Arnie Weissmann
Arnie Weissmann

Is leisure travel's apparent boom masking an uneven recovery? Geoff Freeman, CEO of U.S. Travel, knows that it is. Taking the stage at the opening general session of the International Inbound Travel Association's annual summit, held this week in San Diego, he pointed to stats showing that, although domestic leisure travel numbers often exceeded 2019, itself a record year, business and group travel are at 70% to 80% of where they were in 2019 and in many instances seem to be plateauing.

Even these aggregate numbers mask the bleaker reality in some destinations. Las Vegas is doing quite well; San Francisco, not so much. "We're seeing cities really struggle to get business and group travel back," Freeman said.

And, more to the point for the group he was addressing, in 2022 "we welcomed about 60% of the international visitors we welcomed in 2019. Even worse, we only welcomed 50% of the spend. We've got real challenges on the international side."

Some of the challenges, notably yearlong-plus visa delays in Mexico, Colombia and India, have been widely reported. But Freeman also pointed to our broader situation, showing a slide filled with words and phrases that impact travel but were not on most people's minds prior to the pandemic: Inflation. Labor shortages. Fentanyl. Public health concerns.

"Ten years ago, if you ran a destination, you weren't really worried about affordable housing for your workforce," he said. "You really weren't worried about crime for the most part, homelessness. We certainly weren't talking about fentanyl.

"Today, there's an increasing expectation that industry leaders solve these problems, or at least have a point of view on them. But the truth is, every one of these problems is bigger than every one of us. Bigger than our industry. I worry about focus and where we can put our limited resources to make a difference. I think, for U.S. Travel, we stay focused on a unique mission: Increased travel, full stop."

I would agree that while drugs, homelessness and crime may impact a destination, most travel enterprises are not going to make much of a dent in resolving these issues beyond giving general support for community efforts to address them. But travel is directly connected to other words on his slide: Overtourism. Travel boycotts. Food waste. Single-use plastics. Climate.

I raised my hand and asked, if sustainability is one of his organization's four pillars, does U.S. Travel's focus on increasing travel also carry the responsibility to address concerns about overtourism and other sustainability-related issues in which tourism has been implicated or blamed?

He replied that one of U.S. Travel's priorities is to build a game plan for assessing the footprint of the industry and how it's communicated. "But," he added, "I don't think, by any measure, that less travel can be part of our game plan. Figuring out how to do this in the most responsible way, figuring out how we earn the goodwill of policymakers and leaders in these communities has to be part of our strategy. Obviously, some people don't want more visitors to their ski town. We need a strategy to address that, and the strategy can't be 'OK, you win.' The strategy is, how do we get where we want to go together?"

I applaud his approach to work with community stakeholders but wonder if agreement can always be reached if "less travel cannot be part of the game plan." I believe I understand where Freeman is coming from; with inbound travel challenged and group and business travel down double-digits, a focus on "increased travel, full stop" is a straightforward target until recovery is achieved.

Still, while growth has always been the primary indicator of a business' (or industry's) health, the potential impact of overtourism can breed business-killing resentment in communities that feel overwhelmed by visitation.

The question of destination saturation arose on the panel that followed -- "What Sustainability Means in the U.S." -- which I moderated. Cathy Ritter, CEO of Better Destinations, noted that "destinations where I'm working that tend to have too many visitors are feeling the impacts."

Ultimately, the question of growth may be one of quantity versus quality and, judging from Ritter's comments, bottom-line growth is likely to be impacted if visitation growth is nonnegotiable in discussions with communities.

"It's very important when we talk about increasing travel to make certain we're doing it in a way that will benefit the perception of tourism and support for tourism," Ritter said. "Attracting the wrong kind of traveler creates a backlash against tourism that can take years to repair."

Ritter's observation is not incompatible with Freeman's assumed end goal of increasing his members' revenue and profits, though it suggests a more nuanced approach than "increased travel, full stop." While everyone understands the concept "less is more," its opposite, "more is less," can at times be equally true. 

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