Q&A: Doug Lansky on "unbalanced" tourism and tech's role in destination management

Doug Lansky is a tourism thought leader who speaks on issues related to destination marketing and management at conferences around the world.

In a broad-ranging interview, Lansky shared his views on why the industry needs “a new sheriff in town,” how technology can enable destination management and why much of what is currently happening is “greenwashing.”

What do you think about the current state of destination marketing?

It’s kind of like DMOs got out in front of the crowd and called it a parade. People were coming to the destinations anyway, before DMOs existed, and then they realized they could add some lighter fluid to that to accelerate it.

They spend a lot of money on data, doing a lot of savvy online marketing and then they turn around to the government officials and say we spent this much money and we made this much on tourism. What’s inferred is that all that tourism spend was due to what the DMO did, which is stretching it a little.

If the DMO wasn’t here, they’d have less tourists but it’s hard to say exactly how many. The landscape has changed with social media, with so many other things, it’s hard to know the effect [if a DMO shut down].

It also depends on the strength of the destination’s attractions. You’ve got a trendy yoga attraction and you turn off the DMO money, it may survive just fine.

The other thing is DMOs are trying to market their way out of a management problem. I’m referring to what is known as overtourism, or I prefer to call it unbalanced tourism. Overtourism personally I don’t like the sound of it because it implies there are too many tourists everywhere. And there are not.

There are pockets and seasons where there are too many. And overtourism sounds like you’re just supposed to shrug and go well what can we do, we’re flooded. Whereas unbalanced sounds like ok, let’s balance it, there’s some action that can be taken. And there is.

What advice do you have for a destination that wants to take action to rebalance itself?

There needs to be - just like with advertising and editorial, just like with church and state - a firewall between marketing and destination management. A lot of places have said we’ll call ourselves a DMMO and then we’re marketing and we’re management.

The problem is they are trying to police themselves. They are still getting, in theory, bonuses for bringing more people than last year. Then how are you supposed to manage it?

You need someone that pushes against it, a separate but equal force to check the balance of powers. And what they’ll often say is we’re marketing in the off-season now. Not that marketing in the off-season is bad - it’s a step in the right direction - but a lot of what’s going on is you can’t market your way out of this entirely. You need real management.

Every organization, big business thinks they don’t need regulating, and if you look at the long-term they all benefit from it, in trustworthiness for their industry. Everyone will benefit from smart regulation, it just feels counter-intuitive to put it into place. It feels anti-business.

The way you stop people from coming, the most basic way is the same way that airlines and hotels and attractions like the Anne Frank House do it. There’s a reason they have put limits on the number of people they can accommodate or transport.

We need to apply that same successful business thinking to other aspects of the industry. And not be so shocked and surprised that us not doing that is leading to issues. Yes that’s simplifying things, and it’s different for every destination, but it is possible.

Explain more about how destinations can manage visitor volume?

The easiest, most capitalistic way is that [for example] when you’ve got your five marquee attractions – they all sell time-ticketed entry and you connect it and put it out with an API.

So then when someone is booking flights or hotels to go to Barcelona, a window pops up and says, “Just so you know the Gaudí House-Museum, Park Güell, La Sagrada Familia and the Museu Picasso are all full on those days. Are you sure you want to go?”

And part of what needs to happen is for destinations to start building a digital infrastructure where they connect all the ticketing platforms and get everyone on the same page.

Doug Lansky

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It’s just being open and honest with them. And then if they are going to visit a friend or go to a business conference and they don’t care, they can go anyway. But others might go oh, we want to see those main attractions, so we better change our dates.

That’s how you spread out the season. And you are doing them a favor, because if they go there and they can’t get into those things, they’ll be pretty bummed out.

And part of what needs to happen is for destinations to start building a digital infrastructure where they connect all the ticketing platforms and get everyone on the same page. And then they can do all sorts of clever stuff, not so different from what Disney does.

Disney, when they see a big crowd in one area, they have their NASA-like command center and they go, there’s a big crowd there so let’s dispatch Mickey in a parade to pull some people off and get them to go over there. So in a city, if you see crowds congregating and places are sold out, you can say 50% off at this museum just this afternoon.

To have a digital infrastructure to me feels like a utility, water and so forth, and a city should be making and managing that. And the problem is, if a city doesn’t, Google or GetYourGuide or Airbnb or Expedia is going to come into that space and somehow do it.

And then they’ll have all the data, they’re going to be running these cities when they shouldn’t be.

But this strategy means the airlines and hotels have to be willing to put the brakes on visitors too – is that likely?

Airlines and hotels are living in their little bubble. Hotels are, for example, saying our occupancy rates are great, let’s build more hotels. What they don’t realize is people aren’t visiting for the hotel.

They are visiting for what’s outside the hotel. And by jamming more people in and just looking at occupancy rates and seeing they can make more money out of it, what they are forgetting is they are contributing to the bloating of the destination, which is ruining the very product that people are coming to see.

A city can have tourists, but the tourists shouldn’t have the city.

Doug Lansky

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These same hoteliers would be savvy enough to understand they shouldn’t let people pick coral off their reefs, which would then ruin the destination and it would ruin their future.

But they are doing a more discrete version of that in cities, where they are going hey we can get more people in here. They are ignoring the fact that the main attractions are full.

The problem is, there are so many players. So for example, if Sheraton says we’re really filling up the town, so we shouldn’t build a new hotel, do you think the other 98 stakeholders will do the same thing? Even if there are some hotels thinking it, if they decide not to build, someone else will do it.

The tourism industry needs a new sheriff in town. It will, I’m confident, long-term make it more sustainable and more profitable for the destination and make the life quality better for the locals that live there.

What really needs to happen ... you need to speak to tourism ministers and government-level secretaries of interior and tourism, above the CEO of the DMO, and say “We need a new department, with trained people on the management side with a whole new budget and a new mandate.”

And then I’d push for a third prong, which is a development team.

Look at Disney. They have their marketing department and then they have people working on crowd control - dispatching of parades, how many turnstiles to open at what time of day, how many monorails - and then they have their Disney Imagineers who are coming up with new stuff. And in many respects a destination is not so different from an amusement park.

The topic of destination management has certainly been in the industry spotlight in recent years, and the World Travel and Tourism Council has sustainable growth as one of its priorities. Those are signals we’re moving in the right direction, right?

The problem is, they keep talking about the problem but they’re not talking about realistic solutions. And the solutions they do talk about are like marketing in the off-season. Or like in Amsterdam where they took the “bold” move and said please don’t come.

It’s a lot of greenwashing. Unless you put in some specific tools. No one wants to be the bad parent and tell visitors not to come, but why can’t we can just show them with supply and demand data?

What’s your outlook for the future?

I’m pro capitalistic, pro travel and I love to see the industry succeed. But my mission is really like I’m on a one-man crusade to save tourism from itself. What we need to do is to redefine what success is in tourism. If I ask people what is success, they just think more visitors than we had last year.

That’s a failed metric. It’s like one scoop of ice cream is good, and two scoops, maybe three you could say is better, but 34 scoops isn’t better. It just ends up on the sidewalk and gives you a stomachache.

There’s a finite amount of space to get into the key attractions, to walk on the street without feeling like you are in Times Square, to lay on the beach in a reasonable way.

I believe the success of tourism is four things:

• I think it’s having a maximized local economic impact, which takes into considerations costs and leakages such as the cost to clean up a beach after a bachelor parties and for the water treatment plant to handle all the extra toilet flushes, and then leakages which is the 16 to 17% that goes to brands like Hilton headquarters and franchises that have motherships where a lot of the profit doesn’t stay there locally. And maybe even it means giving tax breaks to locally owned companies if the money is staying and having a better local impact.
• Next is, are you protecting key assets? If you are not protecting buildings that are falling down, the coral reef – you haven’t future proofed yourself. When you are saying we are worth visiting, we are special, and then you don’t have management in place, the very things you are calling special are about to get ruined.
• Third, is it good for locals? If tourism doesn’t work for locals, it doesn’t work in my mind. A city can have tourists, but the tourists shouldn’t have the city. For example, using some of the money from tourism to have some free days at museums for locals and booked times for locals. So they are not just putting up with crowds of tourists all the time, they are getting a nice benefit too.
• And finally keeping the quality of product high. Sometimes you need refresher courses on getting excited about welcoming tourists. It’s focusing on the customer service and the product offer so the quality remains high.

If we are looking at those things as measures of success, and not just more visitors, I think that can help get us back on track for starters.