Tourism and Hospitality Are Not the Same Industry. There, I Said It.

I have picked a fight with a noun.

Actually, two nouns.

I just finished talking about tourism versus hospitality this morning on The Art of Hospitality, and somewhere in the conversation I realized I don't think they're the same industry.

Which is super inconvenient because we say they are approximately 400 times a day.

Tourism and hospitality.

Hospitality and tourism.

Travel and hospitality.

There are entire college degrees with both words in the title. Brenda has it on a retractable banner.

But the more I think about it, the more I think we've been mashing two very different things together and then wondering why nobody in a tourism meeting agrees on what the hell we're doing.

Hospitality serves the person.

Tourism serves the place.

And now I can't unsee it.

ASK FIVE PEOPLE HOW TOURISM IS DOING. RUIN YOUR AFTERNOON.

Put a hotelier, a restaurant owner, an Airbnb host, a DMO and somebody from the city at a table and ask how tourism is going.

• The hotelier tells you occupancy and ADR.

• The restaurant talks about covers.

• The host has a 4.97 rating and you need to remember that.

• The city has tax collection confusion with the platforms.

• The DMO has six pillars, thirteen data sources and some concerns about need periods.

And everybody is right.

The hotelier has rooms to fill. The restaurant needs people in chairs. The host has guests arriving at 4:00 who would like to know where the extra towels are.

Meanwhile the DMO is looking at the hotel, the rental, the restaurant, the airport, the roads, the workforce, the neighborhoods, the residents, the events, the taxes and whatever fresh hell appeared on the city council agenda Tuesday night.

Same visitor.

Very different problem.

And the visitor doesn't care.

She doesn't know who owns the parking garage. She doesn't know that the downtown association and the DMO are separate organizations. She definitely doesn't know that the state controls that road.

She knows she came to your town and the parking sucked.

Congratulations, everyone.

WE MAY HAVE OVERPROMOTED THE HOTEL.

For most of modern tourism, lodging has been the easiest part of the visitor economy to count.

Rooms. Rates. Occupancy. Tax.

Beautiful.

You know what's harder to count?

Whether the place is actually working.

• Whether the restaurant saw any of that business.

• Whether workers can afford to live there.

• Whether visitors are showing up when you need them instead of adding themselves to a Saturday that was already packed.

• Whether residents still think this whole arrangement is worth it.

• Who gets credit when it does work (just triggered my LCA/last click attribution days, but I digress)

You can have great hotel occupancy and a destination with problems.

Hotel occupancy matters.

It just isn't the GDP of fun.

ALSO, NOBODY OWNS THE DAMN PRODUCT.

A hotel owns its rooms.

A restaurant owns its operation.

A host owns or manages the property.

Who owns the destination?

Exactly.

Nobody.

But somebody is supposed to market it.

And increasingly, somebody is supposed to worry about whether it's working.

So we built DMOs.

Then we funded most of them with lodging taxes, called a bunch of them marketing organizations, and acted surprised when lodging businesses expected a marketing agency.

I mean...fair.

But now we're asking those same organizations to think about resident sentiment, workforce, destination development, sustainability, dispersal, accessibility, stewardship and seventeen other things that do not necessarily put a head in Brenda's hotel bed Thursday night.

No wonder this relationship gets weird.

We funded something that has to think about the whole place with money generated by one piece of the place.

...I need to stare at a wall for a minute.

AND THEN WE ACTED SHOCKED WHEN HOSTS ACTED LIKE HOSTS.

This is almost embarrassingly obvious now.

Short-term rental operators came into tourism through hospitality.

Nobody sat them down and explained destination economics.

Airbnb taught them how to host.

Make the guest happy. Answer quickly. Get good reviews. Price the house. Recommend local businesses. Don't have a filthy hot tub.

Then tourism showed up asking about housing, tax policy, supply, neighborhoods, seasonality and infrastructure.

And hosts said: But my guests love it here, I have a 4.97, I've never had a neighbor complaint.

Which can sound completely beside the point if you're sitting on the destination side.

Except it isn't beside their point.

They're answering as hospitality operators.

The DMO is asking about the place.

The host is answering about the guest.

Oh.

There you are, Host Gap.

WAIT. HOSPITALITY MAY NOT EVEN BE AN INDUSTRY.

And this is where I really screwed up my own afternoon.

What if tourism and hospitality aren't two industries sitting next to each other at all?

Tourism is a system.

People who don't live somewhere arrive and start using the place.

They sleep. Eat. Drive. Shop. Park. Hike. Drink. Get married. Buy sunscreen. Call an Uber. Go to urgent care. Take up all the brunch reservations.

That's tourism.

But hospitality?

Hospitality is how we receive them.

• Hotels do hospitality.

• Hosts do hospitality.

• Restaurants do hospitality.

• Attractions do hospitality.

• Tour Operators do hospitality.

A bartender does hospitality. A volunteer at an event does hospitality. A resident who tells you where to get the good tacos is doing hospitality.

Hotels don't own hospitality.

DMOs don't own tourism.

...Well, shit.

We've been putting these two words side by side on conference programs for decades like they're Sales and Marketing.

One is what happens to a place when visitors enter it.

The other is how we treat them when they do.

That's not the same thing at all.

And somebody has to look across the whole mess and ask whether this is actually working for the place.

That's tourism.

Maybe alignment isn't getting all of those people to want the same thing.

God help us if that's the assignment.

Maybe it's just knowing which question everybody is answering before we decide they're wrong.

Anyway, you prob already know at this point in the article, but I made a quiz, so...

WHICH ONE ARE YOU?

Eight questions. Two minutes. Extremely scientific.

No email. No signup. No mercy.

Take the Tourism or Hospitality quiz →

And send it to Brenda.