Travelling to Mexico in the wake of one of the worst tourism declines in recent memory, has been an eery experience: the occasional masked traveller, the non-existent line ups to check-in and a 319 with perhaps 20 passengers. But it isn’t the feeling of crossing some imaginary boundary to a forbidden land or the fear of catching some untamed virus awaiting at the arrival lounge. What makes this trip so uneasy is the realization that the millions of people that are not flying today may not be coming back to Mexico for a really long time.
Whether failures in policy-making, mass-hysteria, international press or just some random genetic mutation are to blame for the stampede the fact is that loosing its tourism edge, Mexico is posed for very dark times ahead. Suffice to know that its tourism industry is second only to oil.
In the midst of such a downturn the entire sector will have to rethink how it positions itself to re-engage with travellers. Yes, Mexico has a privileged geography and has exploited it through the continuous development of its traditional hubs, usually beach destinations flocked by charters full of travellers that prepaid the entire experience back home. I believe those days are over, not because those people will no longer consider Mexico as an alternative and will gradually rediscover its benefits, but because there are far too many options outside of Mexico where the exact same experience is available: blue waters, white sand, palm trees, cheap drinks and lots of sun. The quintessential beach vacation. As people are forced to try other options, they will find them and will have no problem in evaluating their loyalties.
Hopefully the prospects of such a decline will reenergize the sector and open the doors for a new generation of travel ventures that will restore the reputation of Mexico as a prime destination, not only a beach destination but a complex one that spans world-class historic sites, charming colonial towns as well as a very diverse range of cultures that cover its varied geography.
I’m sure the government is already planning how to spend millions of dollars on marketing its way to normal levels and all the major hotel chains are calculating how low they can go to compensate. But what is really needed is a grass-root movement that looks at each corner of the country as a potential magnet for a new kind of tourist: the kind that won’t run after the cheapest room, the kind that puts its heart into researching a trip for months because she knows it will be a life-changing experience. The eco-traveller that understands what kind of impact she can effect on a place, both physically and morally. The equivalent to the agro-tourism that has shifted attention to the Italian country. Reinventing tourism in Mexico will require the participation of people beyond the industry. I’m certain everyone will have something to say as we’ve all been to Mexico at least once. Haven’t we?
Because I spend a lot of my day working around all things travel, that knowledge somehow defines a general theme for many of my posts. Even on my twitter account (@globalculture) I often find it easier to engage in casual conversation whenever the topic is travel. People lighten up when talking about travel.
So when @jenandtheart made a comment about how the Global Culture blog was rising above the usual lightness with which most people talk about travel and culture, he really got me thinking. Long time ago I diagnosed myself with the “meaningful conversation disorder” by which I usually feel inadequate unless a conversation can transcend the mundane. And it seems this blog suffers that same fate.
If I have been talking about travel a little bit too much and it seemed out of place amid the more profound earlier debate, here is a spin that should bring the tone of the blog back to its usual depth:
If you have been planning on reducing your travel budget because the current economy makes you cautious, start packing. You may be travelling sooner than you’d expect.
First some context: in smaller houses, better communities I echoed the idea that the current environment should accelerate some of the urbanization trends, such as concentrating within the core areas that foster creativity and innovation, even if that means moving more often:
“Less ties to a place would create an incentive for people to relocate to the hubs where new opportunities arise.”
And in a call to not waste the current crisis, I seconded the notion to take advantage of the unique opportunity that we have to challenge the old ways to lead to a new standard of living:
“as we grow aware of the world around us and educate ourselves in the ways of other peoples and cultures, we can’t help but notice that things abroad are not too different from things around the corner. In the midst of a global recession it’s easy to panic if we are all doing things in the same ways, buying the same products, asserting the same way of live. After all when the entire boat is going down, you don’t want to be where the majority of the crowd is (pardon the extreme analogy). Instead each one of us will look at doing things a little bit different, trying to use all those lessons on global culture to create a unique mix that will allow us to become unique actors in a complex stage where the rules are about to be rewritten.
In “How the Crash Will Reshape America“, Richard Florida provides an insightful look at the various factors that will be changing the balance of power among American cities. He challenges the assumption that New York will succumb at the same pace its financial industry melts down and believes it will in fact force its creative industries to take the lead in many other fronts… diversifying its portfolio, so to speak.
And just like being in New York during this transitional phase will likely present key opportunities to those that storm the weather, all the other world’s mega-regions will continue to concentrate talent and produce most economic output. Urban innovation will have to accelerate to sustain the rhythm of life in these regions.
Ultimately a variety of factors will lead to a new American urban geography according to Florida:
It will likely be sparser in the Midwest and also, ultimately, in those parts of the Southeast that are dependent on manufacturing. Its suburbs will be thinner and its houses, perhaps, smaller. Some of its southwestern cities will grow less quickly. Its great mega-regions will rise farther upward and extend farther outward. It will feature a lower rate of homeownership, and a more mobile population of renters. In short, it will be a more concentrated geography, one that allows more people to mix more freely and interact more efficiently in a discrete number of dense, innovative mega-regions and creative cities.
An uprooted population, globally inclined, aware of the fact that jobs will be scarce is likely to give away its current address in exchange for some job security. In particular if those jobs are in tune with the zeitgeist. Settling in a new city used to be something you did maybe twice in a lifetime. I believe many of us will be faced with this transition more than a few times. In the same way that the average person would move to a bigger house every 3-5 years (eventually buying the one they couldn’t afford), many of us will find ourselves pondering not a better neighbourhood but a completely new city.
This may sound like a bold move, but your inner global citizen is rejoicing at the possibility that a new travel adventure is around the corner. Pack lightly as you may be on the road for some time. I believe our ancestors used to call this a ‘nomadic’ life.
Given the current economic trends in the travel industry, it is expected prices will drop in many fronts. From the analysis of the recent Competitiveness 2009 report we can even derive that some regions will have to try much harder to compensate for factors such as dependency from long-haul passengers.
In an effort to understand some of the key factors in the current hotel industry, I created a data set with the top 5% most expensive hotels and mapped their locations to determine which regions had the highest density of “exclusive” hotels. As it was to be expected the usual suspects are at the top of the list: London, Tokyo, New York City, Paris, Rome. The rest of the list has a good mix of modern, beach and historic cities: Venice, Miami, Los Angeles, Milan, Moscow, Florence, Cape Town, Osaka, Morocco, Maui, Cancun, Washington, Bali, Madrid. London has over 120 exclusive hotels while Madrid counted 20. Beyond that these exclusive hotels are scattered around the world. These images provide a general view of where in the world they are:
 … …
While calculating these “exclusivity hubs” I came across some other interesting facts:
- The five regions where the top 5% is far more expensive than in the rest of the world are: United Arab Emirates, Morocco, South Africa, New Zealand and Switzerland
- The currencies that will buy you more exclusivity for less are the Japanese Yen, Polish Zloty, Mexican Peso, Canadian Dollar, Indian Rupees, Chinese Yuan and Brazil Reais
- US$264/night will get you into one of these properties
It’ll be interesting to see how this group changes as the year advances and hotels fail to meet their quotas. I’m planning to release a lot more of this analysis as part of a new set of travel guides we’re producing at PlanetEye, but if you’re interested in the numbers behind please drop me a line.
The World Economic Forum announced its Travel & Tourism Competitiveness Report 2009 will be released on March 4. A couple of weeks ago I was asking people where to find better data that could be used to identify emerging destinations and based on the 2008 version of the report, this may be the best source.
The report provides details on a number of factors that combined make it attractive to develop the Travel & Tourism sector. These factors are:
- Policy rules and regulations
- Environemental sustainability
- Safety and security
- Health and hygiene
- Prioritization of Travel & Tourism
- Air transport infrastructure
- Ground transport infrastructure
- Tourism infrastructure
- ICT infrastructure
- Price competitiveness in the Travel & Tourism industry
- Human resources
- Affinity for Travel & Tourism
- Natural resources
- Cultural resources
In 2008, through the methodic evaluation of these factors, countries like Switzerland, Austria, Germany, Australia & Spain were at the top of the rank. However, with the abundance of details provided by this report the one thing that comes to mind as an important deficiency is the fact that only country level data is provided. Well, for a report of this scope is absolutely necessary to maintain this general approach. But I’m certain that the more granular this information is provided, the more valuable it will become. Within countries, specific regions may be investing far more resources to get ahead of the game. Identifying the qualities that these regions have to compete and using such information to publish a regional version of the report may be the first step in creating new tourism trends.
What if you could spend the next two years of your life travelling around the world, taking the time to really get to know each place you visit and nurture long lasting relationships with locals at each point? Which destinations would you choose, knowing that you want to cover as much world as possible but don’t want to feel in a race?
Mostly inspired by slow-travellers like soultravelers3, who have found the way to engage on an open ended trip around the world, taking time to settle in each community they visit and making it a way of life, I realized it was possible to engage on a similar experience by splitting the journey into one to two month long segments, each one of which would be done every year. So this year you devote your summer to a little village in Spain and the next year you immerse yourself into the calm serenity of the northern Italian alpine villages. Each year you complete another leg of this tour around the world…
The nature of such journey allows you to engage in meaningful discovery of the culture that makes each destination unique, and not just the landmarks that have made it famous. Every year you grow wiser as a global citizen, a contemporary Phileas Fogg. With each year you become more engaged with your community because you’ve learned of all the things that you took for granted and find new ways to give back throughout your journey, because you know what value you can add to each destination.
You grow more cosmopolitan as each destination thrives on your cosmopolitanism.
After my post on the emerging destinations index, I got some really good feedback about how misleading calling them “emerging destinations” was. As I replied in the original comment thread it was mostly a derivative from the original “emerging markets” index which is where I got the data from. It just happens that some emerging markets have been top tourist destinations for a long time. So it’s likely a good idea to amend the unfortunate name as I plan to continue tweaking the index until it ranks real emerging destinations.
The idea is to come up with a certain way to organize information about destinations in such a way that those that have good infrastructure but have not yet developed as top tier tourist destinations can be identified. As it is, the index has yet to factor a number of things:
- It must account for current inbound tourism. This must be an inverse correlation as we would want those regions with fewer tourists to bubble up in the rank. I found an old table with the World’s Top Tourism Destinations, which will do for now, but it will work much better the more granular data I can get. Most of these stats are only available per country.
- As I’m planning to use this index to drive a different type of travel, tourism infrastructure is not a must, but there are some key elements that must be satisfied such as availability of quality lodging and a healthy network of suppliers to cater to those visiting. I think some of the dimensions already included in the index are accounting for general infrastructure, but it would be great to get more specific data.
- If I seem obsessed with collecting city rankings is because I believe cities matter. While large cosmopolitan cities act as a bridge to the rest of the world by spreading global culture, smaller cities in the surrounding areas may have a very different attitude yet be excellent destinations for certain types of activities. This means that all the data needs to be very granular.
There are “softer” elements that will have to be added to the index down the road, but I’m not sure how to account for them yet. To understand these I have to refer back to my post a village… once upon a time
I’m thinking “slow-urban”, a slum of hope attracting urbanites, an inexpensive property characterized by the lack of urban infrastructure but rich on more important aspects of life. The antithesis of our suburbs.
Being the antithesis of a suburb implies a certain buzz that is common in “happening” city neighbourhoods; a sense of locality which eliminates the need for unnecessary commutes for daily chores; an interesting community that seeks to grow by tapping on the resources of each individual. All this while providing a safe distance to the always busy urban pace and its obsession with hyper-productivity. For these characteristics I have yet to find a good metric.
Using the Emerging Markets Index released by Mastercard back in October, I’ve created something I’m going to call the Emerging Destination Index as a tool to provide clues as to which non-traditional tourist destinations may provide the fundamental infrastructure to sustain the type of travellers that I’ve been discussing over the last little while in this blog.
The original index data is available from Mastercard, and all I did was to reconfigure the weights assigned by the original methodology to assign more value to those dimensions that have a higher impact on the ability of a traveller to operate remotely from the region with fair access to a urban standard of living. These are the weights I assigned:
- Economic and Commercial Environment (0%) – Used in the original index to measure time and costs for building a standard warehouse, registering a property, exporting/importing cargo, and rate corruption and foreign bond, it seemed mostly irrelevant for the purpose of this index, so I left it out.
- Economic Growth and Development (10%) – Measuring the broad economic health and growth of the national economy this dimension seems to be the best way of describing the level of infrastructure that will ultimately support most activities from those visiting. It will also likely be related to the level scope of urban areas and the availability of important infrastructure outside of the major cities.
- Business Environment (7%) - Reflects the ability to setup a business. After all in order for travellers to gain access to the region, business must prosper along with all their suppliers, just so the visitors can enjoy their stay with a guarantee of fundamental services.
- Financial Services Environment (6%) – The availability of financial services to sustain the traveller during the stay.
- Commercial Connectivity (16%) – While I made the point that no place on Earth is remote anymore, this dimension measures city connectivity to other world and regional commercial centers by air, airline passenger volumes, presence of foreign consulates/embassies, international hotels, convention/meeting facilities, and international trade.
- Education, and IT Connectivity Environment (12%) – The availability of basic IT infrastructure may be key for those trying to maintain their links to work life active while on the region.
- Quality of Urban Life (28%) – Measures the quality of life by considering: personal freedom/media and censorship, medical and health considerations, public services and transport, recreation and culture, mortality, and the presence of world heritage sites. For someone looking to make a trip to a region for a few weeks, this dimension alone provides the most important aspect of the index on whether the visit will be full of memorable experiences.
- Risk & Security (21%) – Gauges a city’s overall risk and security through personal freedom, personal physical safety and the political and social environment. A concern in most emerging regions continues to be personal security and while a destination may be inviting, venturing outside of the usual tourist destinations will require the region to provide a basic safety guarantee.
Here are the top 10 destinations according to this index:
- Shanghai
- Budapest
- Warsaw
- Beijing
- Buenos Aires
- Kuala Lumpur
- Sao Paulo
- Santiago
- Mexico City
- Bangkok
I’ll be happy to share the full list of 65 with anyone that is interested.
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