Transcription
If you look at the percentage of somebody's trip, the percentage of the cost that's spent on the experiences, it's interesting how it's a usually a pretty small percent of the cost of a trip, but a huge percentage of the impact of a trip. And so that suggests to me that as people, if there's economic distress, as they maybe have to cut that back a little bit, they're much more likely to cut back on their lodging than they are to cut back on the experience that they can do. Now, 10 years ago, I don't think that was true. I think the experiences market, if you will, has changed the way that people think about traveling. It's a it's just a whole different world. So, I feel very strongly that leisure travel, the in real life, the human interaction part of it is actually going to be more and more important.
Welcome to the best part of travel podcast brought to you by Arrival where we take you inside the business of destination experiences. I'm Janelle Visser and I'm here with Steven Joyce.
>> Hi.
>> And today we're going to be kicking off the year by digging into trends with travel industry veteran Eric Blford. We'll talk everything from AI to summer camp and what's next for the future of experiences. So to kick things off, Stephen.
>> Mhm.
>> What is your favorite summer camp story? You've been to summer camp, right?
>> Oh, yeah. When I was in school, I went to summer camp every year between grade 8 and grade 12. My favorite time of year. I loved summer camp. I think my favorite memory actually was going up to the Yukon for the first time. I was in the aircadet program and the summer camp that I participated in was called air crew survival. So, it was a survival camp where we basically had to learn survival skills. And one of my favorite memories was basically our survival test at survival camp was we had to spend three days with a partner in like isolated from everyone else and we had to survive for three days on one day's worth of rations. And I think my favorite experience of that was that 3-day just like being completely isolated, having no other people. And it was one of the most satisfying and most enriching experiences I think I've ever had. It gave me the confidence after that, like to be able to survive in the woods for 3 days, finding our own water and all of that sort of stuff. It was really an amazing experience. I'll never forget it and it's still etched in my mind decades later. How about you Janelle? What's your favorite summer camp story?
>> Oh my gosh, there's so many. It's so hard. I went to summer camp too as a kid and I also one of my first jobs was working at a summer camp and it's so hard to pick one, but this came up recently actually because I met someone else who went to a summer camp near the summer camp I went to. And so one of the stories that would be told around the campfire at my summer camp was about camp echo which was a summer camp over there and if you yelled loud enough you could hear them yelling back to you. That's why it was called Camp Echo and the kids loved it. But I met someone who went to a summer camp near the summer camp I went to and we realized in talking to each other that it was Camp Echo like for real. So, her summer camp had the same story. It was a different summer camp. It was a different location, but it was close enough by that I was like, "Wait, you went your summer camp is located here. You guys are Camp Echo." And she was like, "No, you guys are Camp Echo.
>> You're Camp Echo."
>> I had always thought as a super smart 15, 16year-old camp counselor that Camp Echo was it was joke that we told the kids, but it was. And it was also totally real. Oh, I love that. And back then the only way you could communicate with Camp Echo was to yell at them from across the bay.
>> Yes.
>> I love that. I remember actually one of the things I remember at summer camp we had designated times that we could call home and there was only one telephone and you had to take turns using the telephone and you had 15 minutes and that was it. Otherwise, you spent the rest of your time just with people. It was h
>> we need more of that. Yeah, we do more real life experiences and we're going to talk about that. We'll introduce Eric in a minute, but first a message from our podcast sponsor. Protect Group offers a service called Refund Protect. The way it works is that an operator or reseller offers Refund Protect at the time of checkout for an extra fee, usually around 10% of the ticket price. If the guest can't go because of some unforeseen circumstance, they request a refund through refund protect and they get a 100% of their money back including the fee. The best part is the operator keeps 100% of their revenue and they make a little extra. So to find out more, go to protect.group best part of travel.
All right, so let's get into it. We're talking today to Eric Blford. And how do you even introduce Eric? He's had so many titles. Like
>> how do we how do we introduce Eric?
>> I think he's most commonly known as one of the first CEOs of Expedia after Richard Barton was Eric Blford. And so I think he's probably most famous in the travel industry in general for that. But he's done so much more since then. He was a CEO of Butterfield and Robinson, which is a very very popular well-known brand in the adventure travel space. He's on a variety of different boards as a board member. That's his thing now is advising boards and being an adviser to companies. That and he's just a really great guy and also a fellow Canadian. So, we do love our Canadian travel executives.
>> Yeah, there we go. And so I'm excited to talk to Eric because he was one of the people on stage and at the executive summit that Arrival did, the executive summit on the future of experiences. And this time of year, people are always talking about trends and what's next. And so it's it's great that we get him to ourselves for a little while to ask him what's top of mind for him going into the new year. What's next? And what's what should people be thinking about as we go forward?
>> Yeah, let's jump in. It's a great interview.
>> Let's get into it.
>> So, thank you, Eric, so much for being here. Why don't we kick things off with a easy question? What's the most unusual travel experience you've ever had, whether that's personally or like a professional trip?
>> Oh, that that's not an easy question.
>> Oh, okay.
>> I think Well, I'll pick one. I mean, I've had a lot of different unusual experiences because I've done a bunch of adventure travel in all kinds of different places. I would say I'll pick one. I was with Richard Bangs, the father of adventure travel, and we were going by the North Route into the base camp of Annaperna, and we got caught in a blizzard, which is not really a situation you want to be in. And our Sherpas, who were fantastic, came up to us and basically said, "Do you guys know which trail we should take down?" He said, "No, we're you're supposed to know the trail that we're supposed to take down." So I said, "Oh, no. One of the sherpas does. Don't worry." But he already went down. So we ended up pitching a tent and put 12 of us inside a tent and waited for the blizzard to slowly come up and by the time the thing finally we everybody ended up flying by the end of it. We sort of poking out of the tent looking right at snow level trying to think how are we going to get down from here, right? But we we did in the end. It all worked out okay. That's off the top of my head, that's probably one of the strangest.
>> That's Yeah,
>> that's certainly memorable.
>> Nothing like shared near-death experience to really kind of solidify that memory.
>> It was the perfect thing where it felt much riskier than it turned out to be, which is what adventure travel was all about. You want it to feel risky, but actually not to really be all that risky.
>> Yeah, that's true. And you got to experience that with Richard Bangs, too. So, that's that's pretty me that's pretty memorable. Every everything goes better with bangs. Yep.
>> Yeah. I have a shirt that says I desire medium danger. So, I think that's the that's the perfect
>> I want to feel the adrenaline, but I also want to know that the bungee cord is for sure going to hold. Yeah,
>> there's got to be a safety harness. Absolutely. It's just as fun.
>> It sounds like you've had a pretty adventurous life so far. Do you want to walk us through maybe give us some background on where you came from and how you got to where you are?
Sure, I could give you the quick overtake. So, I came out of college, didn't have any money, and I really wanted to travel and so I got a job as a bike tour guide and that's how I ended up in the travel industry. Uh, I really just wanted a way to go travel all over Europe, which I did, working for a company called Butterfield Robinson based out of Toronto and had a wonderful experience doing that. It was just sort of the dawn of that kind of group travel, active travel thing. Turned out the Berlin Wall fell right around the same time, 1989. I'm that old. And uh I somehow got the nod to go into Eastern Europe and set up the first walking tours. So I ended up in my early 20s writing sort of guide books to Crack Island and Warsaw and Prague. And I was there often the first Canadian anybody had ever run into sitting around kitchen tables chatting about but telling stories of the West to folks a little village. You know, I was on my bike a lot of the time and I'd be at a kitchen table and the village would call in the one person who spoke some English and everybody else would huddle around and I would say yes, I'm from Montreal. we have great bagels or something that translate everybody would listen. Oh my god, that's so interesting. Um anyway, I I took that and realized afterwards after that for a few years that it was pretty hard to get a job as a bike tour guide except as a bike tour guide. Turned out nobody was really interested in hiring me for anything else. I had a theater major under my belt and that didn't help either. So I went to business school and coming out of that after a year or two a business school friend of mine was working at MSN which Microsoft and they were starting up a travel project which of course became Expedia and somehow the fact that I was interested in the internet had a business school degree and was in the travel industry allowed me to actually join that team moved to Seattle put in 10 years there ran a marketing there ended up as the second CEO after Rich Barton we sold the company to IEC under Barry Diller put together hotels.com hotwire a bunch of others Then after that when the company spun in public Dashi took over who's now the CEO at Uber and I headed off thinking I would do startup stuff went and ran a company called Terapass that did carbon offsets and environmental consulting >> and then went back to Butterfield Robinson it's a plot twist after the great financial crisis and helped pull them through that worked there again as a CEO for two or three years and then came out of that and decided okay, what's the next adventure went into the investing world at TCV which is a pretty well-known late stage venture capital player in the valley. I did that part-time while doing my MFA in playwriting and fiction writing part-time at San Francisco State. So, I did that for quite a while and then when the pandemic came around, thought, okay, I'm going to put more time into startup investing. But then the pandemic being the pandemic, that kind of blew up a lot of those ideas and I decided after a while that what I really wanted to do was do what I really got a big kick out of, which is sitting on boards and advising companies both in travel and out. And so that's pretty much what I do now. some of the boards most people would have heard of. I'm still on the Zillow board. I was on the Pelaton board for quite a while. I'm the chairman at Busbud.
>> I'm also on Hip Camp, Fora Travel, the Adventure Travel Trade Association. I've never cut the link to the adventure travel world. It's very important to me. And I don't know if we're talking about AI a bit.
>> I love the outdoors and I think it's really important for people to get to the outdoors. The other thing that I do is I own a summer camp in Quebec. It's called Camp Nominang. It's about two and a half hours north of Montreal, which is where I grew up. And uh about 500 kids this summer go through there. No screens, no tech, no nothing. Uh just learn how to paddle a boat and make a fire. And I think that's really important stuff, too. So anyway, that's that's that's the quick the quick version of everything.
I love that. I love that history.
>> Yeah. And it all started as a bike tour guide. And you know that's so many people like especially after university are thinking about what do they want to do and how can they pursue what it is they're passionate about and everybody's so focus especially now like everybody's so focused on you have to get a career you have to you have to find that thing that you do and drive towards that thing and it's like travel is one of those avenues to discovering what you're passionate about and it can lead you in so many different places literally and figuratively, but also it opens your world and your eyes up to possibilities that you that you wouldn't otherwise have. And I think you're a perfect example of that. Just the fact that you've been able to experience the things that you do because of your journey through travel. Like it's amazing. So kudos to you and leading what probably one of the premier brands in travel as well.
>> Yeah, you pretty quickly skipped over Oh yeah, and then I was the CEO of Xedia for a while.
>> People have heard the story of the the fan Hedia journey, but yeah, we I mean if you if you want more detail, I mean so we we did we grew it up as the Microsoft travel project for a while and I got there just as we were just as we decided to put it on the internet instead of on a CD ROM. I remember I'm that old too. I'm that old too, Eric. I remember I remember it on CD came up with the Expedia name after what we tried out few real clunkers. Believe it or not, we actually thought for a while, imagine if we had launched Microsoft Control with a K. We actually thought about that as one of the names. I know. I think we were young. We were young. We didn't know anything yet. Anyway, then we we got the company out public in 1999, right before things crashed. But speaking was an actual business that had actual revenue and gross margins. So we we survived that and thrived afterwards. So it was amazing being part of that journey. I was the charge of marketing >> for most of the time and really got a huge kick out of fedia.com. All that stuff was just super fun to put out in the world.
>> That sounds amazing. The glory days, CDROM or this new thing called the internet.
>> Totally. Totally. Yeah. Yeah. It's really fun to to be actually in a spot where you're surfing those waves of change, right? And everybody right now, we were just talking about people coming out of college. Wow. Yeah. Is this ever another one of those moments, right? Where everybody is trying to figure out, okay, what's this all going to mean? Where's this wave going to go? And it kind of mean slightly scary, but also really interesting thing is that nobody knows. And that just doesn't come along all that often. I feel it's it's kind of neat to actually be in another one of these because it's a pretty different time right now. And I think if you're 22 or 23 years old, yeah, definitely go work as a bike tour guide because there's no better thing to do. But it's a different context now than it was back then, I think.
>> Yeah, definitely. And so that's a good segue to talking a little bit about the executive summit because you were on the executive summit arrivals executive summit and we're going to be doing another one in Valencia and I some of what you've tal mentioned AI this new kind of era of technology as well as this urge to get back out into nature are both things that were discussed there. So let's talk a little bit about that. But before we talk about like the trends or like mega trends, I wanted to ask you because we hear a lot about trends this time of year especially. And what do you think from the business perspective is the point of talking about trends? Like why do we need to be paying attention to this in the first place?
>> You besides making resolutions, see if we can keep them.
>> I don't know how you guys are doing.
>> We have some thoughts on that.
>> Yeah. I think it's I think we we all sort of run on narrative, right? We all like to be around a campfire and compare notes on stuff and trends, whether it be sort of a formal kind of forecast or whether it just be people talking about what they're seeing. Everybody likes some validation and some affirmation that they're not crazy at what they're seeing and what they're thinking. And I think the trends really only work well as a topic when they're batted around among a bunch of different people. Hey, are you seeing this? When I'm seeing more of that, then it's really interesting. Everybody in the business world of course you want as much certainty as you can get going forward so you know how to plan you how many people should you hire where should you put your resources is pretty basic stuff I think it's one of the reasons that some of the policy landscape are really difficult for folks especially around tariffs if you're in manufacturing something like that you don't have that kind of certainty and trends are just another way of saying hey can we all agree on a a perceived version of what the future is going to look like over this time frame and if we can then we can all feel more comfortable at least make our plans. If I were to say I think there's a big trend more and more people are going to be using AI as the top of the funnel for searching for their leisure travel. If enough people say that after a while you start to realize, okay, probably everybody is seeing the same thing. Maybe that is happening. I guess I should put some more resources into that so that I don't get left behind. And there is a weird self-fulfilling kind of prophecy that ends up coming up. Next thing you know, they're charging you for the traffic. I haven't started that yet, but it's only a matter of time. It's only a matter of time. Yeah, they've got to monetize it, right? They've spent billions on this thing, they've got to make their money back somehow.
>> Yeah. One of one of the points that I tried to make at the summit, I said to everybody, if you're feeling a lot of pressure to use AI in your business, it's because it's holding the whole American economy up basically right now. And everybody is saying you have to find a way to use AI. We need the killer app. We need this to work. And I I'm personally I'm very uncomfortable with that because I think it's not fair. just push that down on on all these businesses. But at the same time, if it's inspiring people to put more tools out there for people to experiment with, then that's a good thing. But I think there is a lot of pressure right now around around AI. And I think people are coming up with lots of good ideas, but I think lots of ideas that are probably not all that well thought through as well, which is too bad, but that's the way it always goes in situations like this. So, million-dollar question, will AI finally result in a killer travel planning app?
Oh,
>> there's certainly a lot of entrepreneurs right now who think it will. It's just it doesn't seem to matter what the technology is. That's always the question, right? I remember being pitched over and over again back when Facebook launched, hey, here's a travel planning app that can use other people's photos to plan your trip. And I'd be like, the last thing anybody wants to use is other people's photos to plan their own trip. And the AI thing strikes me as a bit the same thing. It's clearly people want advice. And clearly every survey in history says friends and family advice is the thing that you value most. So if the AI to become a trusted voice like editorial voice or friends and family, it will be one of the voices. But the idea that suddenly people are going to change the way they think about travel planning and magically want to do everything off a connected calendar or something, it would have happened already. AI is not the thing that's going to do it. For whatever reason, we are messy in our travel planning. When it comes to leisure travel,
>> what all these companies keep missing is the fact that part of the fun of travel, part of the story you're telling yourself is you did the research. you had the fun of thinking, hey, would that be cool? Would that be cool? That's part of it. That's part of the whole journey. And it's way more fun if you do your own research and you figure that out for yourself than if somebody just drops you in and says, "Enjoy that."
>> Right. Thank you. Thank you.
>> Yeah. Yes. Yes. Stephen and I have talked about this a fair bit actually. And there's studies that show that you actually get as much joy out of the travel planning process as the trip itself. like you get a dopamine hit every time you book something, every time you confirm something. That whole process gives you almost as much if not as much joy as the actual trip. And so to take that away,
>> couldn't agree more.
>> Yeah. To take that away and outsource it to an AI, it's okay, but you're missing half the fun of it.
>> Yeah. Yeah. Now I I will say that there's another kind of travel which I might call unmanaged business travel which is the thing where it's fairly routine. There's actually not that much fun in planning. In fact, planning is just a task that you have to get done. And so I do think there is a line where there's a bunch of stuff there which right now a lot of people may if they're corporate they might use an agent. Um smaller business if they have an assistant they might do the travel planning for them. It's because there isn't a lot of decision- making to be made. There's just a bunch of boxes to check. Now that I actually can see definitely I can see AI auto is a company that that launched pretty recently that's doing a bunch of small business travel. I don't think they're doing experiences. I think it's just aimed at flight and hotel but I can see that sort of thing a little easier. But the kind of the experiences world again it's very difficult for me to imagine a world where people say yeah here's I'm thinking about going to London and then with one prompt and then the whole thing comes back fully fleshed out in a three-day itinerary and people just say yeah great I'm going to do it. It doesn't seem intuitive to me.
>> No, it's Yeah, it really is about the discovery and the joy of discovery I think is a huge part of it. So, let's jump in a little bit about since we're talking about trends and I admit I did we did digress with the travel planning there.
>> No, it's okay. But to jump to jump back into the
>> to jump back into the trends, some of the things that we talked about at the executive summit and I'll run through a couple of the trends that we sort of identified in both in the report that has come out from the executive summit, but also what we just talked about at the summit. Some of the key trends were things like AI and the shift that's causing inequality in the economy. I think that's a really interesting topic to think about is that we've identified in recent studies that affluent travelers are driving the bulk of spend in travel. And to me that's concerning because it's we're shifting towards travel as a privilege more now. And that that concerns me a little bit. We're looking at what the new traveler mindset is, the climate and impact on climate and crowds at and over tourism as well as just like how do we get back to in real life experiences and the in real life components of the travel experience rather than this overwhelming need to focus on digitalization and the digital experience. So those are some of the things that we talked about. Is there anything in that in those trends that really stands out to you that that you want to talk about?
>> Sure. Look, we're it's a unique moment in time. I guess every moment in time is unique, but it does seem to me that if you look out over the horizon of two or three years right now, the confluence of AI doing what it's going to do, and we can talk about that in a sec, and climate tipping points really coming closer and bumping into this idea of over tourism, you do have this two big trail. And by the way, the third big trend which certainly over the next three years the increasingly kind of anti- tourism bent of the current administration which there's doesn't seem to be a fee that they don't like to charge to international traveler. Here's a 100 bucks to go to a national park. Here's 250. The proposal to search five years of social media history. It's very difficult, right? So operators, especially if they're operating in the US, are really trying to figure out where are all these different things going to go and how do they interrelate. And I think that interreationship of all these things is I mean that is a big macro trend is that nothing is going to be the same as it was three years ago three years from now and the time frames are really compressing pretty quickly and I would take I'll take AI just as a jumping off point because everybody of course is talking about it and I would say it's one of those things it's the rare sort of triple-edged sword because almost every operator I know of any scale has a story to tell now about how they figured out how to save some cost by replacing human labor with AI and a lot of the time it's customer service but it also might be might be something to do with their accounting. There's a bunch of different places we've all seen people saving on legal fees by using AI to do first drafts. If you're a small business, it's wow, what a great gift, right? Because do all this sort of great saving. At the same time, what we're not hearing about so much right now, I think very deliberately on the case of the AI companies, is what about all those people who used to do that? What are they going to do? Because I do think we are at the front end of a big labor displacement. When I was growing up in the 80s, NAFTA was going through and I was actually in Canada. I grew up in Montreal, like I said, but still we were part of the debate all the way. We saw everything that happened as all those manufacturing jobs went away and there just wasn't enough time to retrain people into doing other jobs right away and people lost their pensions and Billy Joel wrote Allentown and all of that stuff was happening and it was it was this move from the theory of what would happen when NASA made it much cheaper to manufacture in Mexico and so on to the reality of all those people getting thrown out of their factory jobs and not having anything else to do. Now, I just feel like we're going to see that across the whole economy. And we talked about the trend in travel, the sort of bifurcation of I guess what they're calling the K-shaped economy. I really worry for the mid tier of the travel industry because yeah, you can save all the money you want using AI, but if AI is putting your whole customer base out of work, it doesn't really matter how much money you're saving because your customer base is going to go away. And I don't see I don't hear around the travel industry enough attention being paid to that sort of crucial issue. I don't think that the high-end has anything to worry about at all. It's very clear the rewards of AI are going to just flow straight upstream. And I think it's a bunch of specialized travel um where people have to do it and so that's not going to be affected either. But a whole lot of discretionary travel counts on all those people who are going to be systematically put out of work. So I wouldn't be a bit surprised if you want to make a prediction if we're sitting here 3 years from now and we think AI is one of the worst things that ever happened in the child because of the evaporation of that sort of layer of white collar workers who otherwise would be taking their two or three annual trips with their families and now simply can't afford to because I guess there might be universal basic income from the American government. I'm not gonna given that we can't given that we can't seem to get our heads around supply Medicaid. I doubt it but just trying to get a reaction on that one. So anyway,
>> you are talking you're talking
>> you are talking to two Canadians.
>> Okay. Okay. Awesome. But but anyway, that's that's a confluence of stuff and so AI is scrambling the eggs for sure. And then the other thing I would say just to to riff on the thing a bit is we're facing obviously a big over tourism problem and it's I guess I'd call it almost a an overconentration problem which actually arrival has done a bunch of work on this the sort of
>> I'm going to forget the stats but I think some huge percentage of visitors in Paris go to very small number of attractions and of course intuitively that's right and who knows the fact of climate change making it more and more impossible to visit certain places at certain times of year maybe that's going to be a bit of a cure for the over tourism thing and also a big sort of worldwide recession much as hate to see it that actually might be a little bit of a cure for that too. There might be a bit of selfcorrection there but as an if you're in the business of providing experiences you don't love over tourism but it's probably rather that than the alternative of nobody showing up. So I think it's a very tricky time if you're especially if you're operating at scale in multiple markets. So guys operate in the big big bus tours that sort of thing. It's very tricky to plan forward right now and I really do I sympathize. I think it's a difficult time for budgeting for this year but also 27 and forward. It's tough.
>> But so that makes me think because we talked about the trip planning thing and how people still want to do that themselves like within travel and within travel experiences. There's so many aspects of it that you need and want a human for. Part of it is the human experience of meeting other humans in other cultures, not a robot with a different accent. So,
>> oh god,
>> how how are there some aspects of the experiences sector in particular that are maybe a little bit more insulated because of the human element of it?
Yes, there there's a bunch of ways in which I think there's insulation there. Actually, it's a good point to bring up. So, I guess I say first of all, I couldn't agree with you more that the human element is the thing that is most important about travel. Again, we're talking about leisure travel here. We're talking about the kind of travel people go to learn more about themselves. I tend to think of that kind of travel as art.
>> It is about human connection. is about learning something from the people you're interacting with as opposed to the more like commerce travel which is a lot of business travel where you have to show up for something and so I but I actually think it's quite important because art is very important to people and the other thing is if you look at the percentage of somebody's trip the percentage of the cost that's spent on the experiences it's interesting how it's a usually a pretty small percent of the cost of a trip but a huge percentage of the impact of a trip and so that suggests to me that as people if there's economic distress as they maybe have to cut that back a little bit. They're much more likely to cut back on their lodging than they are to cut back on the experience that they can do. Now, 10 years ago, I don't think that was true. I think that the experiences market, if you will, has changed the way that people think about traveling so that certainly 10-15 years ago when people landed in a place they wanted to visit, they knew they'd have to spend a little money on a museum, a museum ticket or something or they might find something at the hotel and make a last minute decision to take a bus thing. The new world though is that people actually are thinking hard about what are the experiences I can have in that city and I'm going to I'm going to make sure about that first and then I'm going to worry about where am I going to stay, where am I going to eat. And this inversion of people realizing, okay, if I allocate a little bit of my budget, I can get a way better experience. I will have a way better trip. I will learn more about myself and about the place that I'm in. And the fact that that's so prevalent now and so accepted. You guys remember 10 years ago, it was a little dodgy almost to sign up for a trip and someone's going to show you graffiti. Really? Are you going to walk around town with them? That's going to you they're not just going to take your money and run, right? You know, now of course not only that, but there's five people to choose from and most of them have got MFAs, right? It's it's just a whole different world. So I feel very strongly that leisure travel the in real life the human interaction part of it is actually going to be more and more important and I would actually even redouble it in that boy if we think we're tired of being on screens now wait till half of our co-workers are AI god we're gonna just it's going to be fantastic to leave it all behind I'm already tired of talking about AI all the time I shouldn't say that they might be listening but so anyway I I I totally agree with You know, I think I think it's very important and I think the economics say it's probably the, you know, the last thing people cut out of their travel too.
>> Yeah. And so that brings us back to this idea of the in real life trend or thing that you had on the list from the executive summit and you were mentioning how you you run help run a summer camp where kids aren't allowed phones and when I went to summer camp I'm not as
>> we didn't have I'm not
>> right.
>> Yeah. Wait, like that wasn't even a thing. I'm not that old, am I?
>> Cell phones weren't a thing yet.
>> Yeah. Can you speak a little bit to that and that sense of what's what's driving people to
>> get rid of their phones for a while? People really want to disconnect.
>> They really do. I'll tell you just as a funny sort of stat. It used to be that we would open up our rates and dates in November for the following summer and we would see sort of a slow progression of bookings building with a big spike kind of after the holidays when families got together and realized, wow, this time of year, ah, we have nothing going on for the summer.
>> Now, since the pandemic, as soon as we open up those dates, we celebrate half the season in the first couple weeks.
>> Yeah. Which is marketkedly different. And we're convinced it's because the pandemic was the thing that really showed parents because they were home with their kids watching their kids on the screens all day and it really showed parents like, "Wow, this is not good. This is not how childhood is supposed to be lit." And camp, even if you go for a week if you're a little kid or but a lot of kids go for three weeks, it's an opportunity to relearn how to be with people face to face in real life using your hands to do stuff. You're bored. It's okay. You could be bored. You can actually read a book. It's a completely different kind of experience from doing everything through your
>> paper made of paper. You get you get a knife and you can whittle yourself a little canoe or something. Stuff that feels very old timey, but actually guess what? Kids loved it 50 years ago and kids love it today. It's the same. Kids kids haven't really changed. It's just all the stuff around them that's changed. And so we've got this sort of responsibility now where we made a decision, by the way. I've owned the camp about 10 years. We made a decision early on that as more and more kids had phones and stuff, we said we're just going to be hardcore total zero tolerance on this. And so we take everybody's phones away as soon as they get to camp. And then the first night we do a sweep through the tent line and all the kids who think they're so clever and smuggled in a second phone. We take those two, right? The first morning and the kids, by the way, is between seven and 15. It this holds true for all the age groups. The first mornings the kids get together and they talk a lot about, "Oh, if only I had my phone, I could show you." And there's a lot of phantom grabbing for phones and so forth. And that persists through much of that first day. The second morning, it's as though they never even owned a phone because now they've all bonded with each other in real life. And the only world that matters to them is the world that they're inhabiting there at camp. And it's just magical. And that's the experience they get out of it. And that's the experience that we're trying really hard to to present too. So even our counselors aren't allowed to have phones or tech anywhere that a camper could possibly see it. The only exception is obviously emergencies every now and again, but otherwise we're very hardcore about it and and a lot of parents point out it's the only stretch of the whole year that the kids aren't on screens. And that to me is scary, right? I look at some of the stuff that here's Australia saying there shouldn't be social media accounts. They're trying to do something that that has to do with what I'm talking about here. But what we do is we're as hardcore as you could possibly get. that I it's made me a real advocate for all these different projects saying we should we should ban the phones in schools. I just I'm a big advocate for all these things because I see the difference in how kids interact with one another when they don't have their phones around and it's just it's night and day.
>> I'm trying to promote the idea of doing a disconnected social event at arrival
>> where you lock your phone.
>> We had one we had one accidentally last year. I don't know if you
>> Oh, that's true. Valencia.
>> But in Valencia on the first night there was no power and the cell phone towers went out and our welcome party was at an orchard and people had phones but they were useless. They were worthless. They didn't do anything and everyone like the vibe
>> it was the best
>> people talking with each other and looking at each other. It was like prephone days
>> party vibe and everyone was saying this is so great. So, I don't know if we need to arrange a power outage every year, but
>> yeah. Eric, I am a huge camp advocate. I went to camp I went to summer camp every year between grade 8 and grade 12. And those were
>> Oh, you did? Oh, great. Oh, yeah. They were This was in I was in the aircadet program. So, I went to aircadet camps every summer uh between two and six weeks. Like my last two years in camp, they were six week long camps. And of course, this was pre- cell phones. So they are fantastic experiences. Absolutely fantastic experiences. You make lifelong friends. You learn incredible skills. The ability to just talk to people, build relationships, deal with conflict resolution. All those sorts of things are invaluable skills for young people to learn and and to do that without tech, without access to tech, because that's how it was done before. And it's amazing. So, I love the idea of a disconnected camp. I wish we had more of that.
>> Yeah. Well, and also I wish that there was an easy way to put it more into the non-kid world. You know, you guys saw the White Lotus last year,
>> the very funny sort of subplot about taking all the phones away and then god that became a plot point. I I just don't know how possible it is to actually do that for people who are staying at these high resorts because people just feel a need to be connected all the time. Oh, and I'll tell you one definite learning from the camp environment is it only works if everybody gives up their phones.
>> That's a crucial part of things. Otherwise, it it would just fall apart completely.
>> Yeah. Which we see by the way on visitors day,
>> right? Visitors day we can't ban all the parents and older siblings and stuff from using their phones. And so suddenly the whole environment changes for a few hours while all the external people are on with their phones and then boom then it's gone again.
>> I want to go to camp. Yeah, there are camps actually for adults. I absolutely never too late.
>> Yeah. That that go to these. They're not specifically silent retreats. That's a totally different thing, but they're disconnected.
>> I have done that. Yeah.
>> Yeah. They are disconnected camps and Yeah. It's just a digital It's weird that we have that we have gotten to the point where we have to have digital detox. Like it's very strange.
>> Yeah.
>> Yeah. But the world at that point.
>> Yeah. 100%. I actually got to do a a canoe trip last summer way up north in the Yukon on the Snake River with a actually great outfitter called Black Feather out of Ottawa that you guys might have heard of. Anyway, two weeks down the river, no cell towers of course anywhere nearby. So 12 straight days without a screen or connection. I was there with my dad, my sister, my son and so on. And all there was to do, you just around the campfire. And it was just glorious because I was thinking for all I go and promote the camp and you know how we don't have phones and stuff. I hadn't actually done that in five or six years. And boy is it ever fantastic. I wish there was a way we could get doctors to write a prescription for it. You must go somewhere for a week with no phone access. I think it's the cure for an awful lot of anxiety.
>> I think they're doing that in Sweden. I read an article about how they're the doctors can prescribe outdoor
>> like outdoor activity or something like that to people.
>> Oh, I love that.
>> That's great.
>> The Scandinavian countries.
>> Yeah. Yeah, I know.
>> Always a step ahead when
It comes to that sort of stuff. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, bringing it back to the trends and outlook. I don't know if this was on the list, Stephen, but one of the things we're starting to see is a lot more mergers and acquisitions, IPOs happening in the experiences space. So, Cluke and My Real Trip both said they're going to do IPOs. Expedia acquired tickets, big one in the experiences sector. Do you think that we're headed towards more consolidation in the travel experiences and tech space?
Well, I think yes and no. I think there's probably more consolidation and more tendency towards bigger players when you get when you think about the aggregator or the OTAA layer. You know, get your guide. I'm a believer. I think Airbnb will actually pull it off this time. I think Expedia is certainly showing that they take it very seriously with tickets. So, I think the aggregator layer, yeah, I think fewer bigger companies that are really going to duke it out on the marketing side.
On the ground though, in terms of the actual operators, I guess I don't really see it. I understand that there is of course a return to scale and if you develop expertise at running something like hop on hop off bus or whatever it might be it makes sense to be in a bunch of different markets but it's hard for me to see big broad I don't think you're going to see the McDonald's of art history tours for instance it just doesn't lend itself to that to me so I think the longtail is here to stay which is great because it means it's a place for entrepreneurs to jump in it's still look it's still a business in the travel industry that despite all the modernization everything that's happened. If you've got an interesting story to tell about your hometown, you can find a way to tell it and make a few bucks doing it with people who actually want to hear what you're saying. And that's just great. And that's not going to go away, I don't think, anytime soon. And so, that makes me happy. So, I do think more players bigger at the high end partly as a defense mechanism against the LLMs, right? And they're trying desperately now to figure out how to keep my share, but down at the operating level, I think there's still tons of room for individual entrepreneurs, and I think there will be fault. That's probably good news for a lot of people.
Yeah. Yeah. The operators listening will be going okay. But I think they say there's a reason, right? I don't think it's controversial. Yeah. These are also companies that are not looking to at the operator level. These are these are small entrepreneurs, lifestyle businesses. They're looking to just build a business to sustain themselves and their families and leave some kind of legacy. They're not looking to be billiondollar unicorns or whatever for the most part.
Yeah. That tracks, right? Yeah. Yeah. I totally agree. And I think the smart whether it's Viotor or anybody else, the smart aggregators will do their best to give those those folks tools to run their businesses, build their businesses, like they'll add value above and beyond just the demand, which I think you're already seeing them sort of realize and start to say, boy, if we can actually add something, if we can make it easier for these folks to start and run their businesses on our platform, I guess, you know, in accommodation, Airbnb set the standard for this. I think Viotor, I think others are very good at this as well. in the experience space. That's a way of really keeping that nurturing that that ecosystem of operators so it doesn't have to consolidate down so you can actually make a living doing it without having to get big because that's very important in this whole thing too because otherwise if you didn't have the aggregators and you were just trying to hang a shingle on the big broad internet marketing gets very difficult very fast right so I think that the value the values at each level here is pretty well established and I like I feel if you can't tell I feel very good about the help the ecosystem here when it comes to experiences much more so than I do about market logic.
It's a it's an interesting point because I've talked to a lot of operators who and we always talk about growth, right? And here's how you can grow your business. But there's some operators out there who are like, I don't really want to grow. I'm good. I like what I do. I like the people who come to my company who do the things. And there is that side that's like good at kind of the status quo level. So there is there are growth oriented companies for sure but then there's a lot of companies who just love what they do and they want to keep it.
Within 75% of the companies are like that right it's only 25% that actually have like active growth in mind. Listen, we talked about Butterfield Robinson before and George Butterfield is still a good friend of mine he's the founder of the company they've been in business for 45 years now over 60 years now probably anyway his motto has always been we never wanted to be the biggest travel company just the best and and that's and he's just stuck with it and they just don't add volume for volume's sake. They just don't do it. So they still they bang along. It's a great business but just like you said there's never been an ambition to be some big giant thing with all the issues that brings very different from a tech orientation which I'm very familiar with from investing and from Expedia where actually a lot of the time it doesn't really work unless you get really big. It's a whole different imperative, right? you're trying to figure out how much volume can you run across a fixed cost base and it's a very different way of looking at things if you're running the sort of upper side of a marketplace which is just as true in experiences the different layers have very different incentives I think.
Yeah, definitely. We wanted to talk a little bit about the leadership piece because you've been obviously in a leadership role for a lot of different companies and you're on a lot of boards now as you were saying and I'm wondering if looking back if there's anything that stands out to you that you've learned along the way that you might want to pass on to some of the listeners ers and viewers who might be more up and cominging leaders in the travel experiences space. What would what would you pass on to us?
It's an interesting question. You mean in terms of leadership lessons for people who are running companies?
Yeah. Or just in general from your experience. Yeah.
Listen, I would say the thing that that I guess I see over and over again and it's almost a cliche, but as you're growing, you have to understand where are the places to innovate, where are the places that it's been done before and there's really no point. And the best CEOs and leadership teams are the ones who kind of embrace the idea that there's kind of an operating system for businesses. It's not always the same is really coming up with a sort of fantastical org chart where people do jobs that nobody's ever heard of before or put stuff together in a way that oh this is pretty risky but maybe it'll work or you know coming up with a comp structure that's completely different from everybody else in your industry because you're trying to be innovative but not recognizing it's like yeah but the job offers they're getting are the standardized things from everybody else. So you're just putting yourself at a disadvantage. the place to innovate, the place to focus is on the experience that you're delivering for your customers. And that's as long as you stay really focused on that, most other stuff in business is pretty generic. You hate to say it, but it is. It's pretty mechanical. It's pretty generic. And a lot of it has to do with making sure you've got excellent people. And excellent people can sniff out really quickly whether you're actually organized or not, right? And whether you're actually doing things according to some kind of recognizable playbook. And so I would say you know that I know it's a little bit of a cliche to say that focus is focus on your customer is the most important thing but boy I tell you especially in this experiences world if you're not just totally focused on the experience you're providing and how it's different from what other people are providing and how that resonates with the people who are going to go with you that human connection like we were talking about before the other stuff's not really going to matter very much. So leadership ends up being how do you keep everybody focused on the important thing which is the customer and what what you could provide for them. And I've just never seen that go wrong. Probably the best entrepreneur I know is Rich Barton, the guy who started Expedia and then Zillow and co-founded Glass Door. And he's got a good line about how it all just comes down to power to the people, right? As long as you're focused on the people and making sure they get what they want, everything else will follow the way it should. And and I really I believe that. I think that's true.
That's great advice because one of the things that that we see so often within the travel space, especially when we start talking about the larger companies, is that there's just so much focus on the bottom line, right? on profitability and on driving revenue that the conversation about customer experience and what the customer is actually getting from this experience gets lost because it's oh they're just a means to an end to profitability or to shareholder value and I think it's important and I think the fact that you've pointed this out and given some very very good examples of largecale profitable companies that have a minds set that is focused on the customer experience. I think that's really important to remember for all of those companies that are out there, all of those CEOs that are out there that are under pressure to satisfy shareholder value to think about your shareholder value and your profitability is driven by customer experience. If your customers aren't getting what they want, you're not going to be profitable or be able to provide that shareholder value. So I think it that gets lost. Like I don't hear it very often when I talk to people and it's like your customers are number one like they're driving your profitability. So why aren't we talking more about them and how we can make those experiences better?
I will say one of my criteria as I decide whether to join boards or not, whether to advise companies or not is is the CEO and sort of CEO adjacent is that team really actually interested in the product, right? Are they product people? Is that how they live and die? The quintessential example be a guy like Steve Jobs. Somebody who there's just no question. That's what they're always going to murk you with. That's where they start and that's where they finish is what's the product and do people really engage with the product? And that's a really interesting environment to be around. I I have in another life maybe I would have been a hedge fund guy or something, but I just don't have interest in that kind of the financial engineering world. I understand it to how it works and I think it's great for the people who like it but boy give me give me a product focus every time much more I agree with you 100%.
Okay, so last question. This is again super easy question. If you could predict one big disruption in travel experiences, super easy question. One big disruption in travel experiences in the next decade, what would it be?
I gosh, it seems almost too obvious there. Listen, there will be some share of the experiences market taken away by some variation of an AI guide. that's going to happen. For all the reasons we've just talked about, I think inerson guide is much more what the experience is supposed to be about. But I wandered a lot of cities with my lonely planet guide book back in the day. And I sort of liked doing that on my own and taking it on my own pace and so on. And I'm sure that there's right now tons of people who are trying to figure out how to make chatbt or whichever Claude work really well in that context and be a bit of a ride along right now. Oh, I don't know if you've ever tried doing it. I've tried it a couple of times. It's so annoying because they sit there going, "In front of you is the Church of St. Andrew. Would you like me to describe the stained glass?" No, just stop talking. So, it certainly does doesn't work yet. But, I do think that'll be the big disruption. And the disruption will be simply because it will take away some of the market for sure. It'll make it a little tougher. These things are going to be very cheap, if not free, and they'll take some of it away, and that's going to be a bummer. But I don't think there's that's gravity that that's going to happen for sure. And I think that'll be disruptive. But I will also just say all these debates about, oh, will it wipe out the market or will the aggregators get wiped out by the LLM? And it makes for good copy. But the fact is it's all just a game of percentages. And so some percentage of the market will go to the people who like to have an LLM kind of guided experience. So okay, that's fine. It won't take everything else away, but it might have some economic consequences. We'll see. But that to me is the sort of the most obvious thing coming.
Yeah. It reminds me a lot of the the argument that when the internet came along and OTAAS like Expedia started taking up market share that travel advisor and travel agencies would disappear, right? That they would die. And we still see today that travel advisors generate close to half a trillion dollars worth of global bookings. So it's not like they've gone anywhere. They've just shifted and they've evolved. And that's true for parts of travel that will be affected by AI moving forward as well.
Yeah. Nobody's nobody's using CDROMs, though.
Oh, they're coming back. Millennials are like they're buying up CDROMs and old CD players just for nostalgia. It's crazy. Actually, that is true. That is true. Yeah. My my kids are actually at a place where Yeah, they've got the vinyl for sure. I will say, Stephen, I do agree with you. One of the reasons I joined the board at Foret Travel is is precisely that. It's an adviser. It's a sort of a business in a box thing for advisers to be able to go and have a lot of really good tools to book travel for their friends and family typically. And guess what? People love it. People really like having someone else help them book their travel. And if the platform can make that person super knowledgeable, well, great. It's a win for everybody. So, I definitely agree. Everybody keeps on wanting things to be much more black and white than they are. It's just a human nature thing. But the truth is everything just evolves and things tend to evolve together. So I still go to the theater sometimes. Who in 1950 would have predicted that there's still actual liveaction theater on Broadway. Most people would have said, "Oh, impossible. Here we are."
Yeah. And they're making movies based on theater.
And they're right. And they're making movies based. You can't make this stuff up.
Eric, thank you so much for being here. I wish we could keep talking forever, but we can't.
Very nice to talk to you guys. Thanks very much.
Yeah, you too, Eric. And we'll I'm sure we'll catch up with you at one of the upcoming travel events.
No doubt.
So, Stephen, what stood out to you from that conversation?
I you know what it was something he said right at the beginning like when he was talking about his background that he had a degree in theater and a bachelor's degree in theater and wanted to travel the world and so became a bike tour guide and that was his gateway into the travel industry and I and just reinforced the idea that honestly it doesn't matter what you do in school just do something and get out and travel the world, right? Like your life starts when you experience the world in a way that you haven't been able to. Everybody, in my opinion, everybody should travel. Everybody should experience a different culture, a different part of the world, and because it just opens your eyes up to what makes us all human and what makes us different. And you could tell by talking to him, he's a really empathetic person and he's an empathetic leader. Like he puts people first.
And we see that a lot in travel, I think, just because of the nature of travel.
And he even said it, he's a product person. He is like he's about the customer experience. He's he doesn't care as much or isn't necessarily interested in as much about the financial manipulation and all that sort of stuff. And I really admire that. That's I think we need more leaders like that that are really focused on how does this impact people and.
Yeah, well it it came through in how he was talking about how he decides if he is going to join a board because he's on all these boards now and he's less concerned about maybe some of those financial details although that stuff's important more concerned about do these people actually care about what they're doing and what they're making or what they're providing and I thought that was that was a great perspective that's a great way to look at it.
Yeah.
And the fact that he owns a summer camp.
Yes. That's so cool.
For kids.
Right?
Yeah.
He gets to impact.
Yeah.
in a positive way. 500 kids a year.
Yeah.
Right. What a great legacy.
Yeah. No, it's awesome. And it's it's interesting because summer camp is not the travel industry, but the question of how do you get people to how do you get kids to engage with each other in this world where we're so online all the time is super relevant to the travel experiences sector. How do you provide experiences that get adults out of being addicted to screens? And none of us really want to be addicted to screens, but we are. And so, how do you offer experiences that people are like, "Yes, I want to get out of my I want to get into the real world again. I want to meet actual humans from other cultures and have what you were describing earlier, those mindopening experiences that make you a more empathetic person, make you a better human in the world."
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah. No, it's true. Those are skills that don't come naturally necessarily. I think we're we're tuned to be that way cuz we're social creatures.
But you need to practice those skills. And for kids to be able we saw this with the with the pandemic that kids came out of the pandemic without the skills to be able to socialize with other kids, with other people. They just had no way of like they were anxious. They were they didn't trust people. They didn't have that human connection. This is like to have summer camp experiences like this. And for me, this was this was really important. I'm sure you experienced this too with summer camp is that you were put into a situation where you had to learn to work with people and to make friends quickly and to connect with people and find ways to connect with people quickly so that you could build trust, right? Because there is an inherent trust that you need to have in groups in order to feel safe.
Yeah.
And you need to find ways to build that trust with people and to be vulnerable and to build the group dynamic so that you can so that you can get through the rest of the summer. And that's what summer camps really help foster. It's huge. And because everything you just said was making me think of being a tour guide for multi-day tours, that happens in the tour environment as well, especially when you're with people for a longer period of time. And and that that would happen. And so it was great that Eric brought up the summer camp thing, but also going back to this idea, this trend or whatever you want to call it that we're going to be facing of AI versus human things in the travel experiences world. It's like some things are moving towards AI and yet here we are as humans wanting to have human experiences and how that kind of tension is really going to shape things going forward.
I thought it was interesting that you mentioned trust because we talked about trust in the last episode with Haley uh about how trust is going to become or is becoming even more important to travelers because now that there's so many different options of how to book your travel, who to book your travel with, what things to do, there's this element of needing to be able to trust the person or the AI or whoever you're interacting with in that process going forward.
Yeah. Yeah. Trust. Do we really trust the algorithm?
On that note, we bring this amazing episode with Eric Blatchford to a close.
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The best part of travel.
The best part of travel. Okay. Okay.
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Bye.