#BTColumn – Time to transform tourism

The theme of this year’s Small Business Week, Facilitating a Transformative Agenda that is Fit for Purpose, represents an opportunity to consider how economic activity can be transformed sustainably. 

Traded and non-traded sectors need transformation to position the local economy towards growth; growth that is not only seen in numerical values but is the lived experience by citizens.

The most significant sector to be reviewed is tourism. Tourism is our business – it transcends all sizes of firms, and directly and indirectly impacts all areas of economic activity. While the calls for economic diversification are justified, tourism is the low-hanging fruit that will continue to be the major driver of foreign exchange earnings and employment generation for some time. 

So, let’s start with this sector for transformation. The heavy reliance on technology during the COVID-19 period presented an opportunity to introduce Virtual Tourism (VT). VT represented a sustainable response to shocks to the tourism industry occasioned by travel restrictions in the face of the pandemic.

Extensive research done by Philip Jackson, a digital economy researcher, and first shared in a regional forum in 2012, presents a business case for how the tourism product can be transformed.

What is Virtual Reality? Virtual Reality (VR) is the use of computer technology to create a simulated environment. Unlike traditional user interfaces, VR places the user inside an experience. Instead of viewing a screen in front of them, users are able to interact with 3D worlds. By simulating as many senses as possible, such as vision, hearing, touch, and even smell, the computer is transformed into a gatekeeper to this artificial world. The only limits to near-real VR experiences are the availability of content and cheap computing power.

The VR market was valued at US$17.25 billion in 2020 and is expected to reach US$184.66 billion by 2026, at an annualised growth rate of 48.7 per cent over the period 2021 – 2026. By 2020, some 80 million VR headsets were sold.

Mr Jackson rightly proffers there were some assumptions to adopting virtual tourism in the region.

First, in a post-COVID-19 world, tourism-dependent countries have to innovate to diversify their product offering, anticipating uncertainty in travel. Second, VR technologies provide a real opportunity to virtualise the island’s beautiful landscapes and seascapes, and package them for a growing market of consumers referred to as ‘Digital Dwellers’. 

Third, as VR content can be accessed remotely, these products circumvent travel restrictions and have the extra benefit of expanding the consumption of products without the direct environmental degradation of land and sea environments. 

Fourth, as the gadgetry for accessing virtual reality content becomes more affordable, adoption of these technologies in the population would be limited by the availability of quality and interesting content. 

Fifth, Global VR technologies and content companies would be eager to partner with a variety of entities to encourage content production, including tourism-based content, to grow the VR ecosystem. 

Finally,
tourism-dependent small states have excellent scenic sites and pathways both on land and in their marine environments that are perfect for virtualisation.

Several proposals have been advanced on how this value-added to our tourism product can be developed. Whereas space does not allow for the full distillation of all the research done in this area, there are three key points that are worthy of mention.

1. The VT concept should include the entire gamut of digital reproduction of the appropriate physical environment, from still photos in all its variations, including 360-degree views to videos with all its variants to fully immersive 3D virtual reality reproductions. 

2. Efforts should be made to provide the platforms and mechanisms for various users to aggregate, narrate and curate these various digital assets. 3. An Intellectual Property (IP) framework must be established to first protect the digital reproduction of landscapes and seascapes. This will guide in negotiating the terms of partnerships with leading global entities. The legal and regulatory work may require some joint innovation and as such, a regulatory sandboxing approach may be useful. 

3. The communities where appropriate sites for potential virtualisation exist should be engaged within a larger community tourism approach. This is to ensure that appropriate benefits of these innovations accrue to the local communities and create a sense of ownership. From a sustainability perspective, it is expected that VR experiences will drive interest in actual visits to these sites.

The COVID-19 pandemic has severely affected global travel and adversely impacted the income of tourism-dependent countries. Virtual reality tourism is a viable option to create revenue for these countries, as emerging technology and consumer trends make VT products possible and affordable.

It was the late Winston Churchill who once said, “Never let a good crisis go to waste”. The use of technology was germane to doing business and functioning in other areas of life during the pandemic. Whereas it is not being advocated to adopt digitalisation carte blanche, some benefit can be derived from this disruption that may provide significant economic returns and allow citizens to share in the development process.

The Small Business Association of Barbados (SBA) is the island’s non-profit representative body for micro, small and medium enterprises (MSMEs). Connect with the SBA: https://www.sba.bb/sba/