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Areas with overly high tourist populations are trying to shift tourists to new, less visited destinations. This can be helpful for us, because we are trying to attract people to a place/season that currently lacking in tourists.

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We recently released our annual travel industry trends forecast, Skift Megatrends 2019. Download a copy of our magazine here and look for us to highlight individual trends in the coming days.
Now that the understanding of overtourism has essentially gone mainstream around the world, a parallel trend - undertourism - is playing out in some emerging destinations that are framing themselves as peaceful yet exciting alternatives to the packed streets of other cities.
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As undertourism enters the industry's collective consciousness, offbeat destinations or those with new stories to tell are marketing immersive experiences that build relationships with people, places, culture, and community over Instagram-worthy photo ops and mass touring.

Destinations used to be satisfied with meeting visitor arrivals and spending goals that they set for the year and left areas such as economic development and destination management to other organizations.

In recent years, overtourism has turned the destination marketing model on its head as many organizations realize their responsibility to either manage visitor growth before it's out of control or make a plan to not become the next Barcelona or Venice. In the short term, this might mean forgoing some revenue. But more destinations are acknowledging that a handful of affluent travelers are better than many cash-strapped tourists, and having the right plan increases the high spenders' likelihood to return.

Destinations increasingly say that they're committed to spreading tourism beyond congested areas to neighborhoods in need of tourism spending, or grow tourism during less popular seasons. But the dispersal approach, if successful, only marginally shifts the problem elsewhere rather than solving it. This approach is often taken before businesses in these neighborhoods are fully tourism-ready or willing to accommodate visitors, or before the off-season actually has compelling offerings that could rival the high season.

Muiderslot Castle, just outside of Amsterdam, recently rebranded itself to Amsterdam Muiderslot Castle in a bid to lure tourists from the city center. Amsterdam's tourism board is promoting the castle and Muiderslot's website, which assures tourists that the castle is easy to reach, but there is limited parking and taking the train or bus involves multiple transfers. Tourists don't want to worry about transportation, yet Muiderslot Castle is asking them to figure it out.

In the three years since Skift first defined overtourism, much of the global travel industry has completely changed its mindset for how it plans and manages tourism's many aspects. Destinations conf ronting overtourism head-on, such as Barcelona, Venice, and Kyoto, have admitted a problem, and others that don't yet have crowds are doing what they can to ensure their cities and towns don't become overrun.

We've already seen multiple destinations activate undertourism messaging in recent years. Oslo, for example, launched a campaign in 2017 that focused on "rescuing" tourists from popular cities like Paris and bringing them to Norway's capital where museums generally lack crowds, restaurant reservations are easy to get, and public parks have plenty of free space.

Post-peace deal Colombia hasn't wasted time shaping its new image with tourists and international investors. The city of Medellin, once considered one of the world's most dangerous as a center for drug traff icking, has focused on inf rastructure investment for its residents as the city enters a new chapter. The mountainous city constructed cable cars to help residents get from their homes miles above the downtown core to the central business district, and it's quickly become one of the most successful municipal turnaround stories. Now that residents from the mountains can easily access the city center, they can also tap into the growing economic impact that tourism is bringing to the city in the form of more employment and cultural opportunities.

"I don't think Medellin is fashionable or anything like that, but more people are looking at it," said Ana Maria Moreno Gomez, director of the Medellin Convention and Visitors Bureau. "In the past, we put all the city's garbage in a mountain; now we've transformed that area into a garden."

Indeed, Medellin has embraced the green economy in the last decade as it discards its violent past. The city has made biodiversity and sustainability the face of its tourism value proposition, a ref reshing decision in a world riddled with destination mismanagement and climate change.

Gomez said Medellin is creating more offerings outside of the city such as coffee farms so that those attractions help prevent overtourism within the city. "The new Colombian [President Iván Duque Márquez] talks a lot about the orange economy, which includes all of the creative industries such as arts and culture," she said.

Without a vibrant orange economy, tourism can't take root. More destinations are cultivating their orange economies in neighborhoods beyond their fabled tourism districts to get tourists interested, while ensuring these are long-term plans. "Now Medellin has a long-term tourism plan and each new administration can't change the plan," said Gomez.

Puerto Rico is another case of undertourism in practice. While parts of the island continue to struggle, Puerto Rico has also made significant progress in recovery efforts and bringing back tourism since Hurricane Maria in September 2017. Tourism officials are working to portray the island as an alternative to crowded Caribbean islands where U.S. travelers would likely spend most of their time at an all-inclusive resort rather than engaging with the local population and businesses. Tourism officials continue to promote the cruise business, but they want tourists to fly in and spend a week in a hotel where more tourism dollars often stay with local communities.

Kyoto, Japan, is different from Oslo, Medellin, and Puerto Rico. The Japanese city has been a well-known stop on a Japanese tour for years, but its profile has recently spiked as the Japan National Tourism Organization has launched marketing campaigns focused on getting travelers beyond gateway cities like Tokyo. The campaigns have been successful in that tourism has grown, but they've created a prime example of the adage 'be careful what you wish for.'
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Kyoto residents are angered by the traffic and congestion that tourism growth has caused, and the government has responded by running an experiment that analyzes cell phone data. The experiment is ongoing and tracks the time of day when the most cell phones are present in the destination, usually in the early- to mid-afternoon hours. Kyoto's Nijo Castle has already adjusted its opening times as a result of data that was gleaned from the experiment. As Japan's government has made tourism a key pillar of its economic growth in recent years - it is aiming for 40 million international arrivals by 2020 for the Tokyo Olympics - the tourism organization found that only 18.2 percent of local residents are satisfied with tourism.

Some tour operators have been fighting overtourism for years. Intrepid Travel, for example, published a "not hot list" for 2019 for Asia that promotes itineraries for alternative destinations such as "Sumatra is the new Borneo" and "Bukhara is the new Angkor Wat."

Global tourism arrivals hit 1.3 billion in 2017, according to the United Nations World Tourism Organization, and tourism arrivals have grown for seven straight years since the official end of the 2008 to 2009 global financial crisis. Post-financial crisis, many governments turned to tourism to help reverse course on their flagging economies, and that strategy helped to make tourism the largest industry in a tiny place like Iceland, which Skift covered in-depth in 2016.

Many governments, however, didn't anticipate that consumers' discretionary spending patterns would trend so dramatically to intangible experiences such as travel, and that's caused political and tourism leaders to rethink how, when, and where they market tourism. Amsterdam, Barcelona, Venice, and Kyoto still contain unknown treasures and unbeaten paths if you know where to look and when to go. The answer for these and other destinations is not to undersell because of overtourism but to adopt smart strategies for marketing the alternatives that tourists didn't know they loved.

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Travel Megatrends 2019: Undertourism Is the New Overtourism

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Now that the understanding of overtourism has essentially gone mainstream around the world, a parallel trend - undertourism - is playing out in some Now that the understanding of overtourism has essentially gone mainstream around the world, a parallel trend - undertourism - is playing out in some emerging destinations that are framing themselves as peaceful yet exciting alternatives to the packed streets of other cities.

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Megatrend: Online travel agencies are branching out

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Megatrend: Online travel agencies are branching out

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Online travel agencies are starting to focus on more than booking solely accomodations. This includes activities, restauraunts, ridesharing, tours, etc. This can help up, because it gives us an idea of the competetors mindsets, as well as what travellers want to see.

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We recently released our annual travel industry trends forecast, Skift Megatrends 2019. Download a copy of our magazine here and look for us to highlight individual trends in the coming days.
The online travel agency business over the last couple of decades has largely been built around selling hotel stays. But in 2019, there will undoubtedly be an acceleration of the drive to diversify their core businesses not only into apartments and vacation rentals, but also into tours and activities, restaurants, food delivery, and ridesharing.

The online travel agency future is wide open. Although it has more to do with marketing and business models than products, just consider that Booking Holdings over the last year and a half reversed long-standing practices and leaned into brand advertising instead of paid ads on search engines, and accelerated its use of the prepay merchant model over its mainstay pay-at-the-hotel agency model.
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So anything can happen.

But back to the subject at hand, which is the diversification of online travel agency business lines, TripAdvisor has been a leader in the march away from hotels, which however is still its main business at 73 percent of revenue in the 12 months ending September 30. In the same period, TripAdvisor's revenue from its non-hotel segment - experiences, restaurants, and home rentals - jumped 80.8 percent to $429 million compared with the year-earlier period.

And during the most recent 12-month period, the latest information available, TripAdvisor's experiences, restaurants and home rentals segment contributed 26 percent of the company's total revenue of $1.59 billion. This non-hotel sector's contribution to TripAdvisor's total revenue increased nearly 4 percentage points compared with the 12 months ending September 30, 2017.

For TripAdvisor, particularly in its peak third quarter in 2018, it was experiences and restaurants that drove the boost in its non-hotel business. The company's alternative lodgings business, mired in a hyper-competitive market alongside Airbnb, Booking.com, and Expedia's HomeAway, saw its revenue decline a single-digit percentage in the third quarter, for example.

TripAdvisor CEO Steve Kaufer has compared the drive to make tours and attractions online bookable to bringing hotels to the internet 15-20 years ago, and he argues that the profit margins could be similar.

"You see great growth, or we think it's great growth, in terms of online bookable supply," he said during an earnings call several months ago. "And we're still overall at the tip of the iceberg. So when we look at how this attraction business, this experiences business can compare to the trajectory of bringing hotel booking online 20 years ago, we still see remarkable parallels, a similar margin structure. And it starts with collecting demand and supply, bringing it together, and that's exactly what we're doing."

But then there's the financial issue of experiences generally being lower-priced than hotel bookings. We asked Kaufer that question at Skift Global Forum in New York City in September, and he perhaps coined the name of a new sector: food and activities. Or at least it is an interesting way to look at in-destination opportunities. He argued that volume in the breadth of activities, from dining to tours, that travelers pay for on vacation can compensate for the sometimes-lower prices.

"Yes, there are the Motel 6's and the $250 helicopter tour," Kaufer said. "So on average, I'd probably agree the transactions are of smaller size (than hotels) - I'm not sure - but think about how many things you do when you are in-destination on a leisure trip. And you are spending a comparable amount in in-destination food and activities as you do on the hotel, at least. Therefore, that's a really big spend pie that we can help consumers with."

TripAdvisor will clearly expand its experiences and dining footprint in 2019. It has already begun to expand its TV advertising beyond hotels and into tours and attractions, and off icials announced they will broaden the focus of its advertising in terms of all the various things - not just hotels - that you can book on TripAdvisor this year.

Unlike TripAdvisor, Booking Holdings doesn't break out its revenue according to business lines, but undoubtedly makes the vast majority of its money on hotels. While the company, which owns brands from Booking.com and Kayak to OpenTable and Agoda, sold 1.8 million airline tickets and booked 19 million rental car days in the third quarter, it is branching out through investments in China and Southeast Asia and via its own business operations into tours and activities, ridesharing, and food delivery.

Booking Holdings and TripAdvisor both acquired tours and activities software-connectivity companies in 2018 to further expand in the sector. Booking Holdings picked up FareHarbor for $250 million, and TripAdvisor bought the smaller Bokun for an undisclosed sum.

"In the area of experiences, we are building out our product capabilities, creating a seamless integrated way to offer more choices for our accommodations customers," Glenn Fogel, the Booking Holdings CEO, said in a November earnings call. "This quarter, Booking.com made progress integrating FareHarbor's products, giving Booking.com access to new local attractions in the U.S. and the ability to leverage FareHarbor's technology to help even more tours and attractions around the world come online."
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Booking Holdings' step into tours and activities is clearly not as advanced yet as TripAdvisor's, but it shows how all the major players are branching out beyond hotels, and looking to capture travelers through the entire trip.

"Booking.com's experiences product is scaling well, and we now offer experiences in approximately 70 cities worldwide," Fogel said. "In addition, we are making progress with experience in other areas such as offering at-hotel services and restaurant booking options, though we note these are nascent efforts."

Expedia is less focused on making a big play in tours and activities, although it has offered brick-and-mortar tour businesses in popular vacation destinations such as Las Vegas and Honolulu for years.

As the online hotel booking business gets more competitive, with big chains pushing direct bookings, Google getting into the fray, and Airbnb throwing its weight around, you can look for online travel agencies to continue to point their businesses beyond hotels.

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Travel Megatrends 2019: Online Travel Agencies Scurry for Salvation Beyond Hotels

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The online travel agency business over the last couple of decades has largely been built around selling hotel stays. But in 2019, there will undoubtedly The online travel agency business over the last couple of decades has largely been built around selling hotel stays.

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Travelers are desiring less tech based experiences and more real world experiences. This could hinder us if we focus too much on a tech based approach to online booking. it could also help us by driving travelers to Lapland for it's remote and natural atmosphere.

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We recently released our annual travel industry trends forecast, Skift Megatrends 2019. Download a copy of our magazine here and look for us to highlight individual trends in the coming days.
The sight has become so commonplace it's no longer remarkable: Travelers hunched over their phones as they walk through a foreign street, crowded around a piece of art only to view it through a screen, or posed in front of some stunning vista just to grab a selfie.
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But through the constant glow, a consensus is emerging: This is not good. This is not healthy.

"There's this sort of idea that there are limits, and the basic functioning of our physiology is pointing to these limits," said Christopher J. Lee, a Lafayette College history professor whose book, Jet Lag, explores the negative implications of modern technology. "It's simply important to listen to our bodies, sort of identify what's preventing us from getting rest. Is it this technology that keeps our attention and keeps us awake longer than it should?"

Apple and Google are giving customers tools to cut back on phone use. Silicon Valley executives are trying to keep their kids away from screens. Facebook is trying to de-emphasize mindless videos. And former tech company bigwigs at the Center for Humane Technology are working to combat the problem of technology "hijacking our minds and society."

Wired wrote in mid-2018 in a story about digital wellness: "Our devices have never been more powerful, and people have never been so desperate to escape them through 'digital detoxes' and 'dumb phones.' Unplugging is the rallying call of our time."

Those sentiments build on concerns about security in light of numerous data hacks. And new questions about privacy revolve around smart speakers such as Amazon Echo and Google Home. Even Marriott CEO Arne Sorenson, whose company is installing Alexa voice-powered devices in hotel rooms, sounded uncertain about the technology's future.

"I've got a couple of the devices still in a box in my closet at home," he said during Skift Global Forum in September.

Some customers are similarly uncertain, he said, wary of having the gadget in their rooms.

"I think, as a society, we're going to try and figure out, are these devices that we can trust?" he said. "I think inevitably we will figure that we can trust them because they offer enough convenience that collectively we'll figure out a way to tap into that convenience and still be confident that they're not listening to us when we don't want them listening to us."

Travel Loves Tech

So where does all that leave travelers?

Airlines, hotels, and cruise lines are working harder than ever in 2019 to foster tech-driven relationships with their customers. They are updating their apps to better track behaviors and tailor offers. They are wiring more rooms to let guests control lights, temperature, and TV settings with their phones. Cruise lines - once known for terrible and expensive internet access - are upgrading their infrastructure to keep passengers more tech-tethered than ever.

And social media remains an important way for travel companies to promote their products to consumers. Fewer eyeballs online could mean fewer potential guests at a hotel or destination.

"Basically, there's a very direct conflict right now between the business goals of travel companies and the idea of reducing our reliance on technology," said journalist Sara Clemence, author of the book Away & Aware: A Field Guide to Mindful Travel.

In recent years, a smattering of hotels and other travel companies have acknowledged the issue with tech-free promotions, though they are often short-lived. A company called Off the Grid garnered headlines in early 2018 with a promise to take customers on vacations sans smartphones. By late in the year, the company's website was down and its founder unreachable.

Tour operator Intrepid Travel launched a series of "digital detox" trips in 2016, promising to make cellphones off-limits. While some trips are still placed under that category, the no-phone, no-social media part of the deal is no longer enforced.

Instead, the operator is catering to those who want a tech break by recommending specific destinations where connectivity is a challenge. Intrepid said U.S. bookings to some of those locales were up signif icantly in 2018 compared to a year earlier: Patagonia saw a 114 percent increase, while Mongolia trips jumped 35 percent.

"We are seeing an increase in those more remote destinations where you get that opportunity to unplug and reconnect," said Darshika Jones, Intrepid's director of North America.

Overall, the tours and activities sector is still seeing rapid growth and signif icant investment as consumers shift their spending to experiences rather than belongings. In its 2018 U.S. Affluent Traveler Survey, Skift Research found that 67 percent of high-income travelers said they would rather spend their money on activities than a nicer hotel room. That number climbed eight percentage points from the previous year.

The survey also found that 75 percent of affluent travelers had participated in at least one organized tour or activity. And since travel giants such as Marriott, Airbnb, and TripAdvisor have all been investing in growing their tours business, the sector appears likely to continue to draw customers.

A Happy Medium

Clemence, the author who wrote about mindful travel, said she doesn't expect travel companies to voluntarily scale back their reliance on technology. She believes it's up to individuals to find their own happy and healthy medium. She offers tips on how to be more thoughtful during trips, such as using a film camera for pictures, navigating with a physical map instead of an app, or taking a random bus route for unexpected discoveries.
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"I don't think the answer is either you travel in a way that's super plugged-in or you go on some digital detox holiday that's specially structured and your phone gets locked away when you arrive," she said. "There's got to be something in between. I think that sort of has to be driven by individual travelers."

Still, some companies are trying to be thoughtful in how they deploy technology. J. Allen Smith, CEO of Four Seasons Hotels and Resorts, said at Skift Global Forum 2018 that it was important to avoid "technology bling," or the shiny new object that might be fancy but ultimately not all that functional.

He said one innovation he was pleased with was the company's chat service, which can translate 100 different languages through the Four Seasons app, WeChat, text, or Facebook Messenger.

"At the end of the day, it's all about people," Smith said. "You can't let the technology override that notion. Everything we do with respect to technology is in the quest of serving our guests in a more effective way and providing a better experience."

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Travel Megatrends 2019: Real-World Experiences Gain Value in an Era of Tech Burnout

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The sight has become so commonplace it's no longer remarkable: Travelers hunched over their phones as they walk through a foreign street, crowded around a The sight has become so commonplace it's no longer remarkable: Travelers hunched over their phones as they walk through a foreign street, crowded around a piece of art only to view it through a screen, or posed in front of some stunning vista just to grab a selfie.

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-Urbanisation
-Gene technology

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-Artificial Intelligence
-Cures for every disease
-Life expectanscy  will continue to increase
-Future humans (kyborg, avatar...)

https://media.sitra.fi/2019/01/07145732/heikot-signaalit-tulevaisuuden-avartajina.pdf

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-Authentic atmosphere
-Having an opinion, making a point of view (for example against "black friday")

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-Instagram stories
-Chatbots
-Youtube
-Mikroinfluencers and user-generated-content

https://barabra.fi/top-5-sosiaalisen-median-trendit-vuonna-2019/