Tuna and the Marlboro Man.

Now United wants to bring "Friendly Skies” back. Fortunately, the company didn’t try to mash it up with an old Continental Airlines ad like they did with logos after the merger, which by many measures, including destinations served, makes it now the largest airline in the world.

But it isn’t its advertising that’s the problem today, it is advertising in general.  Now inundated with what experts estimate will soon be more than 10,000 ads per day, it just isn’t as effective as it once was and the average person has just tuned out.

“Friendly Skies” revolutionized airline marketing nearly five decades ago but back then there were only three channels. Cable was just an experiment and advertising worked if a business could just power enough resources into it as United did back then.

Key, of course, is there were also only three other competitors to United.

United’s problem today is that it lost sight of its story along the way and not just the one they conveyed in advertising. 

Back when it first began running those “Friendly Skies” ads, Dr. Stanley Plog was not only conducting research that rescued the tanking political career of Ronald Reagan in 1966, he was rescuing air travel.

In 1967, as I took my first commercial flight, airlines were introducing jets and seating capacity was swelling by 20% while the percentage of passengers flying was growing by only 8%.

To help, Plog developed a groundbreaking classification of visitors that with just 15 questions could be used to identify those who would be most likely to fly.  It was far more revolutionary to marketing than the “Fly The Friendly Skies” ads.  In fact, it was used to calibrate and target those ads.

He ranked visitors along a bell curve of six classifications with pycho-centric (laid back, casual, authentic) at one end and allocentric (adventurous) at the other.   Actually, the quiz, still in use, classifies me as a “mid-venturer,” noting this classification is drawn to technology and history.

In my mind though, I fall more toward the psycho-centric end of the curve.  Give me a lakeshore, a dozen books on my reader, some close friends and family and a few good restaurants nearby and I’m in heaven.

But I guess my cross-country ventures with Mugsy, my bulldog, qualify me to move me up the continuum a bit toward allocentric.  Later Plog evolved his classifications into a tool that helped forecast destination lifecycles, also something I found very useful in the three cities I marketed over my career.

What this hammers home is that storydoing is far more important than storytelling and it isn’t about clever or even nostalgic advertising.  In mid-2009, a few months before I retired from four decades in community visitor-centric economic and cultural development, United’s story was overwritten by a video now seen by an astonishing 14 million viewers.

United Airlines broke singer-songwriter Dave Carroll’s prized Taylor Guitar.  When numerous employees seemed less than empathetic, Carroll, a gifted storyteller, wrote and recorded the song United Breaks Guitars, a song that I admit is not only effective, but on my playlist because, well, it’s a great song.

Those employees and ultimately executives at United, through negative storydoing, did more damage than advertising could ever remedy even in its heyday.  Advertising is superficial and can never cover over systemic flaws in a company’s story.

The “storydoing” challenge faced by airlines in general isn’t just about guitars.  A new study shows that one in five travelers are prevented from fulfilling trips by airline delays and cancellations.

Advertising, even back before it dipped well into a negative return on investment, lacked creditability because as prolific author Seth Godin often writes, it is a form of "yelling” at consumers and the message is really just the advertiser talking about themselves.

It just costs too much to “yell” that loud these days and there are far more effective and efficient ways of marketing, such as “storydoing.”  The “Friendly Skies” campaign was no doubt motivated in part because airline travel wasn’t so friendly in my early years.

When I was eight years old, to collect on her life insurance a guy put a bomb in his mother’s luggage aboard a United flight as she headed to Alaska.  When detonated, it killed everyone flying aboard the DC-6B flying on the segment between Denver and Portland.

A week before I turned nine years old, a United flight struck a TWA Lockheed Super Constellation at high altitude over the Grand Canyon resulting in another 128 tragic fatalities.

This led the following year to federal government development of the current aircraft control system.  It included deployment of a common navigational aid for both military and civilian aircraft called VORTAC, which had been developed by government research.

For the first time it gave airline pilots the ability to detect aircraft flying nearby by means other than by just looking out the window.

It was also the Grand Canyon tragedy that led United to become the first airline to purchase flight simulators for training pilots.

Ever since the 1930s, United has had “big” in its DNA.  It was formed in 1934 when the federal government broke up the monopoly that had been established by Bill Boeing and Frederick Whitney in 1929 called the United Aircraft and Transport Company.

It was divided into Boeing Airplane Company, United Aircraft and United Airlines in the west and companies such as Pratt & Whitney Aircraft Company in the east.

Bill Boeing walked away from the business and developed many of the historic neighborhood immediately surrounding downtown Seattle. Like Boeing, United had its roots in the Pacific Northwest, having been founded by Walter T. Varney who flew mail routes in the 1920s that stopped in my native state of Idaho.

Varney, a California native who was also the founder of Continental Airlines, now merged with United, passed away the year of my first airline trip.

While I was in college, United Airlines was headed by Eddie Carlson, another native of the Pacific Northwest who had begun his career in tourism as a bellhop while working his way through college at the University of Washington.

By 1960, after serving in the Navy during WWII, Carlson rose to president of Western International Hotels, which owned and managed a chain of hotels throughout the northwest.  He famously sketched the idea for Seattle’s Space Needle on a napkin.

By the time I was midway through college, the hotel chain merged with United Airlines and Carlson added president of that airline to his bellhop resume.  I met him during Spokane’s Expo ‘74 and Carlson still had the graciousness of a good bellhop.

By the time I was marketing Anchorage, Western International Hotels was renamed Westin Hotels in 1980, an abbreviation of WESTern and INternational.

Carlson was an inspiration to many of us in community-destination marketing but I realize now that he was the last of an era when hotels and airlines still understood that destinations are the real reason people travel and use their services.

Airlines, in particular, used to be much more about destinations than mere transportation.  During the first two decades of my career in community-destination marketing, airlines used to help helped us develop destination brands and tour products for the cities they served.

Early in the 1980s, an airline friend of mine who served on my board of directors, asked me to accompany him on a 1200-mile round-daytrip from Anchorage to Kotzebue, an Inupiat village on tiny gravel spit pointing out into a namesake sound of the Arctic Ocean.

It was my first visit above the Arctic Circle.  In addition to meeting new friends John Schaeffer and Willie Hensley, I took a snow-machine ride out to see Reindeer herds established there in the 1800s and visited the then new Museum of the Arctic, which has now been incorporated into the new Northwest Arctic Heritage Center.

John was then mayor and soon-to-be head of the NANA Regional Corporation headquartered there.  Willie was already famous to me from my reading of a segment of Coming Into The Country still a classic by John McPhee.

As we landed, made our way around the village and then returned to the airport midway down the spit, I caught many glances of the hulk of an Alaska Airlines L-1049H Constellation (aka “Connie”) the same type of aircraft that had collided over Grand Canyon.

This one had been left the end of the runway in Kotzebue after it belly landed in 1967 during “whiteout” conditions (image linked above is a sister-aircraft that has survived.)

Alaska Airlines today is a leader in safety, performance and technological innovation.  It was being brilliantly marketed during my time in Alaska by Dave Palmer, a friend who is now also retired and who collaborated with me on a signature inflight research project that revolutionized how we marketed Anchorage.

The carcass of the old “Connie” left in Kotzebue was back during a rough patch for the company, probably when one of the airline’s pilots is famously said to have had to personally pay to refuel a plane because the airline had not paid its bills.

Flying the Constellation was itself a form of marketing pioneered by Howard Hughes.  This distinctive aircraft had been his brainchild when he owned TWA and was distinctive because of its unique tail and the humpback shape of its fuselage.

However, the Constellation was brought to reality by Lockheed, a company evolved by Walter T. Varney who was also the founder of United and Continental airlines.

Forced out at TWA, Hughes again revolutionized airline marketing in the early 1970s as my career began by buying and renaming an airline as Hughes Airwest, known for its extremely bright yellow airplanes and “Top Banana”-themed marketing.

Back in 1966, Hughes had visited Las Vegas for Thanksgiving a month before my maternal grandfather, Mark White, took me on a trip there.  It was my high school graduation present, and we went to the newly opened Caesars Palace to see Johnny Mathis in concert.

When after a few days, Hughes was asked to vacate for another guest who had reserved the room, he instead bought that hotel and then several others.  In 1976 while I was marketing Spokane, he died, fittingly on a plane.

By the last two decades of my career, you could scarcely find airline reps who thought of their product as anything other than transportation.

Unfortunately, that meant they typically had little interest in the destinations they served even though those places were the reasons people flew at all.

Having dropped destinations from their storytelling, most could not even tell the difference between a city and an airport name.  A sign of how little they understood, they even charged community destination marketing executives for trips - at their request -to help generate traffic for a new route.

Airlines today are commoditized, and grasping at add-on fees rather than storytelling or storydoing.  It is going to take much more than a throw-back ad campaign for any airline to be much more than a commodity.