That night in my motel room I did a lot of heavy thinking about what I’d seen during the day. Visions of McDonald’s restaurants dotting crossroads all over the country paraded through my brain.
-- Ray Kroc, founder of McDonald’s
Sometimes you have to acknowledge the company you keep and own up to it. Sometimes you need to look at that company -- other subsectors of our industry, the trends they are seeing and the ways in which they are adapting -- in order to chart your own business path.
Although it is rarely discussed, the lowest part-timer on the travel sales food chain is a member of something we call the Travel, Tourism and Hospitality Industry. Enroll in Cornell University for a degree in hotel management, and you will be taking courses in meat science. Study travel and tourism, and you will need to acquaint yourself with the impact that the restaurant industry has on the hospitality business.
We like to see ourselves as custodians of the world, docents and guides to all that is worth seeing in a life fulfilled. We enjoy telling people we are in travel, and we eagerly await the inevitable response: “You are so lucky to be able to travel for free.”
But I am going to ask you to consider a more macro view of what we do each workday. I am going to suggest that we are part of something bigger, one of the largest components of the entire U.S. economy (and global economy, for that matter): the travel and tourism sector. Last year, we generated approximately $1.8 trillion in economic output and accounted for about 8 million jobs. One out of every 18 people in the U.S. works in our industry.
International travel is one of our most valued exports. We account for about 25% of the services exported to other nations.
The fastest-growing of these sectors is inbound business, which is poised to hit $200 billion in annual revenue and generates a significant trade surplus in the bargain. People want to come here, and they are doing so in increasing numbers.
Per-visitor spending, poised to reach historic highs, currently exceeds $4,000. And since business travel and short trips are included in that figure, the average spend of a couple on vacation has to be far more.
Who are the visitors who spend the most when they visit us? The top contributors to the U.S. economy, the visitor group we ought to be thanking profusely when we see them visiting our cities and our national parks, are residents of India. The Chinese are, as they often seem to be these days, in second place. But that is temporary and is on track to change in the next 24 months.
So, we are part of something really big and substantial, and we are all linked to one another in a complex web of supportive businesses. We don’t always see the big picture as we toil away on our GDS or figure out how we can get a client out of the middle seat on a sold-out aircraft.
If you take this huge entity -- travel, tourism and hospitality -- and try to break it down into terms that have meaning, you will find that there are about 25 subsectors of the industry. Break that down further and you will find that four sectors actually dominate. They are air travel; attractions and recreation outlets; lodging; and -- here’s the kicker -- food services.
My premise is that we travel consultants are linked as closely as we can be with the lodging industry. Consider:
Air travel is what we do; it still accounts for the majority of revenue for most agency locations.
And we have close links to the major recreation and theme parks that generate huge numbers. Just last year, for instance, Disney generated $1.8 billion in profits. While it is a huge, multifaceted entertainment company, the fastest-growing of Disney’s five core businesses was theme parks and recreation, which surged 9%. So, yes, we are linked to theme parks.
The only one of the four major subsectors of the tourism industry that we pay scant attention to -- ignoring at our own business peril -- is the food industry, particularly the most important segment of that industry, the one that our clients use most frequently, fast-food franchises.
One day, after writing a consumer travel column for a Chicago-area newspaper group, I was summoned to an important meeting. The editors said they were interested in the fact that I had been writing a Q&A column for three years and a great many of the questions from readers had more to do with restaurants and food than with travel.
It seemed that the readers were ahead of us, and we were not picking up on a trend. No newspaper in America was taking the reader inside the restaurant business. To get that kind of information you would have to subscribe to one of the better food trade publications that the public never sees.
I was asked to start a new dining guide, to write about food and the restaurant industry, and to write long restaurant reviews.
While I was learning as much as I could about this important business sector, I continued to run my travel business. And the more I got into it, the more I realized that there were real synergies between restaurant management and travel management.
Other industries are much better than ours in analyzing and understanding our clients. The day-to-day stories in the food industry can help us understand our clients better. They can even inspire us.
McDonald’s, for example, noticed several years ago that the percentage of moms bringing their children to the chain’s restaurants was not growing. Mothers make the breakfast and lunch decisions and figure heavily in terms of dinner decisions. They were avoiding McDonald’s because while the kids found plenty to like on the menu, the moms found scant nutritional value to brag about.
That was the origin of McDonald’s salad menu, and it spurred the company to take a more proactive approach to healthy options for adults.
A small observation like that can lead us to reconsider our appeal to the soccer mom, the critical family decision-maker in the travel planning process.
How accessible are we during the day when the kids are in school, or late in the evening when working mothers finally have time to discuss their travel options?
How do we communicate that we care about the health and safety of children who travel with their parents?
In what ways do we demonstrate that we are not their grandmother’s travel practitioners (despite the fact that our average age might support that perception)?
How do we redesign our hotel, our aircraft or our agency to appeal to the mother who is desperately looking for travel assistance she can trust?
And how do we help her get fast-food and fast-travel arrangements?
Answer those questions the next time you pass a set of Golden Arches.
Contributing Editor Richard Bruce Turen owns Churchill & Turen Ltd., a luxury vacation firm based in Naples, Fla. He is also managing director of the Churchill Group, a sales training and marketing consultancy. Contact him at rturen@travelweekly.com.