The 26^th Las Vegas International Tourism Safety and Security Conference in 27 years was concluded last week. Next year a whole new concept of tourism security conferences is in the making.

The new face in 2020 will reflect the changing times as tourism security continues to be an issue around the world.

The weekly riots in Paris and the recent terrorist attacks in Sri Lanka demonstrate once again just how sensitive the tourism and travel industries are to the needs of security and safety (S&S).  Professionals in S&S debate these issues with a great deal of emotion not only among themselves but also with their colleagues from all aspects of the travel and tourism industry. Slowly the travel industry’s many components are becoming ever more sensitive to the fact that every S&S decision is a business decision.  Because not everyone can attend a tourism conference in this month’s issue of Tidbits, we present to you some of the ideas regarding tourism and security developed over the past two decades.

The ideas found below, come from past conferences and are meant to stimulate creative thought among those who work in the travel industry. These suggestions are not meant to be specific for any one particular locale or business nor are they an exhaustive list of problems or solutions.  When thinking about security for your place of lodging, community or tourism business, consider some of these ideas:

-Define the problem(s).  All too often tourism and travel professionals are so overwhelmed by issues of S&S that they fail to define which problems are central for their locale or business.  At past tourism conferences some of the major safety and security problems the delegates defined were: the need to protect tourists not only from crimes against them but also from acts of terrorism.  Delegates addressed safety issues such as: outbreaks of infectious diseases such as meningitis, ways to protect tourists from legionnaires disease and aids, methods to assure pure food and water.  Speakers and delegates from around the world agree that for tourism to prosper, it must create travel possibilities in which the problems such as: diarrhea and typhoid cease to threaten the visitor. The delegates also recognized that the hospitality industry needs to be prepared to deal with natural disasters such as earthquakes and floods, as well as man-made problems such as traffic accidents and equipment failures. It was suggested that as the world is so varied, that tourism professionals must define those problems that are most pressing for their own region and/or business and develop methodologies that fit local budgets and cultures.

-Identify problems that will impact tourism/travel moving into the third decade of the twenty-first century.  Not only should current problems be addressed but it behooves the S&S professional to anticipate problems that may not yet have occurred.  Past Conference speaker have identified some of the problems that may also be future problems.  For example, over the past years speakers and delegates have spoken about the need to insure consumer privacy while still maintaining a proper level of safety and security, determine what are acceptable levels of risk, develop cross-cultural safety and security standards, and demonstrate the impact of safety and security to administrator’s worried about profitability.  The issue of personal privacy has become especially important in an age of cyber breaches and identity theft.

– Relate issues of safety and security to travelers’ choice of destination.  To demonstrate the importance of S&S to the bottom-line, S&S professionals need to demonstrate how safety and security issues impact the traveler’s choice of destination, develop correct and universally accepted measurement standards and be prepared for a range of threats such as: attacks by youth gangs, political conflicts that become acts of violence against the travel and tourism industry, acts of money laundering, internet fraud, and ever-evolving high-tech crimes.

– Determine who has responsibility to protect, inform, and to educate the public.  All too often, the travel and tourism industry has simply assumed that S&S is someone else’s responsibility. Over the almost past three decades our speakers have spoken about issues such as:

• Do S&S responsibilities fall only to private enterprise or should governments also be involved?
• How much victim assistance should hotels, attractions and restaurants provide when an incident occurs?
• Does the tourism industry have a right to seek assistance from other sources such as governments and still maintain its independence as a private industry?
• Is the tourism industry private, public or a hybrid industry?
• Who should define and implement travel and tourism victim protection and assistance?
• Who will oversee the implementation of these policies and determine if they are effective?

Regarding tourism safety and security past speakers have also formulated such concerns as:

• How much about a security situation should be made public?
• How is a balance created between educating the public, working with the media and still not harming the local travel and tourism industry?

The above questions are important research topics and it has been the conference’s hope that the ideas expressed in this current conference and in years passed will lead to a number of practical solutions including:

• The need to train all people working in the travel and tourism in matters of safety and security,  whom and how much training is needed?
• Assuring that travel and tourism officials understand the risks involved in ignoring these problems,
• Sensitizing law enforcement agencies and the media to the issues of travel safety and security,
• Developing model crisis plans, devising and adopting international signs and pictograms that relate to tourism safety and security,
• Developing an inventory of the best practices in the field,
• Studying and then implementing “victim advocacy” programs as used in the travel and hospitality industry from around the world.”

The challenge to the travel and tourism industry will be to translate these ideas into actions, and to take turn the hope of a safer and more secure tomorrow in to a reality. In 2020 tourism security will enter will be prepared to create new lessons and ways that tourism professionals can meet not only the challenges of yesterday but also of tomorrow.

More on Dr. Tarlow and travel & tourism security: www.safertourism.com 

African Tourism Board leaders were invited to Zimbabwe for a fact-finding mission and were afforded the opportunity to participate in a discussion with the Zimbabwe Minister of Tourism, Priscah Mupfumira.

This was discussed yesterday with Ms. Likukuma Rita, acting Chief Executive of Zimbabwe Tourism Authority; African Tourism Board VP Cuthbert Ncube; and ATB CEO Doris Woerfel at the Indaba travel industry show in Durban, South Africa.

Zimbabwe has a rich history of untapped tourism products like the Great Zimbabwe National Monument, and the ruins of Great Zimbabwe – the capital of the Queen of Sheba, according to an age-old legend. They are a unique testimony to the Bantu civilization of the Shona between the 11th and 15th centuries.

Likukuma Rita was passionate to work with the African Tourism Board on the Transfrontier Conservation Projects and other important developments close to Zimbabwe Tourism development.

The African Tourism Board VP voiced his excitement to closely work with Zimbabwe. He said, “The African Tourism Board is looking forward to Zimbabwe officially joining our board.”

Founded in 2018, the African Tourism Board is an association that is internationally acclaimed for acting as a catalyst for the responsible development of travel and tourism to, from, and within the African region. For more information and how to join, visit africantourismboard.com.

WISeKey International Holding Ltd (“WISeKey “) (SIX: WIHN), a leading global cybersecurity, Blockchain and IoT company, WISeCoin AG and the SUN^x – Strong Universal Network,announced today a partnership to jointly develop a special purpose Blockchain Center of Excellence in Brussels focusing on the development of standards and technologies to accelerate Climate Friendly Travel.

WISeKey Blockchain technology developed by WISeCoin creates a trusted decentralized and highly efficient way to record carbon emissions using digital identities on the blockchain. Recording all CO²emissions that occur globally and requiring emissions contributors to offset them by purchasing and revoking the corresponding amount of tokenized digital certificates eliminates the need for taxation. Furthermore, companies that have developed technologies that remove CO² from the atmosphere will be able to register their impact on the blockchain and trigger the new emission of digital certificate tokens that will allow them to further invest in the technology. With this model it will be possible to generate new emission certificates, called WISeTravel Carbon Offset Tokens. In the case of shortfalls, the travel industry will invest into WISeTravel Carbon Offset Tokens in order to fulfill their requirements.

Professor Geoffrey Lipman co-founder of SUN^x and President of the International Coalition of Tourism Partners (ICTP), a travel and tourism coalition of global destinations committed to quality service and green growth, said: “We are delighted to cooperate with WISeKey by using state-of-the-art technology to bring a new Blockchain and Identity capacity to the world’s largest challenge, Climate Change Resilience, and one of the world’s largest industries, – travel and tourism. The SUN^x ‘Plan for our Kids’ climate friendly travel program calls for 100,000 STRONG Climate Champions by 2030 in all UN States. Through this collaboration we will be in a better position to deliver Climate Friendly Travel – measured, green, 2050 proofed, and meet the Paris Agreement Carbon targets.”

These technologies will help galvanize regional, national, and local stakeholders to develop their own climate change programs using blockchain technologies – for air, oceans, land, cities, industries, rural communities, indigenous people etc.  Each with their own vision of priorities and goals. The partnership ultimately aims at transforming overall production, consumption, and investment and better align them with the 2030 The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and the 2050 Climate transformation.

Carlos Moreira, Founder and CEO of WISeKey said: “One of SDGs goals that stands out from the rest and is fundamentally existential, is climate change. Simply put, life on our planet is threatened, and without immediate, concrete actions the consequences will be irreversible – future generations will either freeze or fry and the intensifying consequences of extreme climate will continue to severely aggravate many of the other SDG challenges. Our special purpose Travel & Tourism Industry Blockchain Center of Excellence in Brussels will not only develop and deploy groundbreaking products and solutions for the industry and consumers but also harness the power of technologies to act as a catalyst of change and climate transformation.”

The Paris Agreement, with its 2050 national carbon reduction targets must be fully implemented and intensified every 5 years. In 2017, the world’s largest industrial activity, Travel & Tourism, formally embraced the SDGs, engaging public, private and civil society stakeholders in an International Year of Sustainable Development. Rightly so, to become a real force for good, we must be up with the mainstream curve on building sustainability into all growth and development aspirations. The main challenge remains how to keep Climate Resilience front and center when travel and tourism continues to massively grow.

The Blockchain Center of Excellence in Brussels will be fully interoperable with WISeKey’s network of Blockchain Centers of Excellence in India, Canada, China, Buenos Aires, Malaysia, Mauritius and Rwanda with new centers planned in the MEA region, including two in Saudi Arabia. All these centers will be interconnected with its 3 main hubs: Geneva, Toronto and Beijing, a Trust Triangle operating under a Common Trust Protocol, using WISeKey’s PKI hardened Blockchain technology, bringing trust and security, while maintaining the core Blockchain values of transparency, auditability, and traceability.  WISeKey’s implemented and integrated PKI solution is complementary to any Blockchain platform, where it can assist with developing a better trust model for use within a distributed system and create a universal Trust Protocol for the Web 2.0.

Like all other Blockchain Centers of Excellence, the new center in Brussels will assist local Blockchain startups to promote their technologies internationally, facilitate the rapid adaptation and on-boarding of Blockchain-based solutions, foster stronger collaboration between the public, private and academic sectors and cooperate to ensure that the latest technological standards are made available in a safe and trusted manner.

The application of new technologies such as Big Data and the Internet of Things are already leading to new uses and applications that will revolutionize services in the tourism sector and responses to new customer demands. For this reason, a new alliance places special emphasis on jointly addressing the challenges and opportunities that this technological change entails and initially takes concrete form in four specific lines of action.

Telefónica and the World Tourism Organization (UNWTO) have announced an agreement to collaborate in the development and implementation of digital entrepreneurship and training initiatives that allow the tourism sector to increase its competitiveness and strengthen its long-term sustainability. This agreement comes at a time of profound technological change that impacts all industrial sectors, where a commitment to innovation and transformation is essential.

First, both parties are committed to promoting innovation and digital entrepreneurship within the tourism sector through the creation of innovation forums, collaboration in open innovation programs with third parties, and public-private collaboration models focused on Open Innovation. The aim of these initiatives is to create the suitable spaces for the development of innovative ideas and outreach to all the actors involved.

New technologies will have an increasing role in the modernization and growth possibilities of the tourism sector and, therefore, both entities will launch initiatives aimed at the use of Internet of Things (IoT), Artificial Intelligence and Big Data, among others. Many of IoT’s solutions, such as Retail, help build customer loyalty by digitizing spaces that create a unique visitor experience. Or mobility solutions, which allow tourists to enjoy rental cars or car-sharing in a completely safe way. An enormous amount of knowledge is generated about the behavior of travelers through the sensors that make up the different IoT services, allowing us to offer them what they particularly need at any given moment.

On the other hand, the analysis of Big Data makes it possible to understand patterns of behavior to better address some of the challenges facing tourism in Latin America and Europe, and to draw relevant conclusions that influence decision-making and public policies. LUCA -Telefónica’s Big Data and AI unit- is already working with national and local tourism organizations in eight countries in Latin America and Europe through more than 40 projects.

Another important point of this agreement is to focus on Digital Education and Training, something essential in a new technological world in which jobs and skills are changing radically, affecting the employability and sustainability of businesses. In this sense, both entities will collaborate through the training platforms managed by Telefónica Educación Digital, such as Miríadax, to promote local and international courses on digital technologies and skills applied to tourism and aimed at different entities in the sector.

Lastly, Telefónica will lend its support to the UNWTO in the development of a specific Digital Agenda for the tourism sector guided by a set of very concrete objectives: to place new technologies at the service of sustainable growth, foster innovation and promote inclusive economic and social development.

The framework agreement between the two organizations has been signed in Madrid by Jaime Cabal, Deputy Secretary-General of the World Tourism Organization, and by Eduardo Navarro, Director of Communication, Corporate Affairs, Branding and Sustainability of Telefónica S.A.

During the signing, Cabal said that “innovation and digital transformation are among the priorities of the World Tourism Organization in order to provide additional impetus to tourism as an ally of sustainable development.” He added, “Together with Telefónica we can help our more than 160 Member States build their tourism innovation ecosystems and create digital tools that facilitate more efficient decision-making thanks to the use of Big Data, artificial intelligence and many other advances.”

For his part, Eduardo Navarro stressed: “This framework agreement is very important because the technologies are drawing the future of travel and tourism. Virtual and augmented reality, Big Data, cognitive intelligence and the Internet of Things will be a fundamental part of the tourist experience and Telefónica is a very important player in the provision of these services. The fibre networks deployed by Telefónica will also be decisive in making this a reality that will have an impact on the experience of users and on the services provided by the different players in the sector.”