Survey Results: Small Travel Businesses & Technology

This spring I’ve been working with Derek Jirachaikitti and Stacy Magdaluyo,  two masters degree students from the University of San Diego’s School of International Relations and Pacific Studies program on a study of small travel businesses and their use of technology.

The results are in!  We surveyed the small business membership of the Adventure Travel Trade Association and received 350 responses from businesses around the globe.

Masai tour guide

Here are some of our findings, which we’ll be editorializing on in more depth in the coming weeks.

• 24% use internet-based applications for reservations and booking
• 37% use applications such as Gmail
• 40% use website analytics
• 62% use smart phones

Key issues cited as barriers to using technology were capital and manpower.

The prevalence of smart phones, especially among companies operating in developing countries where data plans often discourage usage, surprised me.  The findings about the use of Internet applications for business operations such as reservations were about what we expected; it’s no secret that the travel sector lags in this regard.

For all the disruptive travel technology startups out there, the point is being driven home as Derek noted:  any new technology created for the small and medium size tour operator market will have to be (1) inexpensive for both initial purchase and for any future upgrades (2) easy to learn and operate with limited knowledge of information technology (3) not require the use of extensive manpower or new and expensive equipment.

We’ll be working up a more extensive analysis so stay tuned.  If you have specific questions or interests in this area, please post a note and we’ll try to answer your questions.

Saudi Entrepreneurs

Here in Abha, Saudi Arabia, I’m spending a week leading a workshop for people who hope to launch small businesses in adventure tourism this year.  The workshop participants come not only from Saudi Arabia, but also Oman, Yemen, and Egypt.

Teams collaborate in Abha, Asir province, Saudi Arabia

They were attracted to this workshop, sponsored by the United Nations World Tourism Organization, because they want to find ways to engage young people in outdoor activities and stimulate economic activity in rural areas.  They think adventure tourism might have some potential.

Within the first couple hours of our meeting, the candid observations from this group of 60 government officials and would-be entrepreneurs have me widening my eyes in surprise:

“This culture is affecting the diffusion of adventure activities.  How can we solve this problem?  Tourism awareness should start with the schools!”

“It’s evident that Saudi people enjoy active pursuits, outside of the country Saudi’s do everything – climbing, cycling – but inside the country we observe the taboos.”

Outside Rijal Alma'a Village, Abha

This is my fifth visit to the region, but my first time in Saudi Arabia.  On past projects I have worked with entrepreneurs in rural areas of Morocco, Egypt and Jordan.  Based on that experience and what I knew of Saudi Arabia, I expected limited interaction given the closed, strict culture here.  On top of that, our meeting is located in the mountainous southern province of Asir, a more conservative region of the country.

Contrary to expectation however, the men in this group are animated, talkative, curious and open with their feelings about the country’s trajectory.  Draped in my new abaya and silky black headscarf, I had been shy to enter this formal conference room, but as the day goes and my partner and I continue to ask questions, we realize this is a welcoming audience, eager to share and to learn.

It has been all over the news that the Gulf region is in a state of massive transformation with the popular uprisings in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Syria, Bahrain and Oman in 2011.  Since 1970 the population of Arab nations has tripled, and the “youthquake” upsetting the order of the Middle East is presenting a wave of new challenges, opportunities and ideas.  We learn that in Saudi Arabia 57% of the population is under 30, and that they’re heavily networked – active with their iPhones on Facebook and Twitter.   In Yemen, it’s higher – 75% of the population is under the age of 30.

Saudi man ascends a challenge course at Asir National Park, Abha

Adventure tourism seems like an obvious niche for its accessibility to entrepreneurs and its potential to attract and engage young people.  The challenges here for small tourism businesses, despite the rich natural resources on which to build, are great, however.  The demand conditions – the sophistication of local customers, and the quality, safety and environmental standards of new products – are in infancy.

While they have many of the necessary inputs: natural assets, human resources, access to capital, they will need to create the administrative frameworks and environmental management policies necessary to support a thriving industry.

And of course there are some significant cultural issues to resolve, as highlighted by this question from a reporter today, “Will you have separate areas for the ladies to practice adventure tourism?”

Smart Mobile Services for Travel

TechCrunch: sometimes reading all the juicy tech news in this publication makes me nervous about all the things I’m not doing.  I try to minimize my exposure actually, but sometimes John Beckmann puts something really good in my line of sight and I can’t resist.  Yesterday he shared Saar Gur’s article called The Rise of Smart Mobile Services. Saar’s making a great point in this piece about services that are smart enough to know about our context and interrupt us with value.  (This would be,  for example, the opposite of what Voxer does to me every time someone they think I know starts using Voxer.)

Anyway.

Reading Saar’s article I immediately started thinking about how smart mobile services are making their way into travel, and what the potential is for them to have a beneficial impact on local entrepreneurs.

Saar says, “Why can’t I have the services below today?” And then lists a few.  One of which is, “Discover —  If there is awesome location-based content (or people for that matter), how come it is so hard to discover?”

Trekking with a group in Northern Montenegro

In travel there are a multitude of apps (not so many services as Saar distinguishes) seeking to provide information about local experiences to travelers.

But they’re not all that smart, yet.  Two key challenges I’ve seen in my work with small and medium sized travel business around the world:

1. Service providers – tour operators and guides – aren’t often able to describe their trips or services very well. I love adventure travel companies and have been often surprised with outstanding, fantastic experiences that were described as “a moderate-strenuous trek though the mountains.”  Conveying the spirit and brilliance of one’s trip is not always as easy as it might seem.
2. Bandwidth – in many emerging market destinations (and even in places here in the U.S. where you would think bandwidth would not be an issue!) connectivity is a serious impediment to location-based mobile services.

To compensate for this, we’re seeing companies like Lonely Planet release “mobile” guides that can be downloaded to your phone and work offline.  Lonely Planet has done the writing, and they’ve created something that gets around the bandwidth problem by working offline.  Digital Footsteps is another example of a mobile travel app.  I met these guys at the World Travel Mart in London last year – they have a cloud-based tour builder that’s pretty nifty, but it will be a while before some of the best off-the-beaten path type experience providers are able to take the best advantage of this.

Many of the challenges to smart mobile services in travel will have to ultimately be resolved by teams of people who come from different specializations and branches of government.  Given the pressure from travelers who want these services, and the excitement on the part of developers, I have a feeling we’ll make it happen.

Using Mobile Applications in Tourism Development

Recently I was asked to provide video of myself public speaking.  I had to go rooting around, searching for evidence of my presentations at conferences and in the process turned up this clip from the MTV/NPR Roadtrip Nation interview from a few years ago.  I found this one minute and fifty seconds of myself talking about the potential adventure tourism has to bring economic development to rural communities. 

I still believe all this stuff!  What’s different now, though, is that I have a greater appreciation for the political shifts that have to occur in order for some of these visions come true, and the level of sustained, persistent, coordination among interdependent entities and bureaucracies that’s necessary.

I started reflecting on some of our past field assignments and thinking that if we could go back, we would want to emphasize technology more heavily, particularly tools that spark greater collaboration and make use of mobile phones.  Back in 2008 when our team went from projects in India, Peru, China and Mongolia, we weren’t focused on technology as an enabler the way we are now.

I’m a new fan of services like those being offered by Spreecast, and wonder if the bandwidth requirements would still make services like this difficult to apply in the development context, where we’re often in places that lack strong enough internet connections.  Also, initiatives such as the mHealth for Ethiopia project sponsored by the Gates Foundation that I’m currently working on with Vital Wave Consulting have got me thinking about ways we might be able to use technology more forcefully in our development efforts.  In Ethiopia, rural health workers will use their mobiles according to a structured protocol to interact with remote medical professionals.  Rural entrepreneurs in the travel sector have a set of needs that could be organized along similar lines to those describing the rural health workers of Ethiopia: training and education, supply chain management, data exchange…

And then there’s Lonely Planet’s release this week of their mobile guidebook apps, which work offline.  GPS-endabled tools let travelers pinpoint their location on a map and find the nearest services included in the guide.  Cool stuff.

On my next project, I’d like to try and bring mobile into the equation more prominently, maybe trying things like

• Supporting tour operators and guides – rural entrepreneurs – with regular information updates about factors that impact their operations such as road closures, water levels, temperature, electricity outages
• Capturing traveler impact on remote environments through text messages from guides
• Updating local businesses about progress of destination development initiatives
• Conducting more frequent “Town Hall” type meetings with the cross-sector stakeholders of a project over the Internet

Women + Mobile + Travel

It’s a popular and important theme these days: thinking and writing about the causes of global poverty and the failures of various societal and institutional systems to support environmental and human needs.  Many people are looking for ways to mobilize governments, businesses, and individuals to change their behaviors and bring about the changes we need.  As a social entrepreneur since 2004, I count myself part of this happily expanding tribe, and it’s in this spirit that I share my thoughts on an article I read today, which sparked some new ideas.

Over coffee this morning, I scanned a Tnooz piece in my email about Women and Travel Technology.  In the article, blogger Siew Hoon Yeoh referenced a UN study about tourism as a vehicle for gender equality and empowerment and points out that women also drive e-commerce, contributing up to 70% of revenues to retail sites from fashion to fiction.

Ms. Yeoh’s article reminded me of another study about women and technology, which wasn’t specific to travel, but examines the situation with women and mobile in developing countries.  It found that mobile phone ownership can improve access to educational, health, business and employment opportunities and help women lead more secure, connected and productive lives. (Vital Wave Consulting for Cherie Blair Foundation and GSMA: Women and Mobile, A Global Opportunity). The Vital Wave report also found that women in developing countries represent potentially $13B in unrealized, incremental phone service revenues for mobile service providers.

And then (now into a second cup of coffee) I started reflecting my own research and work with clients over the past few years which has been focused on exploring niche tourism, specifically adventure tourism, as a catalyst for change.  I’ve led a number of projects exploring this subject, trying to build awareness and generate enthusiasm and ultimately investment for adventure tourism:

• A market study with the Adventure Travel Trade Association and George Washington University with the goal of legitimizing and proving that adventure travel is more than a tiny niche – the team conducted consumer survey research to estimate the adventure travel market at $89 billion
• Numerous case studies and reports for clients exploring sustainable adventure tourism as a catalyst for environmental conservation and economic growth
• Extensive research into entrepreneurial investments and why adventure companies and destinations seemed to be missing the mark in terms of gaining investor interest from micro-lenders and impact investors ( Xola Consulting 2009 Adventure Industy Research Roundup)

This morning, thinking about this collection of studies, I noticed a new avenue of investigation with terrific potential, an equation we haven’t delved into yet:

Women + Mobile + Entrepreneurship + Tourism = Change

I know anecdotally from my own set of experiences working with entrepreneurial tourism businesses around the globe -  India, China, Cambodia, Nepal, Bhutan, Brazil, Mexico, Montenegro, Argentina, Peru, and many others – that women are behind many of these businesses with the power to convene groups and mobilize communities around specific goals.

But I’ve never tried to build exactly this case before, and expressing the idea in the form of  an equation feels right. It’ll be fun to see where this leads.