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THE
travel and tourism industry will soon be dominated by
laptop-lugging travellers and those with an infatuation
with healthful living.
This was
among the fearless forecasts made by former tourism
secretary Mina T. Gabor, as she addressed more than 300
local government units, tourism regional directors and
private stakeholders in travel and tourism in a seminar
on community-based rural tourism held recently in Cebu
City.
Central
Luzon Tourism Regional Director Ronaldo Tiotuico, who
was at that forum, noted Gabor’s focus on the need for
the local travel and tourism industry to keep up with
the emerging trends in travel and tourism to better
respond to the challenges and opportunities now facing
the global travel community.
The UN
World Tourism Organization has predicted an increase to
1.6 billion in worldwide visitor arrivals by 2020
compared with 898 million arrivals in 2007. And so,
governments all over the world have become increasingly
aware of the possibilities opened by tourism for social
and economic development and for job creation.
Gabor
predicted these trends:
One,
hotels and other accommodation establishments will most
likely follow the trend by making their safety deposit
boxes or room safes much bigger, to accommodate not only
cash but even laptops. Today, she said, we see an
emerging trend when travelers increasingly depend on the
Internet to scour the global travel community for
interesting places to visit. Even tourism and hotel
management schools will move out of the classrooms and
out of the library, onto the web and into the
destinations.
Two, the
days of the thick travel guidebooks that describe every
step of the way will soon be a thing of the past as
travellers find the web more convenient to use. And so,
authors will be more inclined to do area-specific
guidebooks, Gabor said.
Third,
airlines and travel agencies will soon close ranks with
financial institutions to offer travel loans such as the
old fly-now, pay-later plan as more and more people
cross borders for various reasons. Airlines will
continue to rack up significant losses as they struggle
to deal with high fuel costs, new security requirements,
an onslaught of low-cost carriers and brutal competition
from open-skies agreements.
Fourth,
there is an emerging fashion today to cater more closely
to the aging population. Tourist facilities will soon
make way for health-related amenities like health and
fitness spa to accommodate those that have fallen in
love with whatever is healthy and safe. Establishments
will build lower-rise steps, more handrails and wider
doors to make the aging tourists more comfortable. Thus,
the buzzword “health-tels”. Coupled with this is the
increasing number of family-oriented tours. It used to
be that children were not welcome in tourist
establishments. Today, there is a trend to build rooms
where kids can play, out of reach of the parents’
attention and safely taken care of by hotel staff.
Fifth,
tourists will soon go for home food delivery in hotels
rather than in-house food. It is not uncommon to now
find hotels offering food ordered from a nearby food
chain like McDonald’s or Jollibee. They would rather eat
something that they like back home.
Sixth,
more and more tourists especially from
Europe and
North America, older but better-educated, will seek ecotourism and
cultural travel products. Rural tourism will become the
order of the day. People will look for places where they
can put their hands on and learn from that experience
like milking cows, planting rice themselves and doing
the rituals practiced by the local host population.
The
hectic 10-city, 10-day tour package is on the way out as
more tourists are prone to travel closer to home—not to
overlook what’s in one’s doorstep. Shorter distances and
shorter travel duration will be in thing. People will
tend to go for smaller destinations and off-the-beaten
path. Authenticity is the most important element in
tourism nowadays.
Prayer
rooms and services for no-pork menu will be installed in
tourist facilities to accommodate the growing population
of Islamic travellers.
Antarctica will soon become an ecotourism destination
complete with hotels, restaurants and full-service
tours. The tagline of the future: “Visit the
Antarctica before it melts down.”
By the
end of the decade, a score of management companies will
take control over the world inventory of branded hotel
rooms.
The
introduction of new technologies in the upscale tourism
industry will not replace the human element in service
delivery—to the contrary, it will gain importance.
People are more likely to patronize hotels with quality
service with human touch.
What are
the activities that tourists are looking for nowadays?
Climbing, ecotourism, agri-tourism, riding, adventure
travel, educational travel, and sport and health
tourism.
If China
is the workshop of the world, and India is the global
office, what can the Philippines be, she asked? |
