TRADE SHOWS
For the inbound market to the USA, the International Pow Wow will remain the linchpin gathering for U.S. suppliers and destinations that are developing Visit USA travel business from overseas, Canada and Mexico. And now that its owner, the U.S. Travel Association, has partnered with Brand USA in operating the event, it has the de facto imprimatur of official U.S. policy. In addition to Pow Wow, Brand USA will be operating pavilions at 19 international trade shows, giving a common signature—or , possibly, explanation point—to the USA travel product.
Pow Wow has been around since 1969 and has evolved from a place where face-to-face business meeting where contracts were actually signed to annual reunion where US suppliers re-connect with their clients and make highly valuable media contacts who can provide them with in-market exposure. And now, with Brand USA and its financial resources behind it, organizers will be able host new levels of tour operators to the event. DMO and suppliers that do not market that much internationally will likely turn to newer regional trade shows (Travel South Showcase, Discover New England, Go West Summit as well as receptive operator shows such as NAJ Summits and the RSAA Summit.
U.S. DOMESTIC TOURISM
National Parks: One fairly reliable measure of the health of the tourism industry in the U.S. is the traffic to and within the network of sites operated by the 97-year-old U.S. National Park Service (NPS). With about 75 percent of all leisure travel in the nation conducted by automobile, the NPS system of 58 parks and 340 other sites (historic sites, heritage areas, buildings and battlefields) are a visitor friendly haven for those seeking an inexpensive sampling of the tourism product. With the exception of vehicular passes, most of the parks do not charge admission and—especially important for group travelers—they all have adequate, clean rest-room facilities. In and about the parks has grown up a large infrastructure of food service, travel supplier facilities, campgrounds and tour services that respond to each uptick or depression in the visitor flow.
The post-9/11 shock and some gasoline price spikes drove park visitation numbers down through 2006, with a steady recovery evident in the just less than 273 million visitors in 2006 to 279 million in 2011. The parks have become a staple, too, for international visitors, who marvel at some of the beauty of the recognized “brands” in the system—Yosemite, the Grand Canyon, Yellowstone—as well as our reverence for places such as Ford’s Theatre in Washington, D.C.—the place where Abraham Lincoln was assassinated—and the converted school building in Topeka, Kan., that figured in the landmark 1954 U.S. Supreme Court decision (Brown vs. Topeka Board of Education) that ended racial segregation of schools in America.
And based on reports coming from every major component of the tour and travel industry supplier side—tour operator organizations, including the American Bus Association, NTA, Ontario Motor Coach Association, the U.S. Tour Operators Association and the U.S. Travel Association—the outlook for domestic leisure travel is optimistic for 2013 with modest growth of 3-5%.
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Agritourism Surging: A word that is barely more than 10 years old now identifies one of the most rapidly growing segments of domestic tourism in the United States. As farms and farm-related places to visit—this includes vineyards, truck farms where patrons pick their own fruit or produce and mazes—proliferated, the product began to better identify itself. California and Illinois now have extensive agritourism programs both readily accessible through interactive online directories and services at their respective state departments of agriculture. Within the industry, the trade publication Group Travel Magazine has created a special website, Agritourismworld.com to service the market.
Domestic Operators Adapting to Demographic Shift: Technology, groups and tastes have changed and so have the ways that operators cater to their favorite groups, especially seniors. As Baby Boomers have spilled into the pool of customers by the millions since 2008—this was the first year that they could retire at age 62 and still receive Social Security benefits—operators have found that tchotchkes with company logos and sun visors don’t quite cut it anymore. The more fit-minded Boomers, who also eschew large groups, have persuaded operators to retain group leaders who might double as Zumba or yoga instructors from health clubs, not just from senior centers. And the size of groups has continued to decrease over the past four years to such a degree that operators are now creating tours designed for 10-to-15 travelers using luxury mini-buses. This year millions of seniors will have received tablets and smart phones as Christmas or birthday gifts from their loved ones; this will dramatically change the way operators communicate with their clients in the future.
ASSOCIATIONS When Roger Dow came aboard eight years ago as president and CEO of the U.S. Travel Association, he immediately set about to organize a team that would change the situation in which the association (formerly known as Travel Industry Association) had been largely regarded as a letterhead organization. Within four years, the Travel Business Roundtable (TBR) had folded into US Travel and a group of a baker’s dozen of industry leaders, including TBA’s head, Jonathan Tisch, CEO of Loews Hotels, had a White House meeting with President Obama—a first-ever for the industry.
As US Travel has passed on some of its marketing role over to Brand USA (after leading the legislative battle for its creation) Dow has increased the association’s Washington profile. It has a successful “fly-in” event in the spring, aimed at bringing industry leaders from through the U.S. together with their Representatives and Senators, and it takes on issues important to any and all sectors of the industry.
People in the association community point to US Travel as model for shifting from a mostly membership organization to a real trade association. While US Travel does not quite have the clout of a National Rifle Association (NRA), it is acknowledged as effective lobbyist for the travel and tourism industry, thwarting threats of fund cutoffs for industry programs, defusing potentially damaging conflicts before they reach the conflict stage and functioning as “first responders” to crises that may threaten the industry.
Dow has recorded success, in part, because he is both non-partisan and bipartisan, bringing together at the same stable of key players who are Democrat (Jonathan Tisch, CEO of Loews Hotels and a major fund raiser for the Democratic party) and Republican (the just retired Bill Marriott, CEO of the company of the same name and prominent supporter of Republican Presidential candidate Mitt Romney)—a rare feat in the sharply partisan environment of Washington. Nor is it a personal matter; Dow’s version of US Travel is one that has become institutional—it doesn’t matter who succeeds him as president and CEO. The template is in place, and the travel and tourism industry has both a seat at the table, as well as at this year’s inauguration of President Obama for a second term.
Feud Complicates Work of NTA, ABA: Not quite of the blood variety, the contretemps between the American Bus Association (ABA) and NTA had been low-grade in the past several years, triggered by the breakdown of talks between the two organizations as they were trying to merge their two trade shows—ABA’s Marketplace and NTA’s Travel Exchange—so as to create greater economy and efficiency for their supplier and DMO members. This year’s shows are a wee 10 days apart. And in 2015, they will be less than 100 hours apart. It makes for a tough call to small and mid-size suppliers and destinations who need the group tour traffic that NTA and ABA operators members provide, but who operate under very tight budgets. Which one to choose?
Dates and Locations of ABA Marketplace & NTA Travel Exchange 2013-2016
Source: ABA, NTA
What complicated matters and made them worse was an episode last summer in which a new tour operator wanna-be (a new ABA member in the Washington, D.C. area, equipped with a list from ABA) sent a wave of e-mails to members of both organizations, asking which would be better to join. The situation got to the point that NTA hired a private detective to investigate the matter. This prompted an angry ABA president and CEO, Peter Pantuso, to wonder if NTA was going to sift through his garbage. Needless to say, merger discussions won’t take place in2013.
ABA, meanwhile, has diversified. It bid for and got the contract to manage Skål International USA (SIUSA)—the U.S. branch of a worldwide business networking and social organization for travel and tourism professionals whose name means “cheers” or a toast to one’s health—and run its day-to-day operations through 2013, with options to secure a long-term relationship. It seems like a natural extension of the way Pantuso, who’s headed ABA for 16 years and who has worked for several national associations, does business in Washington, D.C., where he is active in numerous organizations.
NTA will be paying greater attention to its international operations, in particular, to its nearly 150-member China Inbound Program—NTA is the organization specifically designated by the Chinese government to accredit operators to serve leisure tour groups in the USA—which has done well.
The advantage in the feud goes to ABA, primarily because it has a Washington presence (NTA is headquartered in Lexington, Ky.) and its staff, stacked with careerists from our nation’s capital, does a solid job in lobbying legislators and federal agencies who oversee the motorcoach industry.
Travel Alliance Partners (TAP), the organization that started less than 10 years ago as a splinter group of NTA members with a focus on domestic (it has an international outbound component, too) has kept a stable membership—at 34 operators, but its product has grown in its signature product line, its Guaranteed Departure tours, tours that cannot be canceled even if but one customer has made a deposit for a reservation. Its 2013 program has more than 250 in the Guaranteed Departure category, but its members—with its Guaranteed Departures as an anchor—have been able to expand the rest of the line into such new products as a Circle North Dakota, Civil War tours and a Route 66 tour in Oklahoma, where much of the historic highway remains intact.
DMOs Now that research organizations have become better able to break down the economic impact of the “visitor industry” (this takes in business travelers, conventioneers and tourists), convention and visitors bureaus have continued the rebranding of their identity—dropping the words “convention” and “bureau”—and shifting to a title that encourages people to “visit,” “ experience” or “discover” their destinations. “Visitor” is by far the favorite, with some 40 key CVBs having made the change in recent years, including the two largest state destinations in the U.S.—Visit California and Visit Florida. Funding remains a problem, however, which helps explain the growing popularity of the Business Improvement District (BID) or Tourism Improvement District (TID), in which a community creates a defined area in which hotels and other tourism entities self-assess their businesses to pay for business and leisure travel promotion. For DMOs, Brand USA is a welcome boost, as the latter lifts the burden of financing destination-specific promotion abroad; they will be better able to promote through co-op programs, tie-ins and through campaigns that target specific overseas source markets. |
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