The Tribune

By YOURI KEMP

Tribune Business Reporter

ykemp@tribunemedia.net

A strategic advisor to Airbnb yesterday reiterated that tourists are looking for “transformational travel” experiences that have the potential to generate life-altering memories.

Chip Conley, who is also a hotelier and author, detailed what he described as “five qualities” that are defining which industries and companies are going to face future disruption when he addressed the RF Holdings’ Bahamas Economic Outlook webinar.

He said the first involved “the company or organisation [that] has grown complacent due to its past successes, and they haven’t evolved their product offering very much.

“Number two is they’ve lost touch with their company’s core customers,” Mr Conley added. “I think the hotel industry is really susceptible to this one.” He painted a scenario where hotels, in particular, fail to capture customer tastes and preferences via questionnaires and other forms of feedback.

“Understanding the psychology of the customer is really important, and what’s their unrecognised need that they haven’t even talked about,” Mr Conley said. “The third quality that is common amongst industries or companies that are going to be disrupted is that they imagine a whole new set of customers with different needs entering the market.

“The global hotel companies didn’t; did not prepare for the middle class family from Peru or Poland, who was traveling for the first time and their parents had never travelled outside the country.”

Airbnb is targeting these new “digital nomads”, said Mr Conley, because they are the new traveller and have different tastes and desires. He said they want more space but have less money.

“The fourth quality that’s common around companies or industries that are being disrupted is that they don’t take the new competitors seriously. Potentially because they feel comparatively safe due to their historical regulatory environment,” he added.

The fifth quality for businesses that are being disrupted is that they have to realise they are in the “belong anywhere business”, which means that - especially for companies in the hotel sector - they fail to capitalise on the nature of their business model.

This, Mr Conley said, is because managers use descriptive information about the business that is aspirational to themselves, failing to take a holistic approach to what the business actually is and where it is situated in order to give it a fuller meaning.

Mr Conley said there are several ways Airbnb is disrupting the travel and tourism industry. He added that the vacation rental platform is doing this through education by providing training on tourism and hospitality to persons around the world.

It is also disrupting the retirement business by providing opportunities for persons to offer their homes in an established industry, alongside training on a new way of doing business.

Mr Conley said: “I think education and retirement communities are complacent and ready to be disrupted. But I also think that one of the biggest trends in travel today, and this is pretty important for you as we go, is transformational travel. Transformational travel is where that person wants their travel experience to be something that actually transforms their life.

“So they’re not just focused on comfort and entertainment, and having a drink with a little paper umbrella in it, or some sort of colourful drink. They’re looking to actually go and be transformed from the experience of travelling.”