DAY 3 #DCHH17
The Human Factor
Everything related to vacations that can be digitized will be digitized in the near future—but digitizing the touchpoints along the customer journey does not yet guarantee the sense of happiness that guests seek in their personal pursuit of a fulfilling life. The “key factor” here is the human element—whether as an empathetic host, a creator of “awesome” vacation offers, a courteous service provider, or a compassionate conversation partner.
"People as the Key Factor" is the title given to the findings of the 7th DestinationCamp in Hamburg, which concluded on Sunday with six scenario workshops. Digitalization and big data could become effective tools for freeing up more time for guests. They could also lead to vacation products—which are becoming increasingly similar—differentiating themselves significantly through their human element, or to guests voluntarily entrusting more data to one provider than to another. In any case, the relationship between guest, host, service provider, and local resident must be given special consideration in the development of tourism offerings.
Under the theme “Creating Value Through Appreciation,” 225 tourism professionals and policymakers gathered in Hamburg from April 28 to 30 to analyze, discuss, and explore new ideas regarding the value of tourism and the relationships among stakeholders in the tourism sector.
Tourism is a key industry. However, those in the tourism sector need to highlight the industry’s sociopolitical and economic contributions even more strongly. And they need the courage to break away from existing structures. To coordinate further development, a national tourism strategy should be formulated, according to the participants in the “Strategy” scenario workshop with Cornelius Obier and Mathias Burzinski.
New tourism concepts emerged during the “Digital versus Analog” session. The scenario workshop led by Dirk Schmücker and Achim Schloemer outlined sample vacation packages for the North Sea, Duisburg, and low-snow low mountain ranges, transforming the destinations’ perceived weaknesses into needs-based vacation packages.
The Helios project—"Digital Guest Relations in the 'Durchblick durch Einblick' Workshop" by Uwe Frers and Ilka Leutritz—demonstrated how Big Data could be used in a meaningful way to plan and follow up on a vacation.
In the series of sessions titled “Making the Hidden Visible” by Georg Müller-Christ and Sybille Wiedenmann, participants were able to mentally sense for themselves how relationships within a system or organization can change when the “human” variable is realigned.
In the Sales 4.0 Scenario Workshop, the participants led by Ullrich Kastner and Gunar Bergemann were certain: “To make results-oriented use of existing data, the DMO needs an interface manager.” This person must operate independently of the hierarchy, across departments, and at the highest level to determine who receives which data via which interfaces.
And at the “Magic Round Table” led by Claudia Brözel and Kirsi Hyvaerinen, the participants in the scenario workshop came to the conclusion that tourism is the valorization of culture. To this end, they proposed the “Citizen Exchange” initiative—for example, residents of Germany could swap homes and places of residence with residents of Romania for a certain period of time, not only to better understand the culture of the other country but also to see and appreciate their own surroundings through a different lens.
The 116-page anthology *Stellschraube Mensch*, featuring the detailed results of DestinationCamp 2017, is expected to be published in August.
And here's the video recap of Day 3! The 2017 video documentary is presented on the third day by the Wilken Software Group, feratel media technologies, and wetter.com:
