The Visitor Experience Value Chain: Fitting tourism into the development paradigm

Having served on one of the projects that was featured in last week’s Breakfast Seminar on “Tourism as Sustainable Development Strategy: A Systemic Supply Chain Approach,” I was especially excited to hear the presentations by Kristin Lamoureux and Amanda MacArthur. Both Lamoureux and MacArthur’s organizations—the SAVE Travel Alliance and CDC Development Solutions (CDS), respectively—are members of the Volunteers for Economic Growth Alliance (VEGA) and have extensive experience in sustainable tourism development.

Kristin Lamoureux began the seminar by talking about how tourism can fit into the development paradigm, especially because of its potential reach and impact on a global level. However, she made a very clear distinction between tourism done well (where issues of sustainability, local engagement, job creation, cultural sensitivity, and policy issues are all taken into account) and tourism done poorly. Truly impactful tourism development, according to Lamoureux, requires thinking about the “product” as the entire visitor experience from the time they decide to take a trip, to how they learn more about a destination, to their booking and travel experience, to their actual time in the destination, and finally to how they share information about their trip after the fact and what influence that may have on other potential travelers. These form the four phases of the Visitor Experience Value Chain and involve stakeholders at a much broader level than just tour guides and taxi drivers (although they play a part too).

Lamoureux concluded her presentation by discussing some of the key challenges in sustainable tourism development. Despite the fact that tourism is a very different type of product, the critical, but challenging, activities she outlined were similar to those faced by most practitioners in most development sectors. They included empowering local stakeholders, collecting reliable baseline data, and fostering a healthy investment climate, among others.

Amanda MacArthur’s presentation helped to localize the conversation as she introduced the CDS Tourism Employment & Opportunity (TEMPO) program that they piloted in Cross River State, Nigeria (this, coincidentally, was the project I worked on). MacArthur laid out the six main interventions that we undertook during the 18-month World Bank-funded project:

• Destination Analysis: During this phase, our team conducted asset audits of nearly 500 tourism service providers in Cross River State alone and used it to construct a tourism product registry.
• Stakeholder Engagement: In line with the value chain approach, we organized several smaller topic-driven stakeholder committees to assist with the project strategy.
• Destination Management Organization (DMO) Development & TEMPO Technology: This activity, critical to the sustainability of the industry, includes organizing some kind of stakeholders’ group that can act in “co-opetition” (cooperation+competition) to implement industry-wide technology-driven solutions.
• Capacity Building: In Cross River, this involved programs for business development services grants, service quality training (including “smile training” as MacArthur called it), and employee service incentives.
• Marketing and Promotion—As part of this effort, which also included familiarization trips, TEMPO also created an Ambassadors Promotion Program to provide discounted travel packages to targeted domestic source markets.