Everything starts with a dream, including tourism
GAL HANA,
Israel Counsel of Tourism for Canada
Hana
The year is 2040.
You’re sitting in your home office, which actually means wearing your AR (Augmented Reality) Glasses and gear depicting you in the old mahogany wooden style office with your colleagues putting together the strategic plan for 2041.
It was a hectic year thanks to the new adventurous Earth Gazing from the Moon itinerary.
During the meeting, you realize you need a vacation so you are “thinking a note’’ that your AI self will start to prepare.
Alongside the meeting, your AI is formulating the first draft of alternatives for a vacation based on your current free income, savings, and Netflix preferences.
It will also highlight the positive experience the kids had in the zoo as opposed to the stressful visit in downtown, which the AI recognize from the IoT sensors on the cloths.
The AI also took into consideration that in the last 3 weeks both you and your wife emphasized hiking and more adventure and outdoor activities.
By the time you are ‘back home,’ you and your wife are wearing your VR gear and virtually going abroad to examine the different itineraries.
You check the flight experience in 3 airlines, visiting in 4 hotels, strolling in few food markets and even receive some dishes that are available locally to taste that based on your culinary preferences the AI ordered in advance, to make the experience a whole.
For some, this scenario might sound like a sci-fi movie script, but for many others it is the present.
The world is moving forward faster than ever and changes are getting more frequent.
As we are in the era of acceleration and disruption, we need to constantly challenge our perception, adjust and evolve in no-time.
The luxury our ancestors and past generations had in absorbing a change, and in acclimating is not relevant anymore and the need is for an agile approach and fast learning organizations.
The question of how to do that is what keeps so many up at night and focus, mainly, on how to nurture the mindset to promote innovation, creativity, out of the box and critical thinking.
Martin Luther King, Jr. once said that “You don’t have to see the whole staircase, just take the first step.”
This lay the basis for the learning organization – the ability to dream, take the risk in a world of uncertainties and welcome a failure as a means for an end.
2020 will always be remembered as one of the most terrible years in history, and for a good reason.
After many years of economic global prosperity in general, and for the travel and tourism industry in specific, the collapse was hard as the world moved from over-tourism to no-tourism, from numerous airline companies to a shrinking aviation industry, from a leisure and experience orientation to a health and sanitary-centric approach.
However, to go back to Martin Luther King’s words, what we need now is dreams, big and ambitious dreams.
We need to dream on how to bounce back and to restart travel and tourism better than before.
The main question that occupies many is how to lay the foundation for recovery in the short term, but parallel to that and not less important, as a preparation for the future challenges, needs and demands.
The ability to connect between different themes, narratives and concepts into one holistic vision based on processing vast data from as many as possible resources while dreaming on the future.
In that regard, you can depict the future but to also, base it on concrete information and logic.
2021 will be a better year, and you do not need to be a prophet to think that – it is based on data and information.
From first signs of mass vaccinations in many countries, the peace and normalization agreements in the Middle East, the awareness of many to subjects such as inclusivity, responsibility and concerns of society reflect more than a hope, it represent dreams.
Our focus should be on promoting the dreamers to enhance our imagination, to give us the creative inspiration to re-build our industry, to gather everyone after such a crisis in collaboration to formulate an eco-system that will both tackle the past but also the future challenges to create a better and promising present.