How the pandemic can reinvent tourism
After one year of home arrest, it’s obvious that many people will take over the streets. The increased demand will come with new consumption patterns, but the tour operators should not expect a return of the year 2019. In the new normal, they will have a huge opportunity to develop a new market niche but for this, they would have to speculate the consumption patterns.
The pandemic brought a revolution in the field of remote work even in the most conservative countries. In some countries, 30–40% of the employees are working remotely and there are expectations that up to 20% of the working force will remain remote even after the pandemic.
With 20% of the working force performing remote tasks, a great window of opportunity opens for tourism operators. After months of restriction and isolation, many remote workers will have a huge desire to travel, and their distance jobs will allow them to do that. We expect to see more and more young professionals taking their jobs and going into the world. Probably, until 2024 or 2025 it will become something common to have at least a few coworkers that will join the company meetings from various corners of the world. The new digital nomads will have better and more stable jobs and will be willing to spend higher amounts of money in the places they visit. Hospitality should take advantage of this opportunity.
But what stopped the remote workers from traveling and working before 2021 and 2020? Well, the remote jobs were not from everywhere. Most remote workers had to live in the proximity of the companies to be able to physically attend some of the meetings. Also, it was hard to work & travel because most hospitality units offer just sleeping and eating facilities.
Even today, it would be hard to work & travel because of the logistics. You would always be forced to look for some coworking facilities. That would raise your travel expenses quite significantly and reduce your time to be a tourist. You would have to look for a coworking space and go there with a laptop, spend your lunch break to find a nice dinner, and then carry back the laptop to the room. Not a lot of time remaining for actual tourism. And, if you travel to another time zone, the chances to find a coworking space that is open non-stop are close to zero and you will be forced to work and participate in meetings from the hotel room, probably small and unfit for something like that.
In the problem of the working space lies the opportunity for the hotels, bed & breakfast facilities, and Airbnb flats. To attract the new type of work & travel tourists investments in office facilities are needed. The traveler should have the possibility to work from a specially arranged room in the hotel. A space that, at a minimum, provides some good internet connections, a green screen for calls, a printer, some docking stations, and a good espresso machine. This 24-hour open office could be rented to tourists at an hourly rate and even offered to other remote workers from the area.
The benefits would be significant for all the participants in these transactions:
- The tourist will be confident that he has where to work and that he will save time to visit more local attractions; He will also move from one place to another with more confidence, knowing that the new places will provide good working conditions;
- The hotels will attract a new category of tourists and will be able to expand their seasons. Facilities that until 2020 were kept open for three or four months could now be kept open the entire year. Also, renting the offices could provide some additional streams of revenue for the hotels.
This kind of tourism would stimulate other domains. For example, it could revive the festival market by increasing the number of potential participants. The office job will stop being a problem for festival enthusiasts. Do you want to go to Mardi Gras but your job stops you? No problem. You can book a room at a hotel that provides office facilities, take the job with you and in the evening participate in the parades.
In the medium term, this new niche could also support online schooling. As 1990s kids, some of us have seen The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles and imagined how it would be to travel and learn in the historical places where the content of the manuals happened. In the 1990s not many families could afford to travel with private tutors and seeing that not all of us are fit to educate our children, the dream remained a dream. But now, in the new world emerging from the pandemic, we will have the opportunity to see the world with our children, enrolled in online programs of schooling. In a few years, we will probably see parents and children, traveling, working, and learning from all around the globe.
We are entering into a new era of traveling, a new time in which we will have the opportunity to become real citizens of the world.
