Some rafts may not make it.
Tourism has been hit hard by the pandemic. It will come back, but what will it look like?
Hope is not a business strategy. But…we will still very much need it in these trying times.
These were some of the first words that Shannon Stowell, CEO of the Adventure Travel Trade Association, wrote to his members on March 17, 2020. Days later he used a rafting metaphor for the challenges facing the industry:
Some rafts will high side but get through.
Some will sustain damage and need repair.
Some rafts will need to share resources.
Some rafts may not make it.
But if we work together, throw lifelines and support each other we will get through.
There is some good news out there about the planet getting a chance to breathe and heal. I think we as the adventure community have an opportunity to help retrain travelers and point travel of the future towards the right direction of healthy travel.
Let’s create a future where sustainable, responsible adventure travel is just travel.
When we spoke to Shannon, he was humbled by the crisis facing the adventure tourism industry, but he was also determined to imagine a better future. That sense of optimism and resilience can be hard to find right now. We needed to break off a little piece of it and share with all of you.
xoxo,
Erin
Name: Shannon Stowell
Hometown: Salida, Colorado
Current Residence: Seattle, Washington
Living Situation: Off-grid cabin in Salida this month, with wife and dog
Age: 51
Occupation: CEO, Adventure Travel Trade Association
Photo caption: I'm crabbing on a stand-up paddleboard near Deception Pass near Whidbey Island in Washington state.
You gave a TEDx talk in 2018 where you declared that “you can change the world by going on vacation”. Do you think that that’s still possible?
I do.
Just take this example -- the longer that tourists are not going to Africa to see wildlife, the more wildlife will be poached. Tourism is the engine that keeps some species alive. But in so many cases, tourism is very destructive and does just the opposite. We’ve been campaigning to make tourism more responsible, and I think a bright spot from this pandemic is that it’s going to put a dent in the mass market.
Changing the world through travel has to be done thoughtfully though, because travel always has an impact. Mass travel industries, like cruises, often use their capital to buy up or compete with local businesses in order to maximize their margin and hoover up every dollar. There’s a completely opposite model epitomized by a lodge in Jordan, Feynan Ecolodge. They still independently contract their drivers, some tour guides, even the lady down the street that makes fresh Jordanian bread three times a day. 80 families, mostly Bedouin -- now small business owners -- rely on the lodge for a steady income, and people need to travel to Feynan to support that community. This has to be the model for the future in terms of sustainable tourism.
I believe adventure travel is going to come back first among tourism industries; it’s usually outside in the open air, there are small groups, and a lot of the activities are active and wouldn’t necessarily require wearing a mask. I also think that people that travel for passion -- people who love adventure, people for whom travel is essential to their identity -- are going to start traveling again before the people that just like to vacation for pleasure.
The tourism industry has been hit hard by the pandemic, and your organization is no stranger to its impact. You’ve reduced your team, applied for the PPP loan, and several close friends and colleagues have lost their lives recently, both to COVID and other illnesses. How have you been grappling with all of this?
Our community has just been bombarded by difficulty and sorrow for the past four months. I also lost my dad last year. I took a three month sabbatical to just have some space to myself to process his loss, and that was cut short by COVID.
I’ve turned to my faith more and really asked some hard questions about that. I’ve identified some really good friends that I can tell anything to. I have one friend whose company is going through something similar to what we’re experiencing, so it has been good to call each other and have those super angry, sad, scared moments together. Every day you have to re-wrap your mind around it.
We also want to be really transparent with the industry and with our association members. To not be transparent would damage trust, so we’ve made our struggles clear to the industry, where almost everyone is struggling currently.
As somebody who’s leading an organization with over 1,000 members through a pandemic, has your view on leadership changed?
I’ve been focusing on endurance. The tourism industry got hit first, one of the hardest hit and it will be one of the last to recover.
I’ve realized that I need to keep my spirits up for the people on my team and in our space, and when it’s really hard to do that I know it’s time to call someone else who can help remind me of the bigger picture. I’m a member of Vistage, which is a CEO peer group, so I sit in a room once a month, now virtually, with fifteen or so CEOs from different industries. The whole purpose of that group is to have hard, honest conversations about what’s going on, and it’s incredibly supportive. I’m encouraged that many of them said that the old form of tourism, with lots of people on crowded buses, waiting in line at crowded sites, and walking in huge groups is over, and that our form of tourism, specifically adventure, is much more appealing.
When you were a kid your family moved from the Denver suburbs to a much more rural area in Colorado. You’ve spoken about how much growing up around nature shaped who you became. Many of our readers are parents who are grappling with how to give their kids access to the outdoors when they live in densely populated areas. Do you have any advice for them?
I think this is a really instructive time. It’s important to remember that stuff is just stuff, and that experiences and serving others is so much more valuable than working hard to own a lot of really nice things. It’s a good time to think about how we live, what we’re doing to the earth and each other, and if we can make the world a better place by simplifying our lives a little bit.
So many people are waking up to how prevalent racism is in their industries as a result of the Black Lives Matter movement. How can the travel industry do better going forward?
This is definitely an issue.
A few years ago I shared photos of travel ads I’d seen in airports around the world. In nearly every single ad there were exclusively white faces. And these were ads for countries whose population is predominantly made up of non-white people. If people don’t see people like them represented in travel, they think that travel isn’t for them. Our industry is part of that problem, and we’re taking meaningful steps to change that.
The industry is very white, and I think it’s because this is an industry that was birthed in privilege primarily for white Europeans and white North Americans. We have a responsibility to make opportunities for more non-white potential team members and include BIPOC voices even more than we’ve done to date in our lectures, summits, and conferences. We recently started a conversation with the Indigenous Tourism Association of Canada to bring more Indigenous experts into our space, and those are the kinds of deliberate ways to make meaningful change in the industry.
Photo caption: On a socially distanced hike with my wife and our friends.
What do you want to take to the other side of this?
I want to be more gracious and thankful. I want to make a difference. More than ever, tourism feels like a mission just as much as it feels like a business. We want tourism to take care of local people, protect wildlife, do no harm, and enrich people so that they come back better people.
I want to be much more thoughtful in my business. When I left for my sabbatical six months ago, our Association was doing the best we ever had, and then, suddenly, overnight we were not. I want to take much more caution to the other side.