Tourism Isn’t Broken - We Just Forgot It’s a People Business

Good morning. Good evening. It is 6 a.m.

here in the New Mexico Desert. Oh, New Mexico. Wow. It's beautiful.

I'm waiting for the sun to come up. There's a 270-degree view of the horizon. Oh, wow. So it's dark, isn't it?

Very. Very. That's my humor and love life. Inside it's also sunny outside.

It's just glorious. Just darken your soul. We're off to a good start. This is the kind of conversation that I like to start with.

It's a hook. You want to listen, you want to hear more, right? A love life is so inexistent that a swiffer looks like. Oh what a what?

A swiffer. Yes, a duster. This is a new word. Oh, yeah.

Swiffer's the brand. Yeah, okay. I gotcha. Alright.

Good to see you. Good to see you. Thank you for having me on the podcast. Thank you for having me on yours.

This is gonna be such a wacky conversation. I can feel it. We're already off to a good start. So I'll introduce myself.

Please do. I'm Steve Extram, CEO and co-founder of the nonprofit Lark Tourism, Lark Tourism. We now have over 75,000 students all around the world learning how to build their communities through tourism sustainably. Wow.

I have a question. When 75,000 students. Yeah. Who are your students?

Our students are community members, business partners, frontline workers who have a vested interest in building sustainable tourism economies in their space. So it could be somebody who wants to be a tourism ambassador in Washington State, or it could be the residents of a small village in Nepal that's working on development. Yes, there are people who are executives at destinations who are also students, but really we work with them to educate and protect their families. Community.

So sustainability really does cover all three things, right? Are we preserving culture? Are we preserving community, you know, the physical attributes of the area which we bring up visitors environmentally and profitability? Are we giving them tools to make a long-term benefit for their community?

Or is this just gonna be a turn and turn? So we do focus on all three things. I want to come back. Sorry, I'm just hijacking all the questions here.

But well, no, actually, I'm just gonna riff on this. Economically, now I have a controversial standpoint on this for the Australian and New Zealand tourism industry, in that I don't think the economics of running a business in the tourism industry is taken as seriously as it should be, or that we spend a lot of time running training sessions on how to be a sustainable business, how to be an inclusive and accessible business, which are all really important things. I can't remember the last time I saw an RTO run a training workshop on how to be an economically viable business, increase your ROI, tweak your visitor experience, or use your team to not leave money on the table when you have guests in-house.

So how is that approached on your side of the world, Stephen? Is this a conversation that's had for operators? It's very similar. I'm speaking next week to the American Indigenous Tourism Association about welcoming global markets.

We are talking about the soft skills related to marketing business. Are you managing your revenue? Are you managing your expenses? Are you capitalizing on other opportunities?

Are you getting repeat visitors? Are you managing your marketing spends so that it's lower per cap? Yeah, okay. Um those are soft skills that go into any sort of business.

And yes, you're right. A lot of RTOs or DMOs, as we might say here in the United States, overlook those in favor of whatever the flashy thing is today. You know, are you using AI? Are you capitalizing on trade show participation or whatever that thing might be?

Yeah. But if you aren't running this business, then it's a hobby. I've had this discussion many times over the years with colleagues. I I think it's like 95% of tourism businesses in Australia are micro businesses with less than 20 employees.

And for a lot of them, they're one bad season away from no longer being in existence. So with COVID. Yeah, that's so true. There was a weeding or a colleague of the herd in the tourism space.

Two things rose to the top during COVID. Number one, were those organizations that could be responsive to their economic and need, and those who were innovative. What we had were a lot of businesses that didn't come out a cash business. And that's not sustainable in certain cases.

Yeah. Those were the companies that really struggled. Those were the companies that had business models that were 20 or 30 years old and had never learned to evolve. It's one of the things that I like where we were.

We are a learning organization, first and foremost. Everybody on our staff walks into a team meeting ready to talk about what they learned last week and how to apply it. We learn from each other, we learn independently, we learn from third-party sources. And the goal is to be better today than we were yesterday.

How's that going? Not so bad. Pretty good. Pretty good so far.

That's a fantastic goal. I tell my team, regardless of what your job function is, there are two metrics that your job is measured on. One is the quantifiable, did you produce what it was that you were supposed to produce? Whatever the numbers are, whatever the feedback is, whatever that thing is.

The second piece is are you learning? Tell my team you could miss one or the other. But if you're missing both, yeah, it's not gonna work out. Yeah.

I love that. I love the learning component, and it's an undervalued I'm picturing in my mind, which I think is outdated now, the hierarchy of needs. Hierarchy of needs. I feel like it might not be up to date anymore.

But when it comes to motivating your staff and keeping them engaged, wanting to come back to work the next day, that learning and the professional development side of things, keeping you engaged, and I think our tourism operators could do a better job of that with their own workforces as well. Keeping them learning, keeping them engaged, reminding them that they're part of a bigger mission. Yeah. How did you get your starting tourism?

I wanted to be a flight attendant. And I decided over the summer when I finished high school that I wanted to be a flight attendant. I picked up the phone back in the day in 1999. You could do very expensive flight attendant course, maybe three or five thousand dollars or something, and it went for six weeks, but it sounded like an awful lot of money to me then.

I picked up the phone and I called Qantas, the Australian Airline, and I called their HR department, and I spoke to somebody there. Should I do this course or not? It's a lot of money for me, and I'll have to save it up. Should I do it?

The lovely lady was very frank with me and said, do not spend your money and your time doing this flight attendant course. We will train you. We have a dedicated flight attendant academy. If you are lucky enough to land a job with us, we don't care that you've already had training.

You are better placed to go and work in retail or in customer service or in hospitality. And if you want to do some study while you're doing that, then maybe go study tourism or hospitality or something and then wait for a recruitment round to come up. So that's what I did. And I went and I did an advanced diploma in tourism.

And by the time I'd finished, I was madly in love and I didn't want to be a flight attendant anymore. Used my network created during my study years, got myself a job in reservations for a ferry company that runs the Ferry Kangaroo Island off the coast of South Australia. I started in reservations and then that job ended up taking me to New Zealand. And I worked in product development and opened an office for them over there.

I was in New Zealand and I worked at Aja Hackett Bungie, spent seven years managing bungee sites in Australia and New Zealand and Japan. Worked in product development over the years and tour operations. I've been a tour guide and flitted around from one. This looks like an interesting opportunity.

I see. What was it about tourism that caught your interest? I want to say something. I grew up in Adelaide in South Australia, and I always knew I wanted to get out of Adelaide.

Being a flight attendant or studying tourism seemed like a way I could do that. So when I had my son, I took four years off and raised my son. We were relocated to Tasmania here in Australia, and I was looking for some work back in the tourism industry when I decided to return to the workforce. I ended up moving into an events role and running professional development events for the Law Society of Tasmania because it fit around mum life, and I'd had some experience in events previously.

I did that for three years, and then I returned to the tourism industry. My son was a bit older and at school, and I found a job with Destination Southern Tasmania, which is a regional tourism organization in Tasmania. I remember I walked into my first day of work and everyone, there was five of us, gave me a hug. That organization banged out some work for five people, full plates all the time.

Everyone got up and gave me a hug. And my first day of work was sort of monthly operated networking event. And I went along and I was just so it would have been a few years since I've been in the tourism industry. I'd been used to being in the legal profession.

And I was just so reminded how amazing my colleagues in the tourism industry are and how down to earth they are. This is really random, but I think about this often. If you cater for an event in the tourism industry, you have to cater for like double the amount of people that are going to be there. Everyone's there for free food.

In the legal profession running professional development events, you would cater for half. No one's eating anything. Yes, this is true. I love to travel, it's very important to me and my family to expose my son to the world.

But I love we in the tourist ministry have the opportunity to make those memories for travelers and tourists and visitors to our place. And I love hospitality, not hospitality as in a waitressing, but feeling like a tourist is a guest in your place and treating them as such. I love everything about it. People in the tourist space to do it well, you have to create a sense of wealth.

Yeah, and you have to approach that with authenticity. So when you walk into a room full of people who are kind, generous, are interested in sharing a part of who they are with other people so that those other people have great experiences, it's a totally different vibe. So I get a bus touring North America all the time. And I get to stop and visit some of the cities and destinations that we work, and I'm always impressed when there is a local networking or a local business meeting of some sort.

I'm like, hey, mind come on over, stop it. And it's like walking into a room full of friends. Yeah. I've had some wild experiences.

I was in Brazil and I reached out to some tourism contacts. It happened to be the US Thanksgiving holiday. And before I knew that, I was invited to the ambassador's house for Thanksgiving dinner. Oh wow.

I was in Mexico. Next thing you know, I was invited to the five-star luncheon with all of the tourism. Who's who? Southern.

Those sort of things happen in this industry. I don't see it happening so much in others. I'm with that same level of sincerity. Yeah, sincerity is real because I mean, what is the landscape like in the US, Stephen?

Is it also predominantly like small or micro operators? You have some of those, but for the most part, when you're at a destination function, you're gonna probably a quarter of the small operators, probably a quarter of the medium-sized businesses, maybe the hotel companies or the bus companies, some of these attractions get a million visitors a year. So I wouldn't call them small operations. And then you have the destination folks, the ancillary support industry support businesses.

So it's roughly a quarter of I just asked that question because for me, when I walk into a room and it's full of operators, which, as I've said, in Australia is largely owners or members of very small teams, like those people are running the businesses that they run or working in the businesses that they work in because they're interesting people and really down to earth and really care about what they're doing. Often weird. Yeah. Often weird, but there's something special about somebody who wants to lead a turtle tour.

There's something about them that makes them different. And that's great. We need that, otherwise, there are no turtle tours. Yeah, I'm gonna build sandcastles for a living.

Oh wow. Yeah, okay. All right. Like that's the world needs sandcastles.

And they're beautiful sandcastles, but it's just one of those things I never would have thought about. Yeah. The tourism industry is a special place, but through my eyes, tourism careers, in my opinion, have a real PR problem. Young people don't look at tourism as a real and a viable and a long-term career path.

And I think that is a real shame. Even once we do all this work, we lose them. Well, we do in Australia anyway, because there's no real identified career pathway. There's no this is what I'm gonna do next.

Not that everyone's driven to climb the ladder, but at least I can see that there's other opportunities for me, and we lose them. And it makes me very sad as someone that's had a long and exciting and delightful career in the industry, and I'm doing everything I can to try and change this. I think that happens for a couple of reasons. At the lower end of the entry-level tourism scale, you have some not so glamorous jobs.

You have housekeeping, desk at the hotel, host at a restaurant, working together. Those are glamorous jobs, and it's hard to see your way out of something like that where it's repetitious. But they I've interviewed over 300 CEOs on the tourism space, from small organizations to huge organizations. None of them knew that they wanted to work for a destination organization.

Every single one of them had a serpentine career path. But we sat and evaluated all of these interviews. So, what is the career path? Okay, because it's clear.

And it's skills like skills, it's the skills that you build at each level of your personal growth that allow you to grow to that next level. They're transferable skills. But that's where people sometimes get caught up. Because if you're in accounting, for example, you're gonna look for an accounting job.

You may not be looking for a job where you can apply all of the skills that you have. That might seem harder, that might seem different, that's change. Some people thrive and change, and some people don't. One of the things that I think people in the tourism space have to do is thrive and change.

Because you never know if the weather is gonna change, if somebody doesn't show up, if somebody's late, there's a million things that can go wrong delivering the tourism product. And you have to be flexible. For those people who are flexible, they can see how those skills transform. That's an interesting point.

Just a thought. I like it, but it's a shame that our industries aren't taken as seriously as they should be. And I also think there's an element of not every role in tourism is AI proof, but a lot of them are for the foreseeable future anyway. I used to argue with my boss about this, and he would say we'll have AI tour guides, and we already see people walking around with headsets on around the waterfront and in Hobart and Tasmania and listening to whatever chat GPT tell them what they're looking at.

We know that travelers are looking for connection. We're lonelier than we've ever been. When we travel, we want to meet a place through the people, through the food, through the music, through local events. Largely, um folks uh don't want to meet a place through AI or through a virtual tour guide.

And I know that everyone's different, but I just think that that should be part of the thought process for young people when they're evaluating what their career options are this day and age. And I think we've got a way to go before AI takes over the tourism industry. I know that you worked uh heavily with tech. So have you got anything to say about that?

Do you agree, disagree? I I agree that a lot of the tourism jobs can't be replaced by AI. They can't be replaced by tech. I agree that people are looking for authentic, which I do an human production.

They may not realize it though, particularly younger people who have spent so much of their time on a screen interaction with others that they don't know what they're missing. You and I grow up to go outside and play. Yeah. You have to get along with many friends.

A kid today can do their work online, play online, but never have to deal with relationships and understanding the human element. That's a real opportunity for us in the tourism space. Yeah. Yeah.

That's a layer of authenticity that can't be replaced by replaced by a virtual tourist. But somebody says when I'm on a trip as a solo traveler, and somebody says to me at 10 o'clock at night, I mean it's at 8 o'clock in the morning, I'm on the beach, and I say, okay. It might be the stupidest decision I ever made, but it was the most beautiful page I've ever been to. And I spent two and a half hours in a car with complete strangers.

Like, okay, I didn't get jumped. It was good. It was a beautiful page. It was a beautiful page.

It was a great day. It was a really great day. But that's the kind of thing where in tourism people invite you in. They're not talking about it, they're not sharing.

For the sake of sharing. They're inviting their home, their community, their passion, their hobby. That's the human element that came out. Yeah.

I love that you highlighted the fact that perhaps travelers don't realize that they're looking or wanting or will benefit from real human connection whilst they're traveling. That's an interesting interest. Particularly young people. When you are compelled to talk to other people and you are compelled to share, it feels more natural.

Yeah. I hope that the people who are working with tourism have that same sense of wanting to invite others in. They do often with grace. I think it's important for our frontline, but for everyone, it doesn't matter what cog you are in the wheel, whether you are marketing, whether you are finance, in a tourism business, the mission is the same to provide memorable experiences for our guests.

But particularly for the frontline staff, that sense of hospitality, I'm reading Unreasonable Hospitality for like the third time. I just love that book so much. One of the things I think What makes a difference is teaching people to be storytellers. Storytelling is a passive way to let people into what you are, where you're from, what you do.

An example this I frequently is somebody asks for a restaurant foundation or hotel market. The front desk agent can say, go to Jimmy's restaurant down the street. That's a recommendation. I say that you're here with your two kids.

When my family wants to go out for something special, let me go to Jimmy's down the street. One of those is a story. One of those gives the visitor the opportunity to feel like a local. As opposed to being a visitor at a forward place at a subject of a restaurant.

I think that art of storytelling is something that we try to teach in every class now. Ah yeah. It has to be. I think in that example you've given there, to get the buy-in from the frontline staff to even want to tell stories when they're eight hours into a 12-hour shift.

I think it's a challenge. Yeah. For our go on. Sorry, A.

It's a challenge and it's ongoing training and development for our teams, making sure the needs of your staff are met in terms of what motivates your staff. What's going to get your frontline staff to want to tell a story? I'm sorry, I'm antagonistic sometimes because I look at everything through the frontline operators' lens. What's going to get you your not quite minimum wage, but probably pretty close minimum wage frontline staff to be inspired enough to want to tell a story?

It comes down to a couple factors, be appreciation. They have to understand what sort of impact they can make in a visitor's day or trip or life. They have to understand that they also have to feel empowered. Yes.

And thirdly, they have to have lifestyle. They have to have the freedom to do things. Ritz Carlson has any employee to a circumstance to wow a guest. Did you write about this recently?

I'm sure I've read about this. I write a lot. I read that somewhere recently. I think it's a $2,500, but any employee can spend a $500 to wow a guest.

The employees understand the value of that, the impact on the business and the impact on the visitor experience. They understand that as a responsibility, not just freedom, but they they use it very well. Yeah. They use it very well.

It makes a difference. People have to have license to do the nice thing. Yeah. They have to know they're going to be appreciated for doing the nice thing.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. We're at different places than those who troublesome managers.

That's a diplomatic term. Troublesome managers. Yeah. We've all had them.

When you see it done right, or when you are the receiver of a manager or a leader that can get that right and know how that feels, I can think of a couple of standout examples throughout my career where I've truly felt like I was part of a machine. Probably not the right wording because I say that in a fabulous way. Like we were on the same mission every day. And I'm referring to AJ Hackabungee here.

We literally are changing people's lives every day. We are ticking things off bucket lists 100, 200, 300 times every single day. God, we had a good time doing it, and we all were steering the ship in the same direction. But that's a good metaphor.

People have to understand the value that they have. People recognize that they're an important piece of that machine. And I think for our industry, it's disposable. Yeah.

That doesn't work for workforce retention. And it doesn't work for the visitor experience, which then doesn't work well for the business. It doesn't work well for the destination. Everything comes back to our people.

I went and did a fun activity with my son, and it should have been a bucket list experience. I'm thinking of other similar moments I've had where I'm like, I won't mention what this is because I know where the story is going. It didn't work out well that you hoped it was. The tourism experience does a lot of the heavy lifting if it's well crafted.

The experience itself was great, but the people delivering the experience were, I think, quite hungover and not interested in being on a boat with a 40-something-year-old and a 10-year-old at seven o'clock in the morning, and it was ignored us the whole way. And it was such a lackluster overall experience. It costs nothing for your staff to say hello and how you going. And those magical little touch points.

I don't think, as an industry as a whole, we do enough to engage them, retain them, attract them, support them, develop them, and take a more holistic view of the industry as a whole. In Australia, anyway, 95% of operators being so small, we don't have the luxury of being able to send them off for professional development events. Yeah, I don't really have to send people off for professional development. A big part of training is leading by example.

Yeah, don't even, Stephen. Probably just once. Yeah, just that one time and never did it again. If if the audience could hear me roll my eyes.

But I've worked with managers. That one's having a rough morning. And then you see how they power. Don't get me wrong, I'm not poking fingers at people that roll up to work hungover, but you do have to own it.

You might be hungover, but you still gotta have that smile on your face, and you have to show your guests a damn good time. That's your people hung over. Luckily, I was never hung over having to deal with that on a rough boat. I granted license to your tour guide.

I'm gonna ask you to introduce yourself. I don't mind introducing myself at the end. Sure. I'm calm and bold.

I've had 25 years' experience in the tourism and events industry, and now my focus is on workforce and industry capability. So that means uh attracting, retaining, and engaging people into the tourism industry, trying to keep them here, but then also critically working with the operators to make sure that our tourism operators have the skills needed to be able to do that for their workforce and also funnel that through to the visitor experience. That is also part of what I do, and really using your human beings to develop your visitor experience and give your visitors the best experience they can have, which that's fine if you're gonna do it hungover, but just don't let them know that you're hung over.

That's what I do. And then sober up. That's sober up, or don't whatever, it doesn't bother to just don't let anyone know. Do you think live the dream, right?

That's it. We'll ask you one last question. What is the most kind thing you've ever experienced? Find.

Yeah. I met a Japanese boy. I shouldn't say he was a boy, he was probably 18 years old when I was working at AJ Hackett, and my colleague and I were about to take our first trip to Japan, and he came in and did a bungee jump, and we said, Kenji, we are coming to Japan in a couple of weeks. We should hang out with you while we're there.

And he said, Sure, no worries. Here's my email address. And we emailed him and we arrived at Osaka Airport, and there was Kenji, and there was Kenji's dad, and there was Kenji's mum, and there was Kenji's sister, and they took us out to the car and we stayed with them for a week. We didn't spend a single yen.

They took us everywhere. The hospitality was unreal. Took us up to their holiday home up in the hills, and it was the most amazing experience. You can feel it, you can feel the kindness when someone's heart opens and says, Welcome.

It was very hospitable, but the kindness underneath that was like what you are here in our country and we are gonna hold nothing back. We got you, was unbelievable. So that is the kindest thing. That story.

Yeah, it was a good one. Now, can I ask you one question before we sign off? And I for my listeners, can you give me the highlight reel of your career before you started Learn Tourism and why you started it? So I worked in sales and product development for experiences for the first 10 years or museums, restaurants, theater activities.

I would come in and identify the product could be developed, amplified, built secondary spent. After 10 or 12 years, I went to consulting. And I did a similar function for destinations. So a destination might call and say, Listen, we have a soft period in our calendar during the fall.

My job would be to come into the destination, look at everything that they have to offer, identify what experience can be exploited during that fall period, identify what activities might appeal to visitors who travel during the fall, and then how they market to those audiences. So an example would be I fly out to California, the Japanese classic American. Route 66, the vintage signage, you know, it's something that they love. And I identified 20 things market that would appeal to that audience.

This is how you speak to the Japanese, how you go to the Japanese market. Or in that same destination, fly fishing. Every time we crossed a bridge, I noticed people fly fishing, but they've never marketed themselves as a fly fishing. Oh wow, okay.

Three weeks later, there was an article at Forbes. I did that for about 10 years. Somewhere along the way, I had this aha moment that my passion was not in traveling, it was the fact that I got to learn. My passion is learning.

And along with that aha was a recognition that the training and education in the personal space wasn't cut. Terrible. I'm in, I'm in. So there's got to be a better way to do this.

And if nobody else is doing it, I can figure this out. So five years of research and testing and analysis, and I learned so much. And then COVID struck. So what had been a backbone project with my consultant?

I finally had this choice. Like, do I want to rebuild a consulting business that I've had for 10 years? Or do I want to do something different? I want to do something that's going to allow me to be learning.

I want to do something that's a greater difference, bigger. And that's how Learn Tourism got started. You're a nonprofit or an NGO. They operate now in different first countries.

So we're a bunch of nerds. People would love to learn, share what we learn. In the same way that I think we should treat our visitors. Yeah.

Learn about them. They have learned from us. It's a two-way street. Congratulations to you because it's no main fate to have a business still going after 10 years.

So well done to you. Yeah. All the good ones do. Yeah, it's making up for it now in ways that I'd never foreseen.

But I am happier. I'm surrounded by better people. The work that we do is much more appreciated than anything for us. Well done.

Thanks. If folks have a more question, sure. Perfect. I'm gonna fill that again.

Go for it. Dream big. Did you intend on working in the tourism industry? Or the travel industry?

Did you know what you wanted to do when you finished school? Did you study when you finished school? So I studied marketing. Marketing.

That seemed like a good fit. Like, oh, I can talk to people and make things sound interesting. I held the record for most candy bars sold during our school fundraiser. Oh my god.

Wow. Six. How many did I eat? That's probably a better question.

You sold them to yourself. Yeah, you did. So I got a job working at a theme restaurant, very Disney-esque theme restaurant. They needed a sales manager, so I said to them, I'll do it.

I don't want to work tables for the rest of my life. Okay. So I decided to be a sales manager for the restaurant. They ended up creating educational programming that would get school kids in before the restaurant public and secondary.

I also worked for a staffing company that did temporary and permanent placement in a wide variety of industries. In a wide variety of job functions. And I did that for about a year leading up to 9-11. What was really fascinating about that job was that I got to learn about almost every type of industry that existed.

I got to learn about almost every type of job function. I got to learn about different work environments. I got to learn about the financials and incentives, pay packages. And after doing that for a year, I realized those jobs suck.

I like what I'm doing in the restaurant. Yeah, yeah. And then I got a job with New York City. One thing led to another, they all built upon each other.

Yeah. Well, if folks want to get in touch with your car, how would they do so? You can do so on LinkedIn. Just look me up, Carmen Bold, or my website, Carmenbold.

com. That'll get me. Fantastic. LearnTourism.

org or Steven with a Ph. E-K-S-T-R-O-L. You are a delight. I'd do what I can.

You two are a delight, Stephen. This was fun. Thank you. I hope we get to work together more in the future.