 A while ago I saw a
travelogue on bicycle tourism in the Alps. The tourist authorities
realized the rigours of regular bicycling wasn't for everyone, so they
introduced some innovations:
- Elevators inside the mountains for the major uphill sections, so your personally-powered travel is mostly downhill
- Closely-located, unique inns and restaurants, all scheduled
and booked to be waiting for you when you arrive, with local cuisine
and 'picnic baskets' you can drop off at the next town
- Vans that take your luggage on ahead, so it's waiting there when you arrive each evening, allowing you can travel very light
The North American tourist industry is, by contrast, wasteful
and archaic. Expressways, offramp gas stations, chain restaurants
and chain hotels make every route and every destination look alike. You
travel thousands of miles simply to get a warmer or cooler climate, a
change of skyscraper- and billboard-obscured natural scenery, a
slightly-different golf course or strip of crowded sand, or some
contrived artificial 'theme park', casino or beach resort. The whole
vacation industry seems designed to waste oil and water, terraform the
natural environment, and make faraway places look just like 'home'.
Meanwhile, the heavily-subsidized airlines are full but still going
bankrupt, turning the clouds brown, and thanks to 'security' making
flying more trouble than it's worth. Trains are overpriced,
disconnected and limited. Most public transport is unreliable, decrepit
and unsafe.
Even eco-tourism is a challenge. It's mostly priced for those with
neither the time nor the sensibility to appreciate it, and can be more
like a Survivor experience than a learning one -- and in some cases it
is, ironically, terrible for the environment.
So what could we do about it? Apply four rules:
- Slow down.
- Stay closer to home.
- Put more things to do and see closer together.
- Design, 'string together' and organize (technologically) simpler, less expensive entertainments.
We could learn from the Alps bicycle tours. It would require some
substantial changes to the tourist 'industry' infrastructure, but these
changes would be good for local employment, good for the economy, and
good for the environment. And by using our imagination and innovation,
and letting nature do more of the 'entertaining', we could still
deliver the adrenaline rushes some world-weary, desensitized travelers demand without
bulldozing acres for malls, roller-coasters and parking lots. We might
even make travellers more physically fit instead of candidates for
embolisms and heart attacks.
This would require, however, some (gasp!) government and peer-to-peer collaboration. If
you want to create an enjoyable and memorable experience for the
tourist, you need to think about the entire
experience, and that means not leaving it up to individual vendors, who
are, today, each trying to get the maximum amount of money out of tourists who
will probably never return anyway, with the minimum possible
expenditure -- a commercial example of the 'tragedy of the commons'.
This would require more than just coordination,
what most tourist 'boards' do to day. Co-marketing, scheduled
'festivals' and sharing news about what each establishment in an area
is doing is not enough. Collaboration means developing a coherent,
sustained experience for the tourist with no 'gaps'. It also means
innovating new experiences that draw on the natural environment,
existing infrastructure and the imagination of the collaborators.
Even
today's package 'tours' don't go far enough to creating an integrated
experience, because each vendor cares only about their disjointed part
of the tour, so there is little or no cohesion between the parts, some
of the parts can be exploitative (some operators treat their package
tour customers almost like hostages), and the travel between the parts
is usually treated as a no-frills, no-profit nuisance, to be outsourced
or left to the individual, and handled as inexpensively as possibly.
And
collaboratively creating an integrated experience for tourists doesn't
mean organizing every second of their day, either. It means looking
after the details, the logistics of the journey so the tourist doesn't
have to, but still leaving the tourist with freedom to do their own
thing, and accommodating changes in their itinerary on a moment's
notice when the tourist decides to spend more, or less, time on a
particular part of the tour. So, the Alps bicycle tours provide
checkpoints and cellphones that you can use to help the tour organizers
coordinate and accommodate changes to your plans, so you don't have to
worry about them.
Collaboration means that each collaborator
needs to have a vested interest in the entire experience, so they care
about more than just their small part. Think of this as analogous to
the training of people on an assembly line to be able to handle tasks
upstream and downstream of their own, both to enrich their personal
competencies and to instill a sense of care for what happens elsewhere
on the line. So if you're a hotel or restaurant in a tour, you should
learn how to offer any other part of the tour experience, to appreciate
how your establishment contributes to that cohesive experience, and you
should cost-share and profit-share with every other part of the
experience as well.
The greatest benefit of such collaboration,
however, is the innovation that collective energy can produce, adding
imaginative benefits and experiences that an un-integrated tour
'packager" would never think of. Some of these innovations could cost
next to nothing but add immensely to the tourist's enjoyment. Others
(like the elevators in mountains) might add considerable cost that no
one establishment could probably afford, but which spread among all the
collaborators could be manageable and open up the market to a whole,
huge group (like those who like the outdoors but aren't fit enough to
pedal up mountains) who otherwise would be unlikely to patronize any of
the establishments.
Here are just a few possible ideas
for what such collaborative groups might do, off the top of my head;
I'm sure groups of people in the industry, who know their customers
(and potential customers) much better than I do, working together,
could come up with much better.
- Open Source tour itinerary development:
Establish networks of local citizens and local enterprises to
brainstorm and co-develop new, imaginative, integrated experiences for
local tourists. They might come up with ideas like sophisticated
real-time, real-space local 'murder mysteries' to solve, or scavenger
hunts, or even 'car rallies' on foot or by bicycle that tax your powers
of observation and knowledge of local history and geography rather than
your muscles.
- Seven day "safe and easy" countryside walking and biking tours:
Design seven interesting local hikes that can be managed by all ages in
a day, and then 'string them together' by providing transport between
them each evening, dinner and evening social venues, transport to/from
local bed-and-breakfasts (or home, for those who can't afford to pay
for overnight stay). Each one could start on a Saturday morning and end
on a Friday night, and some of the hikes might even include nature or
tour guides.
- Podcast-directed local travel-and-study programs:
Spend a week learning about nature, architecture, art, sculpture, a
craft, music, photography, cooking, small business, or farming, with
the entire program on podcast. It would guide you around the local
community, and coordinate hands-on learning with local biologists,
artists, chefs, entrepreneurs or farmers at various points in the
week's study.
- Serial impromptu Meetup vacations:
Instead of going elsewhere on vacation, Meetup with people who are in
your area for a vacation, show them around and enjoy the local
attractions with them. This could be as simple as pre-scheduled evening
Meetups where locals and visitors can meet each other and talk about
local attractions and events (and see how the locals really live), or
something more sophisticated where locals could actually make a living
entertaining out-of-town tourists personally and inexpensively (using
the Internet to share best ideas with others, to rate "hosts" after
each trip, and to coordinate larger-group activities).
- Local ballooning trips: See your local area from a bird's-eye view, not just for a single two-hour trip but for a whole vacation.
- Self-organized
local theatre festival: Network with other locals to identify local
theatre productions, shows, day-trips, street festivals and other
activities and then coordinate and string together organized tours that
go to all of these events, either in a week-long festival, or a regular
once-a-week or once-a-month basis.
Who knows, there might even be some opportunities here for innovators
to create Natural Enterprises that facilitate collaboration among
establishments in their area who are currently disconnected,
uninnovative, and even working competitively at cross purposes,
and in the process create local tourist industry booms drawing on
people right in the community. And in the process, we could save a lot
of oil, save a lot of money on travel, and help the local economy and
the environment.
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2:03:00 PM 
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MADE IN CANADA
trust your
instincts 
