Virtuoso CEO and Chairman Matthew Upchurch is encouraging the industry to flip from using the phrase ‘over tourism’ to ‘destination stewardship’, which the World Travel & Tourism Council has been referring to the edgy topic for the past four years.
“Let’s get rid of the world over tourism and lets talk about destination stewardship,” Upchurch encouraged.
“Destination stewardship starts with what a destination wants from a self determination perspective, then its our responsibility as organisations and travellers to respect that self determination.”
Speaking to media, including LATTE, during the week-long conference in Las Vegas, Upchurch highlighted the downsizing of participants at this year’s Virtuoso Travel Week.“We had 6,300 people here in 2019. That was the biggest Virtuoso Travel Week ever. We’re at 4,800 now.”“But the difference between 2019 and now is that in 2019 we were maybe, at an educated guess that I’m pretty sure is close, we probably did 15 other meetings. This year, we’re doing over 70 meetings and in 2026, it’ll be 90.”
“We’re starting to create this ecosystem around the ability that events are not a singular event now.”
Further, Upchurch said the Virtuoso Events app is collating data from other events such as Symposium and the numerous Forums held around the world. That data “gives us an opportunity to build something that is more strategic and thoughtful moving forward.”
Upchurch also touched briefly on the wave of change that Independent Contractors (ICs) are creating for the industry, and Virtuoso. The same topic itself was raised by Matthew Londregan, Virtuoso’s Senior Vice President, Global Operations, and exclusively foreshadowed by LATTE.“We’re in the process of modernising our entire member governance structure that we’ve been working on,” Upchurch said of ICs.“Independent Contractor sounds like somebody whose going to come fix your pipes,” he quipped.“We shouldn’t actually call them independent contractors. It’s an entrepreneurial revolution.“We’re horrible in this industry around names, right? I hate being called distribution. I feel like I’m delivering a sack of potatoes, that sort of thing.”“It’s really entrepreneurial because that model attracted professionals who would never have been a traditional travel agent because they own their own businesses. They’re their own bosses. They can do their own thing.”
“The IC revolution is spreading fast, because it’s not an IC revolution, its an entrepreneurial revolution.”
“I’m loving the fact that we are creating a new language and a framework that basically allows private sector, public sector. At WTTC, one of the things I championed there was if the WTTC didn’t engage small, medium sized businesses (SMEs) – it’s great to have big global governance, but if we don’t – we have to engage SMEs, be able to build a narrative on what responsible destination stewardship is, and not vilify everything with a broad stroke.”
Meanwhile, Upchurch says it gets “a little frustrating” when he sees how much travel and tourism is “taken for granted”.Travel & Tourism is “the largest service industry in the world, employing almost 380 million across the globe. It’s 10% of the world’s GDP.”“One of the problems with tourism is it’s sometimes a convenient political topic.”“That’s why we need the voices of the people that are not just viewed as multinational corporations who have an interest, but actually the local companies that create the jobs and maintain the culture.”
