Ten Minutes with Arnie Weissmann
AMA Spends 10 Minutes with Arnie Weissmann, VP and Editor-In-Chief,
Travel Weekly
Arnie travels the world reporting on tourism. Hear how he sees how Hawai‘i stacks up to the competition … and how the tourism recovery looks from a “big picture” perspective.
AMA: Your reporting on the recent Travel Weekly Forum in Hawai'i highlighted pricing as a big issue. Some of the wholesalers were warning against going too far too fast with pricing. Others spoke about destinations that are competitive to Hawai'i having more pricing power. What's going on? Arnie Weissmann: A couple of things, really. The economic recovery, such as it is, seems to be moving from east to west across the United States. Hawai‘i is, of course, heavily dependent on traffic west of the Rockies, particularly from California. Californians are particularly price sensitive, so if prices go up too quickly here, they'll look at alternatives. And, Hawai‘i is still disadvantaged from an airfare point of view - a family of four or five is already facing quite an air tab just to get to the islands. They'll be looking at the land costs very carefully.
AMA: You're on the road a lot looking at resort destinations around the world. Who's on the leading edge of travel marketing and what can we learn from them? AW: Though it's not thought of primarily as a resort destination, I think there are big lessons to be learned from the Incredible India campaign. I thought It was the most memora ble destination campaign in the past five years. It showcased the impact of very creatively directed photography. We've all seen, or imagine we've seen, photos of Indian elephants, dancers, temples, the Taj Mahal. But we never quite saw them the way they were captured in that campaign. The colors were supersaturated and very eye-catching. Hawaii is clearly photogenic, and we've all seen its fantastic sights captured on film many times. But what was interesting about the India campaign was that it took images of familiar themes across a huge, very diverse country, and somehow introduced a binding visual style that came through the whole campaign. There was just something unexpected in all those images, and I think the trick would be taking Hawai‘i, a place people think they know, and showing it to them anew.
Most of the other interesting things in destination marketing are being launched in social media. Queensland's "world's best job" campaign, where they turned a vacancy in an isolated part of the state into a platform to talk about the destination's isolated beauty, was brilliant. And note that its success was dependent not only on the viral nature of the Internet, but on traditional media picking up on its cleverness and spreading the word to everyone offline as well.
AMA: What's the general mood "out there" on the mainland about recovery for leisure travel? What are the prospects of returning to the go-go days of 2004-7? AW: The stock market, the reports on unemployment, the prospect of a debt crisis exploding on this side of the Atlantic -- the economy is so erratic, I don't hear anyone talking about 2007 numbers returning in, say, 2011. But the good news is that there are plenty of transac tions in travel, lots of activity, and prices are rising. But the debt crisis in particular, both here and abroad, makes it difficult to for anyone to be a flat-out optimist.
AMA: From what you've seen, is there a permanent shift in consumer attitudes toward travel and, especially, travel pricing? AW: I think we're in a period that's similar to 2002, when the 9/11 pricing crash had everyone worried about exactly this, especially that the short booking window would become ingrained in consumers, which would result in continuing downward pressure on pricing. This is a bit different because of the slow recovery on the meetings business, which really impacts compression for properties with lots of meeting space and trickles down to everyone else, as well as the cruise industry, which is impacting everyone in leisure travel because they took on so much extra capacity over the past few years. But no, it's not permanent. This is a pendulum swing. There's just a particularly long arc on this pendulum, but I do think it's begun to come back in the right direction.
AMA: What are the big travel stories you see coming up in the next year? AW: Last year, the industry looked forward for most of the year to the inauguration of the Oasis of the Seas, Royal Caribbean's 5,000-passenger megaship, and to the opening of CityCenter in Las Vegas, the largest construction project going in the U.S. in 2008-2009. There are no real big break-through products coming on line in the next 12 months that I can see. It'll be interesting to watch if the United-Continental merger goes through, and what impact that will have. But overall, we're very much in recovery mode, and the trick will be to absorb a lot of capacity that came on at exactly the wrong time in 2009.