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Eulogio Bordas at the 3rd International Tourism Summit organized by IESE and Cornell

The people travel to have and to experiment emotional states. Travellers are looking for a kind of happiness, said Eulogio Bordas at the 3rd International Tourism Summit organized by IESE and Cornell University. We are facing a turbulence on the tourism business models, they are old.

For the past 40 years we have been innovating very slowly, and the work we didn’t do must to be done now and quickly, adds Bordas as part of the ‘The Tourism Industry: A Vision for the Future’ panel shared with Isabel Hill, Director of the Travel and Tourism Industries Office at the US Department of Commerce, Jose Luis Zoreda from Exceltur, among others.

Some of the main issues described below, on the words of Eulogio Bordas, will create the small revolution that the tourism industry needs.

Developing new STP strategies
Direction number one is the development of new segmentation, position and marketing strategy. Here we need a small revolution. For example, The results of recent researches show that travellers at least can be decomposed on six different typologies. They look for different things, they look for different motivations, they have different resources. They are looking for a complete different value proposition.

So we need to change at least the first part of the business model to be capable to capture this very different demand.

Or “new markets”, tourism for adventures, for sports, for nature, for wellness, for good life, for masstige, for peace of mind, for causes, or for hyper-tourism and we can go until 60 different sectors.

Improving the customer value proposition
We cannot afford to deliver a great value proposition simultaneously with the same business model for 60 different sectors, this doesn’t work. We need to start really segmenting, focusing on certain segments and delivering great customer value.

Repositioning brands
For example Relais & Chateaux has been talking “ We have very nice hotels, luxurious ones for very special clients and we sell nice rooms”. Now they say “We want to deliver happiness”.

Capitalizing on key partners
We need to be sure that we will have permanent access to the key resources and we will be capable to perform the activities. We need to partner for this.

So the future is also for partnership, and we have to capitalize on key partners.

Some examples on the tourism industry:
Royal Caribbean and Dubailand partnership to make joint marketing and promotional activities.
National Geographic and South Africa, in order to guarantee a lot of advertorial and reportage, developed by National Geographic about South Africa.
Tourism of Australia partnership with Virgin in order to promote special events in Australia.

Reinventing digital distribution strategies
We need to reinvent the distribution strategies. People from the Dream Society tries to get emotional-positive states, they want to dream, they want to enjoy, rewarding experiences and we are achieving them with these boring website (referring to booking.com), this is the antidream site. The technology behind this is incredible and the job these guys are doing is fantastic, but this is boring and this is not satisfying the desires of the rest of us.

One of the main directions is covering the full travel circle.

Today nobody is managing this in an integrated way and I’m sure that in the future we will see how new commerce will put all this pieces together. Today we have partial solutions.

So the question is… either we change the business models or fifty years ahead the today’s industry will be owned by others.