World Tourism Day: Friday September 27, 2019

-- World Tourism Day, UN World Tourism Organization

This year's theme is "Tourism and Jobs."

New York Times image.

That the venerable packaged tour organization, the UK-based Thomas Cook International, went out of business earlier in the week, stranding hundreds of thousands of tourists across Europe ("Before Thomas Cook stranded vacationers, it made travel accessible to everyone," Washington Post") is an indicator of how in the kinds of planning frameworks I espouse, there needs to be monitoring of the health of these organizations, because of the impact of tourists on local economies as well as on jobs, of which 20,000 people lost theirs, when the business shut down ("Could a Thomas Cook-like travel nightmare happen in the US?," NBC).

Similarly, the New York Times reported ("Iceland's Purple Planes Are Grounded, and With Them, Its Economy") about the negative impact on tourism in Iceland because of the failure of the Wow Airline, which provided cheap flights from the US to Europe, many with a stop in Iceland.  It's been a severe impact.

And the Los Angeles Times reports ("Mexico closed its tourism board, so tourist hot spots are going DIY in LA") in one of the many anti-government actions by the current President, the Mexico Tourism Board was dissolved, which will force individual states to take up the charge to market their states and the communities within them.

I mean to write about this separately, as an example of how all politicians run "against government," but it's interesting too because for decades there was an anti-funding bias for tourism promotion on the part of the national government in the US too, out of the idea that

(Although Canada might be a good example. While the national government invests in tourism promotion, most of the provinces are equally invested. In fact, in the past I have availed myself of many of best practice development publications produced by the economic development departments and tourism promotion groups there.)

Cliff House, San Francisco.

Last year, I thought that this San Francisco Chronicle piece, "Tourist Trap Day: Seeing the sights visitors flock to — but locals skip," was interesting. The idea is to visit typical tourist traps, but in the off-season.

With that kind of idea in mind, I recently visited Theodore Roosevelt Island for the first time.

Because of the trade war with China, Chinese visitation to the US is down.  This is a negative development because international tourists spend more money than domestic tourists ("Chinese Tourism To U.S. Down After Years Of Booming," NPR).

There are still the evergreen issues:

(1) touristification;

(2) overtourism;

(3) the impact of short term stays via sharing apps like Airbnb on communities; and

(4) the tourism tax revenue stream, how much is too much, does it reduce visitation, and what the money is spent on, such as the new Raiders football stadium in Las Vegas ("Don’t count on Raiders reimbursing any public money for stadium," Las Vegas Review-Journal).

And for me, perennial issues that are more local include:

(1)  how "destination marketing organizations" market their cities generally;

(2) and within the city once people visit (i.e., visitor centers);

(3) the value of cultural heritage tourism;

(4) whether or not a community has a tourism plan, works at building community capacity for tourism (e.g., 2019 Maryland Tourism & Travel Summit, Maryland Tourism; VA1 Tourism Summit - Virginia's Conference on Tourism ), etc.

I still have on my reading list the out of print book, The Competitive Destination, and Destination Branding for Small Cities (which is relevant to marketing sub-districts of larger cities) especially since I aim to produce a model destination development plan for DC's Capitol Hill, as part of a planning engagement of which I am lead planner.