Truth Behind Travel Podcast

The paradigm shift we need to define the future of tourism with Anna Pollock

• Dolores Semeraro • Season 4 • Episode 71

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Dolores Semeraro interviews tourism expert and internationally acclaimed keynote speaker and thought leader Anna Pollock on her journey in travel and tourism, the evolution of tourism from a network to an industry, and the shift towards technology and the early adoption of the internet and its tools.

Anna Pollock constructively criticises the tourism industry's focus on growth and productivity, leading to over-tourism and environmental degradation. She advocated for a regenerative approach, emphasizing community involvement, local pride, and sustainable practices.

Talking to Dolores Semeraro, Anna Pollock called for a paradigm shift in thinking, stressing the importance of ecological literacy, community responsibility, and the need for political leadership to align with sustainable tourism goals.

Connect with Anna Pollock here.

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Welcome to Truth Behind Travel Podcast a platform for tourism, travel and hospitality professionals and enthusiasts to share, learn and unlearn what we need to create better tourism, protect the environment and become better humans. 


Dolores Semeraro is a sought-after international tourism keynote speaker and sustainable tourism marketing professional.

Dolores actively works in the tourism and travel conference space as a keynote speaker and moderator, gracing the stages of international tourism summits and trade shows.

As a professional keynote speaker, Dolores’ speaking topics encompass sustainable digital marketing for the tourism industry, how to establish digital mastery, and learn how to identify today’s traveler’s needs.

During the pandemic, Dolores launched her podcast show named ‘Truth Behind Travel Podcast’ where she regularly interviews tourism and travel industry leaders and representatives on how to rebuild the future of travel.

In the recent years, Dolores has continued to work and live on beautiful islands such as Mauritius, where she started her tourism and hospitality marketing consultancy working closely with the Mauritian luxury hospitality sector as corporate trainer.

According to her international clients, Dolores is a gifted trainer and intuitive workshop facilitator.

She is now based in Europe where she actively works as keynote speaker and corporate trainer in the tourism industry.

www.doloressemeraro.com

dolores@doloressemeraro.com

Instagram @dolores_semeraro

LinkedIn @dolores.sem

Dolores Semeraro:

Welcome back to the show, Season Four of truth behind travel. Today, I have a guest on the podcast that needs no introduction. Anna, welcome to the podcast.

Anna Pollock:

Thank you so much. Dolores for having me today.

Dolores Semeraro:

Travel is something that really has accompanied you throughout your life, and before we go into a range of questions that I can't wait to ask you. I would love for you to just give us an overview of the journey you could share with us what really made you, what what brought you to where you are today.

Anna Pollock:

I guess I've always loved travel, because I've always been interested in what's on the other side of a hill. My background actually, is I grew up in in a beautiful county called Sussex in southern England, and at a time when it was possible for young people to be able to walk about and travel and experience nature, for example, by themselves. So at a very young age, I was off on my bike going going on the country lanes. No one worried about that. So I that, I think, developed my curiosity for places and my love of geography, and I went on to study geography. And my geography studies took me then to New Zealand for a scholarship. And I realized then that while I love learning, I didn't feel I was suited to the academic environment. So I decided to set off. And I'd met a Canadian while I was there, and I followed him off to Canada. On the way there, I just happened to get a job with the English tourist board, a brief job for the research department, but it put tourism on my resume at a time when Western Canada was just beginning to think about, do you think we could do something with tourism? Believe it or not, that was in the 70s. I was really heavily involved in technology and tourism. We introduced the Internet to tourism and changes in my life. My marriage broke up amicably, but I decided to come back to the UK with my daughter, who is 11, and I got very heavily involved in introducing the internet and technology to tourism destination. The key thing about that was it really introduced me to the idea of networks, and we'll talk about that later, but realize that tourism, in fact, is a network. It's not an industry. Actually doesn't work as an industry. And, you know, just brought me into all kinds of areas of discovery outside tourism. And I guess what I've been doing is trying to apply it to you say, what's the relevance of all this to to the tourism sector that led me to consulting here and writing and so on and so on. So a long story, but then I am getting older now, so there's a lot to say.

Dolores Semeraro:

Well, you certainly are not slowing down, and we see you in many forums, and as a an international speaker and writer, I've been following the work and the content that you've been sharing. And one of the things that really comes through is the clarity of message and how something especially on the subject of tourism, and most recently, on regenerative tourism, and how the complexity of of what is needed to to really embrace tourism in this way, it's often there's often, often leaves rooms for misunderstanding. And a lot of organizations around the world are doing their best. Some are doing nothing. Some could be doing more. So there's a lot of disparity. And I see the tourism industry nowadays. It's a land of contrast. You cannot do tourism and do only good. There will always going to be an element of, I would say, an element of darkness, but an element that doesn't necessarily bring 100% of goodness. And I've met professionals from really different regions of the world, Asia, Indian Ocean, Africa, Europe. Some are doing a lot, some are doing nothing. And we can't really say that nowadays, the conversation around tourism in the, you know, international ecosystem, it's a conversation that nobody knows about it. Nobody's a novice anymore when it comes to sustainability, conscious travel. Yet there's a failure. There are organizations. There are tourism entrepreneurs, there are operators that are still failing. Why is that?

Anna Pollock:

Well, first of all, I mean, that is the really big question, because we're talking about a phenomenally big industry now I will say it isn't actually an industry. It's. Network of billions of customers served by hundreds of millions of suppliers. So they're all acting semi autonomously. Semi ended independently of one another and other industries where the income and wealth are more concentrated. You know, decisions can be made. I often argued when I was in Canada that you could get the decision makers in the forest industry, which was very important, you know, in one room and decide to go in a certain direction. You would need the entire sort of big stadium that we had of, you know, 60,000 seats to get the same coverage in tourism. So we have to accept that it's a loose network. It's very difficult to lead it because of that. The second thing I think, I my experience of tourism, is that people don't often live within these silos. We we have conversations within our networks in tourism, as if we were somehow independent. Tourism doesn't exist in isolation. It's it's part of a much larger society, economy, and it's that where the change is actually happening. So tourism is being affected by that, but it's also going to affect it. And if you want to get really sort of conceptual, it's, it's, it's an, it's an economic phenomenon, if you like, that's embedded in and affected by a particular way of seeing, being and doing that underpins how we operate our economies, how we operate society today. And the reason for this sort of, you know, huge contrast in terms of, you know, people really moving ahead quickly, and other people not, is that that way of seeing, being and doing, which we call a paradigm, that's the assumptions that we have, individually and collectively, about how the world works, how we should behave, how we define success, how we relate to each other and other living things on the planet, that set of assumptions is going through a dramatic change, and Not many people even are aware of that, okay, but it affects how we think and how we make sense of our world. But those assumptions, have, you know, been formed several 100 years ago and been developing more or less since the beginning of science, okay, and the industrial revolutions. So we've internalized those assumptions you know, things like, you know, I'm separate from you, and you this country is separate from that. This notion of separation is fundamental to our way of seeing things. We have internalized all the things that our parents told us. You know, to get ahead, you've got to look after yourself, and it's a harsh world out there, and if you don't do it, somebody else will. Those kind of assumptions. They've become internalized. We're not, not often aware that we're we have them, and you can't change something if you don't know you've got something within you that needs to change. Now, that paradigm, that way of looking at the world, has actually, you know, been very helpful. I mean, since the birth of science and the industrial revolution, human species has just gone from strength to strength. Population has exploded, and we're now the most powerful animal on the planet. You know, we have completely in the process of completely changing ecosystems around the world, and we are now in a point of being able to decide whether life as we know it on this planet continues. I think life always will continue, but it may not be a form that makes it possible for us to continue. The reason I'm mentioning all this is that the root cause of the sort of volatility and the confusion that's existing at the moment is that that paradigm, that those set of assumptions, aren't working for us anymore. A lot of writers are using terms like, we're in the great unraveling period, and they'll start to say, you know, it's not just one crisis, it's many. We've got biodiversity loss, ocean acidification, wealth inequality, the impact of artificial intelligence, political polarization, all of these things are happening, and they're now being called one big poly crisis. So, you know, the point is, the rubber is hitting the road right now. We're going to have to really look at how we think, and we cannot continue to look at all of those subjects separately. And that's the other you know, for example, we've had cop about climate, and there's a cop now about the. Biodiversity, and those two have been kept separate for well over 10 years, and that's crazy, because you cannot separate the climate from nature. And so only now are we beginning to see that the actions we take over here affect us over there. And we need to look at these deeper than that, to the root cause. And the root cause is the way we think, and that's why we're living in a period of what's called VUCA period. It's volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity. And so therefore, is it really a surprise that some of us get it, some don't, and there's a lot of confusion.

Dolores Semeraro:

The effect of today's volatile environment. What is the effect that we, that you recognize, on tourism?

Anna Pollock:

Tourism has been happening for hundreds of years. We called it hospitality. It was a natural thing. In fact, I prefer to use the word hospitality more often than tourism, because that's the core activity. It is the act of a host, welcoming a stranger and looking after them all right? And it involves travel, because sometimes these two meet accidentally, as it were, that's the core of our business. And in when I grew up, started out in Canada, for example, that had been going on, but it wasn't recognized as an economic phenomena. And frankly, globally, tourism has not been recognized as a specific economic phenomenon with its own set of accounts. For example, which is what mattered in this economic world. Until relatively recently, it's grown and grown and grown to the point where it couldn't be ignored, but it still didn't seem to have that economic legitimacy, until the last 20 years or so. And during that period, my experience was everyone in tourism felt they weren't being taken seriously. They weren't getting the recognition they deserved. And so what they did was they began to, well, how do we do that? Well, we have to use the same kind of language instead of experiences. We started then talking about products, and the economist said, You're not productive. So we started thinking about productivity and efficiency and scale. We started to talk about, oh, well, maybe we can show them that we are a legitimate industry, because we we sell to consumers, obviously, but we have agents that, you know, we have the the retailers. We have wholesalers, tour operators, hope became wholesalers. We started to use that economic language in order to get that sense of legitimacy, actually, and it and as time went by, the emphasis was more and more on productivity, on volume, on selling, and we became an extractive quote industry. This was one of the reasons there's a lot of confusion because, or it's not so much confusion. But it has, in fact, done some damage, because we've, we've taken out the the human element of hospitality and turned it into a big, big business. And in those economic when you apply those economic rules of productivity, etc, scale is absolutely everything. More is more important than anything else. So everyone felt, if we were going to we had to grow tourism to show that we were an effective economic driver, because that gave us legitimacy. And that's, I think, one of the reasons why, because tourism had this enormous dynamic the minute you started mass transportation, followed by this internet. The internet has had a phenomenal impact in connecting people, making people want to go to places they wouldn't have considered before. All of these things that are just rising prosperity in many countries has caused this phenomenal growth. And then the politicians woke up, oh, right, we're making tax revenue from this, and therefore more tax revenue is better than next year. And that's what's led to virtually every destination setting growth in volume as their primary target. And that's why we now have all of the negative aspects of over tourism, the pollution from emissions and contrails, etc, plastics, chemicals, water shortages in some places, plus plus many of the other impacts that we're in other industries that we're now suffering from, including, you know, the industrial agriculture, industrial pollution, etc. So they're all interlinked, but I think it was that drive to get legitimate that turned us into an economic engine, or a cog in an economic engine.

Dolores Semeraro:

We shifted from considering people explorer into considering them, consumers. How sad is that.

Anna Pollock:

Yeah, well, it's sad, but frankly, that is what's been driving this economic growth since the war. Everything became based on on volume. I mean, one of the for example, after the war, a huge amount of productive capability was developed to win that war, the last war, every war, they're expensive, so you have to do an awful lot of work after a war to make up for it. There's a lot of rebuilding that takes place. But I mean things, for example, about we look at the the proliferation of chemical fertilizers and pesticide pesticides in agriculture that started after the war, when they had all of this chemical production capability that was used for, basically, for bombs and other nasty things. And then they applied that to the agricultural sector. So because they had this enormous productive capacity at the time. But it just was a something that we can't blame anyone about. It was, it was, you could argue it was a natural progression, but the reality is, it just has gone too far. And in tourism, yes, I think we have, we have this idea of a visitor, a guest, being a consumer, you have a completely different mindset when you see it that way, and then the consumer starts to think, well, they have a completely different mindset, because they have the right to go anywhere. And then the investors feel they have the right to go and and say, Well, you know, there's somebody's written a beautiful article about this, or a movie about this fantastic beach in Thailand. I better go and buy land there, because people are going to want to come. And the next thing, you know, it looks like, it looks like the Costa del Sol. You know, that's a natural process of the nature of this economic engine. So, yes, it's hard to say, how do you turn that back? We can talk a bit more about that later. But what I think is happening is that human beings are waking up to the fact that this is not producing the happy end result we wanted. And how do we now remake and rethink all of our activities on on the planet

Dolores Semeraro:

at the time of heavy and Fast, fast and furious development of tourism that has happened over the last 30, 35, 40 years, the voices that were heard in the industry were the voices of the business owners, the ones developing the businesses. And what we hear now instead is a huge and growing range of voices of the people that are there to welcome the visitors, the local communities, right? And if the if the visitors, per se, are already coming into a destination, holding a narrative of consumerism, how can we ever expect them to travel embracing more sustainable practices? I mean, what do we need to change data. What needs to change there?

Anna Pollock:

I'm very glad you asked that question, Dolores, because I think right now the assumption is that it is the it is the visitor, visitor who has to change. And frankly, I don't think that's right at all. I think we have created a visitor that expects to consume. Considered it a right, you know, they've got the wealth. You've been told that once you're wealthy, you can go travel anywhere. We've built that market up as well, and those expectations and those attitudes in many cases, and so at the moment, what I see is, is some some suggestion that, you know, we've got to change the visitors behavior, or we've got to have the right visitor and that kind of thing. And that, again, is deflecting from where the responsibility sits. The responsibility sits, in my opinion, with the businesses, okay? And as you quite rightly point out, in many cases, they've we've brought that extractive mentality that economics is about taking a resource, making something of it, adding, if you like, value, but making something of it that we can then sell, that someone can buy, and then it can be consumed and thrown away, that that is the fundamental economic model that we have. And we've, we've incorporated that a little bit into tourism. And so the assumption that that a place was was a resource. Now a place actually is what they call an economics a common good. It's the place where those people live. It's their home. And for a long time there, we just completely ignored that, and we allowed people to come in who had more money than the people in that home, in that destination, to either buy up land. Yes, it was creating. Jobs. These are still the big excuses. You know, we'll have hotels, they'll employ people that wouldn't otherwise be employed, and and so on and so on. And so we then get this, this chain of economic productivity and seemingly greater growth. But again, at no point, until very recently, were any of those investors and developers and business owners asked to pay all of the costs associated with that? So you take things like water, that's a common good, you know. And yet the tourists we know hotel is built, the tourist expects a certain standard, and their consumption of that common good is so disproportionate to the consumption by the people who actually live there that things get very much out of, out of out of balance. So it's, you know, I don't like pointing the finger because there's no one culprit. I mean, all of us are utterly involved in this. I travel, you travel, we're all contributors. But I do think personally that it's time now for the travel industry to be more honest about what it has done in the past and how that needs needs to change. If I can give you one example, I mean that the the economists and the politicians love to point to, to the growth, to the growth in spending, to the income that's coming in. These are things they can count. And that's that's a reflection of an old paradigm. If you can't count it, it's not worth doing, you know. But what that? What are they counting? They're counting them. What I what is known as the sort of gross impact, where the money how much money is coming in, what they're not counting is how much money is going out. So if most of the investment was, let's say foreign investment, because that's where the capital was coming from, an awful lot of that income actually does go out of the country as well. That's called leakage. And if there's one statistic that we could be counting that we're systematically trying to avoid counting, is simply that. So, you know, you take a Pacific country, I won't name any names, but you know, 82% of the income, often that's going into that country is actually disappearing because it's going back to the investors who are foreign. That's not healthy, and that's the kind of honesty that we need to have. Now. How can we change that, so that there are opportunities now for the people in these these countries for whom it's home to say just how much, how much visitation can we cope with? How what of ourselves do we wish to share? What aspects of our culture do we not wish to see? You know, spoiled, just to make it more convenient, because a visitor wants to see the culture, but doesn't want to sit through a ceremony that lasts eight hours, when we can compress it into 15 minutes, get back on the bus and do something else. I mean, I know some of these are old, cliched examples, but they hold relevant still.

Dolores Semeraro:

I think it's a dialog that needs to constantly be there between the the the tourism development vision of a destination and the, I call them the doers, like I personally, I've been traveling across Greece for the last few months, and I see how many, pretty much, 90% of the businesses and the doors are closed when we talk about, you know, giving tourism, using tourism as an opportunity for growth, for development of a place, to bring more wealth generated by tourism into a destination, I've been wondering, if Are we missing an opportunity here, for example, I'm taking Greece as an example, as I'm here right Now and then I've been having these conversations with local hospitality managers, the answer was unanimous. They said, Dolores the locals do want to have a break. You actually cannot impose a greater idea of a greater vision of traveling off season or extending seasonality, or an all year round offerings, because the locals do want to have their time off. They have other things to do. They're happy to close for a few months and come back next year. So my question is, before strategizing in today's tourism industry, are we actually asking to the local communities, to the locals, as we said, if that's what they want, and if that's what if they don't want it, then what can we do about it? And I feel that this conversation seems to be happening in many outlets around the tourism industry, for the sake of happening. And here I am. Am witnessing it firsthand that they do not want this, yeah, yeah, you know where, where, where do we stand? You know what, when, where is that fine line?

Anna Pollock:

No, I think you raised a really important point. I think finally, after many, many years, there is a growing recognition that the host community is the most important of all. You know, if you want to see this working, I believe, you look at indigenous communities, they are so closely connected with the land and the nature, they have a very fundamentally different paradigm than the one that we have in the West. So now we're being asked to look at how systems work, and systems work together in harmony, and no one part of any system can just look after itself, all right? The most important rule in nature is that you contribute to the system of which you're a part, right? So now that kind of thinking is seeping into our consciousness. It's how it happens. And we're beginning to recognize, oh, okay, we can't operate in isolation of what our community, the system we're living in or working in, actually wants. But we're just at the very beginning of that, I saw the change happening when people started saying, Well, we have to survey. You know, the destination marketing organization said, Oh yes, we better make sure that residents are happy. So off they want the clipboards. And you know, you know how you can organize the survey to more or less get what you want. Oh yes, they're really happy. We can carry on doing this for another 510, years. That was the first step, but it wasn't enough. We know what I'm seeing happening in some communities is there are either communities beginning to kind of wake up, if you like, and say, We must take care of ourselves. We must identify the place we wish to become, or what we want for us. In other cases, you know that's being introduced, but they're now starting to get involved in that decision and hope. And some places, the tourism industry is saying, and this, to me, is the biggest change. It's not, what can you do for us? We're the tourism industry. We're going to bring you jobs and all the rest of it. What kind of tax incentives are you going to give, or planning permissions are you going to give so that we can do all this great economic thing? Now they're starting to say, how can we contribute to making this community a better place? But you can only do that with any degree of legitimacy when you become part of that community. And that's why I feel hospitality has got such a wonderful opportunity today, because it's the one part of the this economic engine we call tourism that actually is embedded in a place so Hoteliers and restauranteurs have to be there all the time, so ideally, they are people from that place, but not always. There may be people who moved there to open a restaurant. That's fine, but they once there, they can't move because the one thing that differentiates tourism from other economic activities is we move the customer to the point of quote consumption in other industries, we sell it out. So these, these are the aspects of of our sector that are rooted and again, that's important, because that's very much how natural systems work. The plants are rooted. The trees are rooted. They don't just pick up and walk like in some Disney movie. They are there, and therefore they're responding always to the unique conditions of that ecosystem, that ecology of which they're a part. So I think the restauranteurs and the hoteliers could play a major role in helping to bring a community together around what they want for the future and what issues they feel need to be attended to. That's the shift I see, and it's a beautiful thing to watch, but it's very slow at the moment.

Dolores Semeraro:

One of the aspects that I've always observed in in community empowerment is how the sense of being proud, you know, the pride of belonging, that sense of belonging would be encouraged, would be nurtured and fostered across the communities. Because if locals are not proud of of the heritage of the cultural background that they carry forward, how can they authentically and genuinely showcase it to visitors? Right? So nurturing that sense of belonging and nurturing that sense of pride really ultimately. Really sits into honoring their roots. And so this rooting, this, this really grounding mechanism, it's something that should be embedded into a destination development strategy as such. My question is, do you see that as a process of true and of really guaranteeing and creating true empowerment for local communities?

Anna Pollock:

Yes, you've expressed that extremely well. I think exactly that the this, the sense of pride of who are we, basically, if you think about it, this industrial, economic engine that we've had over the last basically, 50 years or more, has, has actually tried to to take that away from places and people. It, to me, it's a form of, you know, modern day colonialism, when, when we go, you know, this western world, northern the northern hemisphere, they call the global north, if you like, has been going out and telling an awful lot of beautiful people and places that somehow they're inferior they need to be doing living the way we live. And so, you know, when I saw the first Starbucks in Bali, for example, I cried. I cried because it had exactly the same furniture in it as the Starbucks that I'd been to in Seattle just a few weeks before. And that led to all these chains, you know. Again, just think of the language, the chains, all the brands you know, popping up in all kinds of places and making out that their way of serving coffee was somehow superior to the way that the Balinese had been doing it for some time before. I've just recently been been privileged to spend a fair amount of time in the Pacific and working in a particular beautiful country called Vanuatu. Vanuatu happens to be one of the classified as one of the poorest countries in the world, but it also has been clearly and survey after survey after survey, it's number one or number two, the happiest place in the world. But again, their sense of confidence and pride in their culture was has been been knocked back because, you know, they weren't serving Western food, they weren't behaving and, you know, you weren't dressed up in suits and all the rest of it, totally inappropriate in that climate, by the way. But the point is, there was a sense of, you know, we have to try. We have to behave differently if we're going to get acknowledged as participants in this global society. But then COVID came. So they had been told to have all these hotels and to cater to the to the visitors, because they needed the foreign exchange. And so foreign investors came in, bought the hotels, opened the hotels, the young people went to work in the hotels. They began to dislike their own food because the Western food seemed more exotic. That's was more important to have. You know, rice and ketchup, if you can get it, and hamburgers. And then COVID came, and those those investors, just closed everything down, just left them high and dry. And those people, fortunately, their their traditional cultures were still alive. The elders said, okay, they didn't have Plan B. We have come home, come home into a village. Learn how we grow Taro. That's what you're what's what we have lived on for all these years. Learn how to fish, learn how to understand nature, learn how to construct when things get destroyed by a hurricane, learn your own language, your culture, your songs, your rituals. And that's exactly what they've done, and that has re established their sense of identity. Fortunately, post COVID, the kind of visitor that's coming to those islands now is different. They don't want to sit by a pool and drink martinis or whatever, as they would have done in the 50s and 60s. They now want to go out and experience village life, and these these beautiful people are shaping those experiences from within their own culture. And seeing the visitors excitement is reinforcing that pride. But they, in that case, they they had never really lost it, but they needed that sort of Jolt, particularly to, in a sense, help the young people discover who they are. So it's a little in it's a beautiful story, because I'm just seeing so many examples of entrepreneurial initiative by creating new experiences, new products, new things. But it's coming entirely from within, and as you say, from a state of pride.

Dolores Semeraro:

it's the ability of being able to get to know these stories and the ability to to be able to be so connected all the time, everywhere, with everything, to have informations at the at our fingertips at any moment, and earlier on, the on our conversation you touched on, you know, as a pioneer of showcasing what the internet can do for the tourism industry. I want to go back to that for a moment, because, especially as we live now, we're probably living through the era of the artificial intelligence adoptions and all kinds of technology that can that is portrayed as the ultimate way of doing tourism, or the ultimate way of managing tourism destination, creating smart tourism processes. So lots of technology, left, right and center and and seeing a lot of confusion, fusion, confusion these days happening in the industry. How do we, as a as for yourself. You know, as a pioneer of of that technology for the tourism industry, how do you see what is happening today as where can we find the silver linings in in this, in this unmonitored adoption of technology across the industry?

Anna Pollock:

I think I'm probably going to show my age now, because, yes, I was an early proponent and adopter of internet technology back in the 70s. I mean, no, that's too early. Probably I did the first travel and technology conference in Vancouver in 1993 and I was introduced to the internet then by some students, and at the first I said, Well, this reminds me of early cars. You know when, when you had to have a horse in front of you because it was so wretchedly slow. I mean, you press a button to over a hyperlink and go and have coffee. But we began to see the potential. And I felt that this was a technology that the destination the place could make best use of, because they were closest to the source of supply. And I spent, actually, 10 years trying to persuade destinations that that this was the way to go. And we built one of the first destination management systems. But unfortunately, the private sector saw it long before destinations did. And then you got the OTAs, and once you've got the OTAs, then again, responsibility for the control, the accuracy, the Yeah, the authenticity of the information was, was, was the opportunity to have that part in, I wouldn't say power, but that role and responsibility was lost. And so that reinforced the commoditization of of it, the whole industry. It was an It was another force for taking us down that direction. And now, of course, it's AI, and again, I mean, AI is incredibly expensive. It's making huge amounts of money for relatively small number of people. And it's another complex level of complexity that is going to have the potential to separate us, again, from from some reality. And when we're talking about, I haven't really thought this one through, because I, when it got to AI, began to say, you know, I'm tired of this. What I would hate to see right now is, is attention being placed too much on on technology as an intermediary of any description. It has served us well. It has enabled us to connect. I would prefer that we're using this, you know, using technology as such, for educational purposes, for sharing of knowledge, rather than than distracting us into some kind of artificial way of being, as opposed to, what is it? What is the is really mattering here? And to me, it's the human connection, and it's the connection is, is helping people really become, uh, aware of of who we, who we are, as human beings, as being part of nature and the so technology gets in the way of that, actually, because the the real technology is the inner technology that we have. We're born with it. We're born with a sensitivity. It's just that that has been crowded out or drowned out or minimized by a need to rely on some kind of material machine to do something that we do naturally. I feel that the direction that we need to go is away from quantity and growth, which, by the way, is a subject that nobody wants to talk about. But. They want to talk about everything else, but not about the fact that we cannot continue to grow infinitely on a finite planet. It's it's just that is, that is such a fundamental rule, there's not a single living being on this planet that that can grow forever. That is a law of nature. You have a beginning, a middle and end, and then a recycling, a composting, if you like. And yet, tourism seems to think that despite COVID, maybe the lessons that could have been there in during COVID, no we can just keep on growing. And the percentages that they're talking about are incredible because, and again, no one knows what a 5% per annum increase means, what does that look like? It sounds great, but it means that in 12 years, you doubled in size. Can you imagine us doubling in size again, and what that would look like? The whole earth is beginning to be covered by hotels and shopping malls and parking lots, if you're not careful, and we now know that that is utterly unsustainable. So how do we redefine success? How do we redefine growth and talk about it in terms of increasing the value in in not just in material terms? That's the other big shift. I think it's a shift away from from just measuring once you say you if you can't measure it, you can't manage it, and therefore it's not worth doing. You throw out the window all of those important things that cannot be measured. How do you measure the quality of this conversation that we're having? I'm enjoying it. You're enjoying it. I hope your listeners will enjoy it. But is there a is there a measurement for that? It's a personal thing. Each of us is going to enjoy it in a different way. Similarly, in when I go to a destination, what I will enjoy in Vanuatu will be different from someone coming from a different part of the world, in a different economy, a different society, etc. All I'm trying to get at is, why can't we start thinking about how we can build a good business and a good economy based on the quality of the experience and how much of our being there in that place is helping that place develop itself in the way that works for it. So I think it's an unwillingness to face that fundamental truth and get that truth across to our politicians that in the long run, it will be far better for their communities and their voters, if they're starting to see a qualitative improvement to their way of being, our way of living there, and a sense that there is something in in that for their future generations,

Dolores Semeraro:

If you were to map a mindset for a tourism professional. It's someone that is in hospitality, someone that runs a travel business, that could a person that would leave and breed that sustainability definition and work towards that goal. What would that mindset need to contain? I don't know what's the right word, like, what? How would that mindset look like?

Anna Pollock:

To me, it's a question of, of seeing, seeing the way, the way life is, you know, and learning how life works. So the mindset I would ask is, is off? The message I would give would be the same as a famous ecologist called Gregory Bateson said, it's the problem is humans haven't learned to think the way that nature thinks. So step number one, recognize you are part of an infinite set of systems or holes. And you play, you contribute to the shape and nature of those holes. So the mindset is one of, you know, I'm part of the system. I can contribute to the system. And so from a destination development point of view, it's really about, how can we come together as a community and say, you know, we are unique because we're in this particular piece of geography, if you like. I mean, every place is unique. What made us become who we are. So what's beautiful about nature is that it takes there are some fundamental rules, if you like, or principles, and I'm not even going to try and talk about those today, that we can learn and that we can work with to live in harmony. So the mindset right now, I would ask you. For people to consider is, first of all, it's a it's a mindset of curiosity, how does, how does life really work? You know, we can learn this now. I mean, it's some of the real leaders in this so called regenerative living systems movement, of saying the first thing we need to do is, is develop some ecological literacy, right? That's the beautiful thing about the internet. You can learn anything on the internet. Now. The second thing is, is to an intrinsic part of this is that we're not just it's not just about what we do. It's about how we are inside. So it's developing our own sense of self, our own sense of who we are, what we care about. You know, our values. You know what is really important to us, what are we prepared to fight for now? Are we? Are we courageous enough to stand up and say, No, I don't buy that piece of you know, propaganda, if you like, that's not who I am or as a community. That's not who we want to be. We don't want to be used. We want to have a sense of control over our own destiny. All of this is about beginning to take that much more responsibility for the whole than we've done in the past. I think our current culture, our old dying culture, because I think it is dying, you know, asked us to become bystanders. You know, just watch the important people will take care of it. They'll set the pattern, they'll set the fashion, they'll set the values. We can't allow that to happen anymore. It's a long and fumbling answer, perhaps too.

Dolores Semeraro:

I love it. I think important question. Well, if I may, summarize it, curiosity, sense of self, clarity of values and connecting, and connectivity with nature, knowing that, you know, if anything, we can bring our heartbeat back into in Synchron with with Mother Nature.

Anna Pollock:

I would say it's education. Learn what, how life works, where you are, and secondly, take responsibility for educating your peers so that together you can let the politicians know that this has to change. I think frequent, more and more where I'm at is writing papers. I can write papers till I'm blue in the face, but I think now I see the role is educating people so that they can educate their political leadership. It's only going to change that way, actually, when it becomes apparent that that's what the people are going to vote on next, next election that will get this will get any movement in the in the right direction, because in the meantime, the big businesses are are taking what they can get. They know it's going to end. They're taking absolutely everything they can before it does.

Dolores Semeraro:

And then hopefully the people that are being educated today are eventually going to become the politicians of tomorrow. So we can break that cycle and have people that really actually understand the dynamics of nature and the world, the society.

Anna Pollock:

it's fun to learn, by the way, that the importance of educating our children so parents supporting their children. In fact, actually, what's happening right now, the children are educating their parents. In many cases, absolutely, they are the future leaders. But we actually, actually, I think we do need to work with the ones we've got. The second thing, I think that looking into the future, the big R E word is not just regeneration, which is literally means creating the conditions conducive for life to thrive. If you bear that in mind, then it takes away all the complexity of definitions and so on. You just take that sentence, regeneration creates the conditions for life to thrive. So therefore, are my actions being regenerative? Are they creating the conditions for life to thrive?

Dolores Semeraro:

It's true. And I mean, I'm super conscious of the time, and I think just continue this conversation, absolutely loving it. And it's really hard for me to having to wrap it up now, but I I've been taking plenty of notes for from this, from this conversation we've covered, we've talked about, you know, the real pillar of everything, being curiosity. We've touched upon how working in silos towards, you know, and as opposed to working as a network, and how to enhance that network, we've looked into how we have internalized stereotypes, so to speak, and and how as a society, we we are trying to we have been. Trying to validate the the efficacy, efficacy and the validity, per se, of the of the tourism industry, how in, how we've moved from explorers to consumers and and that, and what that came with, with the responsibility lying in the businesses of the tourism industry, and then we looked into the technology and how technology enhances AND or OR alters the relationship between humans and nature and their progress in society as as in relation to tourism, And what is the mindset of the tourism professionals that that really should, what, what are the, what are the if we, if we are to map a mindset, what are the points?

Anna Pollock:

It's such a big topic. And, you know, I sometimes think I ramble too much. But, you know, hopefully I've been succinct. I think if I had a a conclusion or yes, yeah, I think if there's one thing I think we need to focus on in the future is is going back to the essence of of travel. It was always about going from from one place to another. And partly because of the novelty of going to another place, every other place was different, it's getting back to that. And therefore each place, people in a place, getting back to that sense of community, which is, you know, we talk about communities again. It's just another word, but it means that we have a, we share, a shared an idea of who we are and who we want to become. So bringing people together in that community to to express their story of their place, and then start to take responsibility for its health, because that's the big objective, no health, no life. Alright, so how do we? How do we, we take responsibility for that, and in that process, how then can we offer, now and in the future a way of experience in who we are us this place, in a way that inspires and educates the visitor, but also maintains the vitality and Thrive ability of of who we are. So there's a management aspect built into that. So it's a sharing of a place that that has now become truly unique. It's not that's not just an overused adjective, it is unique, and it's expressed because all the participants in that community are digging deep into what makes them who they are. That would you know if we start doing that and we stop talking about these technical terms like destination management and blah, blah, blah, it it's about people coming together and saying who we are, who who we wish to become, and what do we wish to share with others in a loving, caring way. That is about it, as far as I'm concerned, very simply

Dolores Semeraro:

brilliant. Thank you so much, and all the best.

Anna Pollock:

Thank you for having me. It's been wonderful talk.

Dolores Semeraro:

Thank you.