A NEW ITINERARY May 15th 2008
Both as destinations and as new sources of tourists, emerging economiesare transforming the travel industryWHEN you arrive at Dubai International Airport, the bus journey fromyour aeroplane to the terminal building takes almost 15 minutes. Thisis not because Dubai is inefficient--far from it--but because for asmall country it has a huge airport, which is in the throes ofexpansion. The airport will still be too small to cope with theswelling inflow of travellers, so Dubai's rulers are building anotherone, at Jebel Ali, a port town 35km (20 miles) away, which is due tocome into full operation in 2017. Designed to handle 120m passengers ayear, it is expected to be the world's busiest airport.Booming emerging economies are the great hope of the world's travel andtourism industry. Dubai is the most shimmering example. It has only atiny percentage of the United Arab Emirates' oil reserves, and so isstraining to turn itself into a regional hub for finance, travel andhigh-class tourism. Three palm-shaped island-resorts are being built:the Palm Jumeirah (pictured), the Palm Jebel Ali and the Palm Deira.The Burj al-Arab, curved like a sail and on another artificial island,is the world's only seven-star hotel--with its own helipad, naturally.Dubai also boasts the Middle East's first indoor ski-slope.About 30% of Dubai's GDP depends on travel and tourism, but SheikhMohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Dubai's ruler, wants the industry togrow much more. He is the driving force behind the construction ofDubailand, a tourism and entertainment complex divided into seven theme
worlds that are Dubai's answer to Disneyland. By 2015 Dubailand isaiming to attract 15m tourists, roughly 40,000 visitors daily.No wonder, then, that last month the top brass of the World Travel& Tourism Council (WTTC), the industry's main lobby group, heldtheir annual meeting amid Dubai's glitz. They might have found lots ofreasons to be gloomy: a weak dollar, sky-high oil and food prices,looming recession in America and a credit crunch on both sides of theAtlantic. Yet the tourism barons were fairly chipper. They hope thatAmericans will still travel, albeit more parsimoniously. And they thinkthat travellers to and from emerging economies will make up for some ofthe flagging WANDERLUST of the developed world.READY FOR TAKE-OFFThe rise of emerging economies marks the third revolution the travelindustry has undergone in the past 50 years. The first came in the1960s, in the shape of cheap air travel and package tours. Risingincomes enabled people of modest means to travel more, to farther-flungparts of the globe, and to take advantage of "all-in" offers that mayhave included sightseeing trips, scuba diving or camel rides. Thesecond was the advent of the internet, which has allowed millions tobook flights, hotels, hire cars and package tours without going near ahigh-street travel agent.Now fast-growing emerging economies--not just Dubai but also the BRICs(Brazil, Russia, India and China) and others, such as South Korea andVietnam--are changing the world of travel once again, either asdestinations or as sources of newly affluent travellers. Often,citizens of these countries are visiting similar, emerging lands. Lastyear, for example, Russians made a total of 34.3m trips abroad, up from29.1m in 2006. Turkey was their most popular destination, followed byChina and Egypt. The Chinese head the table of visitors to Vietnam.The WTTC claims that travel and tourism is the world's biggest industry
in terms of its contribution to global GDP and employment. The lobbygroup forecasts that global travel and tourism will account for $5.9trillion of economic activity in 2008, or about 10% of global GDP,employing 238m people. It expects employment to rise to 296m in thenext decade.In fact, assessing the scale of the industry is not straightforward.When all travel and tourism is lumped together, so that everything fromairlines to cafes counts, it is no surprise that the WTTC's total is solarge. As a rule, restaurants do not record whether they are servingtourists, business travellers or locals out for a meal.The United Nations World Tourism Organisation (UNWTO) has resorted tomonitoring international tourist arrivals only. It therefore knowswhere tourists are going to, but has a much less accurate idea of wherethey have come from. Travel and tourism data from developing countries,in particular, are unreliable. And many of the industry's jobs, such astour guides or souvenir salesmen, go unrecorded. Officially, thetourism business in Sicily is sizeable, but it would be bigger still ifuntaxed and undeclared jobs were counted.Never mind the difficulties of definition and measurement: theindustry, from any angle, is huge and growing. It accounts for a largepart of many countries' foreign-exchange earnings. For many developingcountries, it offers an important route out of poverty. And furtherexpansion and democratisation of tourism, centred on emergingeconomies, is under way. Having once worked in tourism, an increasingnumber of citizens of those countries are beginning to become touriststhemselves.According to the UNWTO, international tourist arrivals grew by 6% lastyear, to 900m (see chart 1). The total has gone up by almost 100m intwo years. Last year the Middle East welcomed 13% more internationaltourists, or 46m in all. Arrivals in Asia and the Pacific were up by
10%, to 185m--with much of the extra travel coming from elsewhere inthe region. Africa saw an increase of 8%, to 44m. This year, the UNWTOpredicts, growth of international tourism will be fastest in Asia andthe Pacific.Forecasts for growth are even less reliable than in other industries,partly because tourism is vulnerable to shocks such as naturaldisasters or terrorist attacks. Jose Antonio Tazon, boss of Amadeus, atravel-technology company, points out that global firms are lessexposed than local ones. They can make up for lost business in a regionaffected by catastrophes with business in other parts of the world.A DOLLAR WON'T STRETCH THAT FARFor the next year or two, the travel industry is likely to find itslong-standing customers in rich Western countries a less than reliablesource of growth. As American families plan their holidays, many willbe worrying about the frailty of their country's economy, the risingcost of petrol and--for those venturing outside the United States--theweakness of the dollar. They are delaying booking in the hope ofnabbing cheap, last-minute deals.They certainly seem to be spending less. On May 7th Orbitz[1], anAmerican online travel-firm, posted a first-quarter net loss of $15mcompared with a net loss of $10m a year earlier. The mainstay of itsbusiness is domestic bookings, which were 6% lower in the first quarterthan a year earlier, at $2.4 billion.About 85% of American travel and tourism is domestic. Only one-fifth ofAmerican citizens have passports. Those thinking of going abroad willneed more tempting than usual. Some hotels in European cities areoffering deep discounts to American travellers to make up for theweakness of the dollar. WorldHotels, a hotel-marketing company, saysthat Americans can book rooms at a one-to-one euro-dollar exchangerate--a saving of roughly one-third at today's rate--at 52 of theEuropean hotels on its books. Nevertheless, WorldHotels saw a 15% drop
in business from Americans at its European hotels during the firstquarter of this year.Yet the industry remains confident that people will travel, even ifthey spend less. "One of the last bits of discretionary spending peoplecut is their holiday," argues Thomas Middelhoff, chief executive ofArcandor, the German retailer that owns Thomas Cook, a travel company.Some European travellers, by contrast, will at least have the benefitof a strong euro. Within the continent, there are other pluses. Theexpansion of low-cost airlines is boosting short-break travel. Theextension of the passport-free Schengen area to nine more countriesmakes trips within Europe easier. The Euro 2008 football championshipin Austria and Switzerland, the Zaragoza International Expo in Spainand Liverpool's reign as Europe's cultural capital are also expected tobe good for business. That will help the European Union remain thebiggest contributor to global travel and tourism, with 27.5% of theshare of the world market and more than 10% of the industry's totalworkforce.Even so, Europeans are likely to feel the slowdown of the economy andthe impact of the high price of oil. British Airways recently upped itsfuel surcharge, which now stands at GBP158 ($312) for a returnlong-haul flight to Britain. On May 7th easyJet, a low-cost airline,unveiled a GBP57.5m loss for the six months to the end of March.Granted, that is usually the company's weaker half-year, but the loss ayear before had been only GBP17.1m. The trouble was the rising cost offuel, which now accounts for 28% of easyJet's cost per seat. All thismeans tourism in the EU will grow by only about 2% this year, reckonsthe WTTC, compared with worldwide growth of 3-4%.For faster growth, the industry will have to look to emergingeconomies. These are becoming increasingly well established as placesto visit. Now they are starting to provide more visitors too. According
to McKinsey, a consulting firm, by the middle of the next decade almosta billion people will see their annual household incomes rise beyond$5,000--roughly the threshold for spending money on discretionary goodsand services rather than simple necessities. Consumers' spending powerin emerging economies will rise from $4 trillion in 2006 to more than$9 trillion--nearly the spending power of western Europe today.Some of that extra purchasing power will go on travel, at home andabroad (see chart 2). Western companies are flocking into thedeveloping world to prepare for these new tourists. "The Middle East,India and China are the next big thing," predicts Bill Marriott, thechairman and chief executive of Marriott, an American hotel chain. Hethinks that the industry will be bigger in the Middle East, where he isplanning to build 65 hotels by 2011, than in India. China will dwarfeven the Middle East.THE NEW TRAVELLERSLast year the number of visits abroad by the Chinese reached 47m, 5mmore than the number of foreign visitors to China. The Chinese alsomade 1.6 billion trips at home--a staggering total, but not much morethan one each. According to WTTC forecasts, Chinese demand for traveland tourism will quadruple in value in the next ten years. At presentChina ranks a distant second, behind the United States, in terms ofdemand, but by 2018 it will have closed much of the gap.Other emerging economies have woken up to the spending power of Chinesetourists. Mexico is one: AeroMexico will begin direct flights betweenMexico City and Shanghai at the end of May. The plan is to fly twice aweek. In Vietnam, home to one of the fastest-growing tourist industriesin the world, Chinese and other Asian tourists are overtakingWesterners. In the first 11 months of last year 507,000 visitors cameto Vietnam from China, along with 442,000 from South Korea and 376,000from America. The Tourism Authority of Thailand is also counting on
more Chinese custom. It forecasts that 1.3m Chinese will visit thecountry this year, 10% more than last year (when visitors were put offby Thailand's unsettled politics).To speed up the development of tourism and other industries, theChinese government is racing to build roads, railways and airports. InJanuary it said that it planned to add 97 airports by 2020 to the 142China had at the end of 2006. The number with an annual handlingcapacity of over 30m passengers will grow from three to 13. Accordingto the state media, investment in infrastructure will see double-digitgrowth every year for the rest of the decade. Between 2006 and 2010,$200 billion is expected to have been invested in railways alone, fourtimes more than in the previous five years. In June the world's longestsea-crossing bridge, a 36km six-lane highway across Hangzhou Bay, isdue to open. This will halve the travel time between Ningbo andShanghai, two of China's busiest ports, to about two hours.Asia's other rising economic giant is lagging behind China, both as asource of tourists and as a tourist destination. Last year India hadonly 5.5m foreign visitors, a tiny share of the world market: thecountry of the Taj Mahal and the Himalayas ranks below Bulgaria andBahrain. Fewer than 10m Indians travelled abroad, though about 600mIndians made trips at home. Andhra Pradesh, home of many religioussites, got the lion's share of visits, whereas foreigners flocked toDelhi and Maharashtra, India's most urbanised state. Travel on thesubcontinent can be bewildering even for Indians, owing to more than 20official languages and innumerable dialects. Many moan as much asforeigners do about uncomfortable transport, strange food, unusualbowel movements and the lack of decent hotel rooms.The subcontinent's biggest problem is the poor state of much of itsinfrastructure. The government plans to spend more than 20 trillion
rupees (around $500 billion) on infrastructure in the five years to2012. India's tourism ministry says it spent 4.6 trillion rupees on 248projects in the year to March. India's main airports are undergoingexpensive facelifts with lots of private-sector money. Parts ofMumbai's Chhatrapati Shivaji International Airport are gleaming; butelsewhere people sit with their saris drawn over their mouths to stopthemselves inhaling the dust as plasterboard is machine-sawn nearby. AtIndira Gandhi airport in Delhi, immigration officials will thinknothing of clocking off with four or five people left in the queue, whothen have to go to the back of another line. An official will stamp atraveller's visa--and a few yards later a guard will check that it hasindeed been stamped.Some investors are backing the country's breathtaking beauty againstall the inconvenience and bureaucracy. Marilyn Carlson Nelson, chiefexecutive of Carlson, a privately owned travel group which ownsRadisson hotels and Regent Seven Seas Cruises, sees great promise inIndia. Carlson is developing around 50 hotels in India compared withonly ten in China. Manny Fontenla-Novoa, chief executive of ThomasCook, a travel company, is equally optimistic about India's potential.In March Thomas Cook bought Thomas Cook India, the subcontinent'slargest foreign-exchange and second-biggest travel business, datingback to the 1880s, from Dubai Financial Group. Joint ventures in Russiaand China are next on Mr Fontenla-Novoa's list.CLOUDS ON THE HORIZONWhat might stop tourism's latest revolution? Political violence is onepossibility. Developed countries are no strangers to terrorism, but thedangers in emerging economies are greater. This week's bomb attacks inJaipur, a popular spot on the Indian tourist trail, are a bloodyreminder. Kenya, a country that depends on tourism for much of itsforeign income, lost about half its business in the wake of political
violence after elections in December. Natural disasters are alsolikelier to cause worse devastation in poorer places. However, Mr Tazonof Amadeus points out that "the industry has proved to be veryresilient." It recovered quickly after the terrorist attacks onSeptember 11th 2001, SARS, the outbreak of the war in Iraq and thetsunami in December 2004.Another possible obstacle is the growing concern, especially in Westerncountries, with the environment. During the 1960s and 1970s, whentourism was growing explosively in American and Europe, few gave muchthought to the consequences for the planet. That has changed. PhilippeBourguignon, vice-chairman of Revolution Places, a travel business,says that greenery cannot be dismissed as merely the flavour of themonth.The industry, which contributes 5-6% of all carbon emissions, seemsworried. Green strategies are multiplying. In April Travelport, atravel-technology company, introduced the Travelport Carbon Tracker,which allows travel agencies and companies to measure and analysecarbon emissions and hence to help "sustainable traveldecision-making". Hotels are keen to show that they conserve water (doyou really need a clean towel every day?), recycle rubbish, and saveelectricity by using low-energy light bulbs. Airlines order lessthirsty planes. Eco-spas powered by wind turbines and solar panels, andsafaris based on conservation are vying for the customer with a greenconscience.Marriott's efforts are a case in point. In April the hotel firm and theBrazilian state of Amazonas signed an agreement to protect 1.4m acresof endangered Amazon rainforest in the Juma Sustainable DevelopmentReserve. Marriott is chipping in $2m to pay for an environmentalmanagement plan administered by the newly created Amazonas SustainableFoundation that will support employment, education and health care forthe approximately 500 people who live in the Juma reserve. Over the
next ten years Marriott aims to reduce energy and water consumption atits hotels by 25% by, for instance, introducing solar power at up to 40hotels. "After years of lip service, companies like Marriott are reallybeing proactive," says Michael Johnson, dean of Cornell University'sSchool of Hotel Administration.For all this concern, emerging economies are much more interested inrapid growth than in ecology. And holidaymakers, wherever they arefrom, seem unwilling to give up flying or driving just yet. MrFontenla-Novoa sees little evidence that an environmental conscienceplays a big part in customers' travel planning. Westerners have hadtheir decades of fun. Now the rest of the world wants a turn.
