Travel mini-series: the FT’s travel editor talks tourism

This is an audio transcript of the FT Weekend podcast episode: ‘Travel mini-series — the FT’s travel editor talks tourism’

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Lilah Raptopoulos
Hi, FT Weekend listeners. Welcome to episode three of our four-part mini series on travel. Today, I’m really excited to share a conversation that I had with the FT’s travel editor Tom Robbins. Tom just knows it all. He’s been reporting on tourism for many, many years. He’s a real expert, and he’s very honest and clear about what’s going on in the industry and how it works. We talk about the impact that social media has had on where and how we vacation. We talk about how people now want authenticity over those luxury resorts where you could kind of be anywhere. We talk about why everyone suddenly started going to Iceland and a lot more. OK, let’s get into it. This is FT Weekend, the podcast, special travel edition. I’m Lilah Raptopoulos. Here we go.

Tom, welcome to the show. Thank you so much for being here.

Tom Robbins
Thanks, Lilah. Great to be here.

Lilah Raptopoulos
So you are the FT’s travel editor, which makes you kind of our eyes and ears around the tourism industry. I hate to start with Covid, but it changed our habits so significantly around travel that I want to know, you know, like as I’m looking at my Instagram feed . . . (Laughter) people seem to be everywhere. It feels like travel is back but on steroids. And I’m wondering if that’s true.

Tom Robbins
It’s sort of true, basically. That’s very much what the travel industry would like you to think. But the reality is, globally this year we are still down on what we were pre-pandemic. It’s something like we’re at 57 per cent of trips globally compared to the same period in 2019.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Wow.

Tom Robbins
And so my kind of broader view of travel right now is that 2020 and 2021 weren’t really the crisis in tourism. A tipping point was being reached in 2019 where we had this unprecedented number of people travelling combined with awareness about climate change and sustainability sort of hitting the mainstream for the first time.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Right.

Tom Robbins
And that’s, that sort of really caused a bit of a rethink, I think, within the industry and, and among consumers as well.

Lilah Raptopoulos
And Tom, how does a place get trendy? You know, it feels like there are cycles where everyone seems to be going to the same places like Portugal gets hot or Mexico City gets hot or Croatia or Joshua Tree. What is it?

Tom Robbins
There’s a really brilliant example. Case study is Iceland, which has had a huge tourism boom in the last 20 years. This is my approximation of why I think it happened. But there was musicians like Björk, then Sigur Rós, that people were becoming aware of. And at the same time, Icelandair, the national airline, was offering people stopovers in Reykjavik. So few people were doing that, and it wasn’t because they wanted to go to Reykjavik. It was a bit of a pain, but at least they put you up for a night for free there.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Right.

Tom Robbins
And then the government started incentivising lots of adverts to be shot there. So there were all these sort of like luxury sports car advert sort of, you know, spinning around the desolate landscapes. Then there was a Bond film, you know, that sort of came off the back of that with a big car chase on the Jökulsárlón. So people were becoming aware of it and starting to go, but very small numbers. But then there was the 2008, the currency collapsed. You know, there’s a big economic meltdown there. So the krona halved in value. So that suddenly made it far more affordable.

Lilah Raptopoulos
To go there. Yeah.

Tom Robbins
And a tourism board invested massively in promoting tourism as an alternative to all the banking and other interests that had been sort of driving the economy before that.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Right.

Tom Robbins
There is numerous different factors that sort of feed together.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Right.

Tom Robbins
And, you know, the result of all of that was that tourism went up tenfold in 20 years. And in Iceland, they called it the tourism bomb.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Not a boom, but a bomb. Yeah. I mean, and then on our side, you’re like, oh, I really want to go to Iceland. I just want to see the Northern Lights. And you’re like, why do I even think that now? How come I suddenly want to go to Iceland? I don’t even know.

Tom Robbins
Yeah, the weird thing about social media is it kind of like atomises travel . . . 

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah.

Tom Robbins
. . . because you know, in the olden days, you’d, you’re interested in somewhere you go and get The Lonely Planet, and you’d read a chapter about it or you read the whole book. And you’d pick out the bits that were interesting to you and everyone would spread out a bit. Whereas now, you know, there’s one Instagram image that suddenly goes everywhere. And then, you know, if one wants to go and they take pictures of the same place, and so suddenly you find that instead of everyone going to Iceland and spreading out across the country, they’re all going to the same hot pool, you know . . . 

Lilah Raptopoulos
Right.

Tom Robbins
. . . in the same corner of the country. So it kind of is drawing everyone into the same places.

Lilah Raptopoulos
And that’s really, I imagine, bad for those places.

Tom Robbins
Exactly. Yeah. A lot, a lot of things around travel is that it’s not a case that there are too many tourists. It’s that they’re all in the same place. And again, Iceland’s a brilliant example because, you know, they’re up to sort of two and a half million tourists, and, in the whole country in a year. And there’s all these, you know, huge number of articles about the terrible overtourism crisis there. But, you know, we get three times that number in the British Museum in a year, and that’s just one building. And so the problem is that they almost all stay in the same little area in the south-west corner of Iceland, and they go to the same few places.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Right.

Tom Robbins
What needs to happen is that they need the tourism industry needs to sort of manage them more and encourage them and, you know, a bit of carrot and stick, to encourage tourists to spread out more.

Lilah Raptopoulos
So how would you do that? What’s an example of something that’s worked?

Tom Robbins
The stick is taxes. Bhutan reopened a couple of weeks ago, and they reopened with a $200 a day fee for tourists.

Lilah Raptopoulos
So every day that you stay, you have to pay $200 to just be there.

Tom Robbins
Exactly.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Wow.

Tom Robbins
Exactly. Yeah. And you also have to have a guide with you and you have to have a driver. You can’t rent your own car. So they’re going after this, you know, very wealthy tourist. And they can have very low numbers, but they’re thereby hoping to sort of protect their cultural integrity. So that’s an extreme example of it. But, you know, like Venice earlier this year, they banned big cruise ships. And at the start of next year, they’re going to have a tourism tax by a few euros. The idea is that it stops people just coming for a day, taking their picture on in St Mark’s Square, then going without spending any money. And I think we’re going to see a lot more of that.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Right. And then what’s the carrot?

Tom Robbins
Yeah, the carrot, I guess, is, is sort of telling people that they can have these experiences that everyone wants. Social media, if tourist boards use it carefully and inventively, they can use that to draw people away to new destinations, to, to spread out all those tourists.

Lilah Raptopoulos
That’s interesting. OK. So, Tom, every December you write a piece that I really look forward to. It’s a list of predictions for the next year that’s kind of based on tourism data that you expect to be big. So I looked at your predictions for 2022. Now that it’s the end of the year, they’ve basically come true. And I love to talk through them. The first one that stands out to me the most is the luxury dude ranch from Montana.

Tom Robbins
Oh, yeah.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Our colleague Madison Darbyshire wrote about this for you, too. And I think this one is funny because there are a lot of people who are spending basically luxury hotel prices to do hard physical labour for a week and sleep in a bunk bed and kind of live out their American cowboy fantasies. Yeah. Can you tell me about that as a trend?

Tom Robbins
Well, yeah, it’s very much this thing about, you know, experiences and something that’s kind of authentic, you know, rather than going to a theme park where you’re sort of, I don’t know, everything’s a pretend version of reality.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah.

Tom Robbins
This is trying to actually go and see something that’s authentic as possible, even if that means, you know, a level of discomfort. That’s the case in, you know, not just in the US and those dude ranches, but, you know, people wanting to go and stay in mountain refuges in the Alps. You know, that’s even led to those queues on Everest that we’ve seen. You know, that’s the sort of ultimate example, I guess of, of the sort of drive to get out there and get extreme as much as possible.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah. Are there any other trends that you wrote about in December that stand out to you now, you know, towards the end of this year? Some of the ones that you had are luxury sleeper trains, polar cruises down to places like Antarctica, big multigenerational family trips, adventure cycling, super yachts . . . 

Tom Robbins
I mean, I think all of those have come to pass this year. The demand for train travel and long-distance train travel instead of flying is, is definitely there. And it’s sort of become like this sort of status symbol, really. Train travel is more expensive than flying, takes more time. You know, people are absolutely evangelical about long-distance train travel.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah.

Tom Robbins
Adventure cycling, yeah. I guess that’s the sort of, you know, the same trend for wanting to do authentic adventures out there.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Everyone bought a bike in the pandemic.

Tom Robbins
Yeah, exactly. And it’s, but it’s not just any bike. It’s like a gravel bike with a strap-on bags. (Laughter) And, you know, they’ve got their own special espresso maker that slips into one of these bags. And, you know, it’s all very fetishised. Yeah. So that’s definitely a growing trend.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah. Yeah. Tom, you’ve been to many places and you write about many places and you commission stories about many places. I know this goes against everything we’re saying about . . . (Laughter) sending everybody to one place but like if you were to recommend one or two places that people may not have thought of to visit, what would you recommend?

Tom Robbins
I mean, against my better judgment, my absolute favourite place is Greenland. I’ve been there a couple of times. I spent seven or eight weeks there once camping. I went back 20 years later and it hadn’t changed at all, you know, which is which is wonderful. And it’s still just feels completely like a frontier in its own interest, incredibly sort of invigorating way. And I guess my other thing is, you know, I’m an obsessive about the Alps. And, yes, I find that there’s still, you know, lots of tiny villages that are really, really authentic and preserved and where you can go skiing and just have a very peaceful time, really sort of getting back to nature. Should I name one place or should I keep that for myself?

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah, keep it for yourself (Laughter).

Tom Robbins
OK.

Lilah Raptopoulos
We’ll tell people to Google it. Tom, this was so informative and so fun. Thank you so much for being on the show.

Tom Robbins
Thanks, Lilah.

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Lilah Raptopoulos
That’s the show. Thank you for listening to FT Weekend, the podcast from the Financial Times. I’ve shared links to some of Tom’s stories in the show notes, including some of his favourite small villages in the Alps. I was just kidding about making you Google it. There is also a special discount there to a subscription to the FT. Next Wednesday is our fourth and final episode of our travel mini series. And I’ll be talking with Matt Kepnes. He’s better known as Nomadic Matt. Basically that last episode is all about tips. Matt’s a deals expert. He’s been travelling consistently for well over a decade, and he knows how to do a good trip on a good budget. So he tells us about points, flight deals, planning trips for big groups and a lot more. This show is produced by Zach St Louis, executive produced by Topher Forhecz and sound engineered by Breen Turner, with original music by Metaphor Music. Thanks to Cheryl Brumley and Alastair Mackie.