Virtual Tourism, A Pandemic Reality

Mil­lions of habit­u­al tourists have decid­ed to stay close to home or even stay put alto­geth­er. Can you blame them? It’s called vir­tu­al tourism. Accord­ing to “Rec­om­mend” mag­a­zine only 44% of Amer­i­cans are plan­ning leisure trav­el in 2020. Of those, 81% will take a day trip and 72% expect to take overnight vaca­tions. Most impor­tant­ly, the over­whelm­ing major­i­ty don’t expect to take cruis­es (only 14%) or air­planes (only 32%).

And who can blame them? Would you spend the next 7 days of your life on a ship with thou­sands of strangers, run­ning the risk of being infect­ed with coro­n­avirus? That’s called Russ­ian roulette in my book. And what about planes. Air­lines tried to lure tourists leav­ing an emp­ty seat between pas­sen­gers. But that wasn’t enough. Peo­ple just didn’t buy. Now they’re not even doing that. They expect you to get into an alu­minum tube with hun­dreds of strangers sit­ting inch­es apart. I don’t think so.

Con­se­quent­ly, air­lines are fac­ing an unprece­dent­ed finan­cial cri­sis and beg­ging Con­gress for a sec­ond bailout. If they don’t get it they’ll lay off thou­sands of work­ers. The trav­el indus­try, as we know it, is in for some chop­py skies.

Cruise ship oper­a­tors have it even worse. Accord­ing to KPMG, a net­work of firms oper­at­ing in 147 coun­tries, with over 219,000 employ­ees, “in the wake of COVID-19, there will like­ly be a sig­nif­i­cant finan­cial impact on rev­enue for all cruise oper­a­tors, which could make it dif­fi­cult for many cruise lin­ers to attract cus­tomers and result in clo­sures”. Fur­ther­more, “shares for the largest three cruise orga­ni­za­tions were $30.30, $10.50 and $12.60 respec­tive­ly on April 1, 2020, approx­i­mate­ly 70 – 80 per­cent low­er than the begin­ning of this year”. That spells rough seas.

Air­lines are loos­ing great sums of mon­ey because peo­ple sim­ply aren’t traveling.

So What Does This All Mean For Local Tourism?

Gov­ern­ment should stop wast­ing mon­ey try­ing to lure inter­na­tion­al tourists. They’re not com­ing!!! Most of them will stay close to home or stay home alto­geth­er. It’s called a “stay­ca­tion”, and it has been one of many pub­lic reac­tions to government’s mis­man­age­ment of the Covid-19 pan­dem­ic. Peo­ple are tak­ing mat­ters into their own hands. It’s every man and woman for him/herself. And in such a sce­nario peo­ple do what they believe is safe for them, not what any­one else suggests.

Once you get that out of the way, there are many things local gov­ern­ments can do to help keep their own tourism indus­tries alive and afloat. For one, they can redi­rect those mar­ket­ing dol­lars towards bail­ing out their own peo­ple. Covid-19 and the present pan­dem­ic aren’t going to last for­ev­er. There will even­tu­al­ly be a vac­cine and we’ll all return to “nor­mal”, what­ev­er that is or was before the cri­sis. But it’s not going to be soon and it’s cer­tain­ly not going to be in time to save thou­sands of hurt­ing businesses.

I know this goes against con­ven­tion­al wis­dom, at least against the kind of “con­ven­tion­al wis­dom” that favors bail­ing out large enter­pris­es and leav­ing the small guy to fend for him­self. But in this case the for­mer is the recipe for dis­as­ter. Things are what they are, not what we would like them to be. The vac­cine will prob­a­bly take a year or longer, many more peo­ple are going to die, the gov­ern­ment will con­tin­ue to mis­judge and mis­man­age the sit­u­a­tion, and many busi­ness­es are going to colapse regard­less of how many bailouts they receive.

The dif­fer­ence is one of num­bers and pro­por­tions. The world will go on spin­ning with few­er air­lines and few­er cruise oper­a­tors, but local tourism will colapse if we leave the lit­tle guy to his/her own luck.

Armchair Tourists, An Emerging Phenomena

David Ogilvy

David Ogilvy, one of history’s most rec­og­nized adver­tis­ing experts, used to say that one of the first eco­nom­ic sec­tors to get hurt in a finan­cial cri­sis is adver­tis­ing. In layman’s terms: “when the shit hits the fan busi­ness peo­ple curl into their lit­tle cocoons and stop spend­ing”. On every­thing!!! At first glance this sounds log­i­cal, but in a prac­ti­cal sense it’s a mis­take. It’s cer­tain­ly wise to cur­tail cer­tain expens­es in the midst of a finan­cial down­fall, but not adver­tis­ing. Why? Because those who adver­tise dur­ing a finan­cial down­fall are the very ones that will be remem­bered (top of mind) once the sit­u­a­tion returns to normal.

That was Ogilvy’s think­ing in his best sell­ing book “Ogilvy on Adver­tis­ing”, back in 1983. Today things are a lit­tle dif­fer­ent, not in a mat­ter of sub­stance but in the tools.

Many tourists have decid­ed to sit 2020 out. They’re stay­ing put. They’re stay­ing safe!!! No one is going to lure them onto a fly­ing tube or onto a float­ing petri dish. But that doesn’t mean that they are not going to trav­el. Sure they are!!! They’re just going to do it from the com­fort and safe­ty of their own home. For these peo­ple 2020 will be a stag­ing peri­od for 2021, or maybe even 2022. They’re going to watch every pos­si­ble YouTube video, enjoy the pic­tures on Insta­gram and Pin­ter­est, read blog arti­cles, lis­ten to pod­casts and explore from the com­fort of their arm­chairs. They’re going to “ride out the storm”. So I guess we could call them “arm­chair tourists”.

If I were a play­er in the tourism indus­try (which I am in a way), regard­less of what kind of busi­ness I was in, I would be telling poten­tial tourists about the mar­vels of my sur­round­ing area. And in my case, of course, that’s Puer­to Rico. You can be tempt­ed to tell them about the mar­vels of your par­tic­u­lar prod­uct or ser­vice, but believe me… no one will care. I’m sor­ry for the blunt­ness, but it’s the truth. Tourists don’t care about you. They care about them­selves. How­ev­er, if you tell them about the attrac­tions around you, regard­less of what specif­i­cal­ly, and they do decide to vis­it your area in the future, who do you think they are going to remem­ber? And the more you tell them, the more they’ll remem­ber you.

Ogilvy’s world revolved around adver­tis­ing, but that will hard­ly work today. Adver­tis­ing is sales in print, as Ogilvy so bril­liant­ly put it. The prob­lem is that in today’s world peo­ple still like to buy, but they hard­ly like to be sold to. That’s why many tra­di­tion­al advert­ing agen­cies are in trou­ble, and it’s also why the more pro­gres­sive ones have migrat­ed to the Inter­net and onto social media.

Today’s con­sumer has access to the world in his pocket.

Today’s con­sumer has access to the world in his pock­et. So it’s hard to lure him/her by con­trol­ling infor­ma­tion (which in a sense is what mar­ket­ing does). He/she likes to explore and arrive at his/her own deci­sions. He/she hates to be told what to do, or when and how to do it, which is ulti­mate­ly what adver­tis­ing seeks to achieve. Then what?

Well, there are many ways to reach this kind of tourist, all of which are infor­ma­tion-based. The entire site you are on is a liv­ing exam­ple. Take the series of YouTube videos about Puer­to Rico that I’ve been pub­lish­ing for years (the ones on the right side­bar of this post). I post them on my Puer­toRi­coByG­PS chan­nel and here on my web­site. They con­tain NO adver­tis­ing. They don’t speak about me either. They just speak about the won­ders of Puer­to Rico. So what’s in it for me? Well, they do say who makes them and they do men­tion Puer­to Rico By GPS, where I hand out even more infor­ma­tion for free. So, don’t you think there’s a chance that peo­ple who watch my videos will end up check­ing out Puer­to Rico By GPS as well? And if I were to sell some­thing that’s where I would do it.

I guess we could call them arm­chair tourists even thought they’re miss­ing the armchair.

You can do the same thing for a hotel, for a tour oper­a­tor, for a car rental com­pa­ny, and basi­cal­ly for any kind of tourism relat­ed busi­ness. The trick is to resist the temp­ta­tion to make it about you. Peo­ple want true hon­est-to-god infor­ma­tion, not adver­tis­ing. And please have the guts to tell them the truth!!! Peo­ple will respect you for it it.

The oposite is also true. Peo­ple will hate you for lying, for cov­er­ing up shod­dy ser­vice, third-rate facil­i­ties and mediocre loca­tions. Tell it like it is. They’ll love you for it.

So What Should You Cover?

Well, that’s the tricky part. There’s a method to the mad­ness. You can’t just do it willy nil­ly. If you do you’ll have a lot of fun but no one will con­sume your con­tent. Hell. even if you do things “by the book” there’s still a chance that no one will con­sume your con­tent. And believe me, it hurts deep inside to labor on a YouTube video, on a blog post or on a pod­cast episode for days only to get a hand­ful of views or clicks. But then there are also those lone­some “uni­corns” that catch fire and make it all worth it. Think of it this way. You have the down­time any­way and the medi­um is free.

To increase your odds the trick is to fol­low a process that includes key­word research, scriptwrit­ing, voice record­ing, film­ing, pro­duc­tion, ren­der­ing, pub­lish­ing and pro­mo­tion. And then do it again, and again, and again… many many times!

Key­word research will tell you what peo­ple are look­ing for so you can pro­duce con­tent that peo­ple will actu­al­ly be inter­est­ed in con­sum­ing. That doesn’t mean that every piece that you pro­duce has to be a mega hit, but strive to have the occa­sion­al hit. Then men­tion the small­er, more obscure, pieces with­in the hits. That way the more suc­cess­ful pieces will help car­ry the small­er ones.

And it doesn’t have to be YouTube videos either, although tourism is main­ly a visu­al thing. You can also write, pro­duce audio con­tent, post pic­tures or any com­bi­na­tion. Com­mon sites to announce your con­tent include Face­book, LinkedIn, Insta­gram, Pin­ter­est, YouTube, Tik­Tok and many more. The trick is to under­stand the cul­ture, demo­graph­ics and psy­cho­graph­ics of each of these sites and pro­duce con­tent that will fit each one.

And keep in mind that all of these sites run on an algo­rithm that con­trols who gets to see your con­tent. Some of them are key­word dri­ven like YouTube, Google and Pin­ter­est and oth­ers are behav­ior and inter­est dri­ven like Face­book, Insta­gram and LinkedIn. All of them start­ed with gen­er­ous access to traf­fic in order to lure peo­ple in and col­lect their data, but today it’s most­ly a pay-to-play envi­ron­ment. If you don’t pay almost no one will see your con­tent, with the notable excep­tion of YouTube, your own blog or your podcast.

And what makes YouTube, your blog and your pod­cast dif­fer­ent? Well, YouTube is the world’s sec­ond largest search engine and it’s tag dri­ven. Tags is just a dif­fer­ent name for key­words. Your blog and your pod­cast live on the Inter­net, which in turn depends on Google to sup­ply traf­fic. Google is the world’s largest search engine and it too is key­word dri­ven. That means that the suc­cess of your con­tent, on both these plat­forms, will large­ly depend on SEO (search engine opti­miza­tion) and fre­quent­ly pub­lish­ing fresh and rel­e­vant con­tent to “feed the beast”.

And don’t believe what they tell you that any­one can do it. You can spin your wheels for years before gain­ing any trac­tion or you can find some­one who actu­al­ly knows what he’s doing and hire him/her. It’s your time and your mon­ey and you have to spend one of them.

But look at it this way. At this moment in time it doesn’t mat­ter what you do. Only a trick­le of tourists will be com­ing your way. Regard­less if you are in Paris, Mon­tana or in Puer­to Rico. Peo­ple are just stay­ing put!!! If you are one of the lucky ones that can weath­er the storm, while every­thing around you returns to “nor­mal”, why not spend that down­time wise­ly pro­duc­ing con­tent that poten­tial vis­i­tors will remem­ber you by?

Time is going to go by any­way. You can com­plain, wait, sob and hope that tomor­row will be a bet­ter day, or you can make it bet­ter. You can spend that time intel­li­gent­ly putting hun­dreds of lit­tle hooks in the water for when the fish return… and, believe me, they WILL return. It’s your choice.

©2020,Orlando Mer­gal, MA
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Bilin­gual Con­tent Cre­ator, Blog­ger, Podcaster,
Author, Pho­tog­ra­ph­er and New Media Expert
Tel. 787–750-0000, Mobile 787–306-1590

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