Chris:
When we think of tourism, we tend to think about going to a place, spending money, having a good time and turning around and going back to where you’re from. But tourism is much more than that. And what we’re going to talk about on today’s episode is what it means to the community and how it could be transformational and how it can really help and through such a difficult time in the pandemic, we’re going to talk about that as well. How tourism really helped keep counties and communities going and what it has done for those communities. And we’ll continue to do in the future. Join me.
Chris:
Welcome back to another episode of the Get Over It! Podcast. I am your host, Dr. Christopher Fasano. During this pandemic, one of the most hit and really, really devastated industries was tourism. And today our guest can speak to this perfectly. We’re going to talk to him about that and a bunch more. Before we get into the interview, just to reminder, to make sure you subscribe to the podcast if you’re enjoying the episodes. The best way to do it is on your favorite pod player, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Amazon iHeartRadio, they’re all there. Wherever you find a podcast, you can find the Get Over It! Podcast. Thank you for coming back with us. Today our guest is Bob Provost. Bob is the CEO and president of the New York State Tourism Industry Association. I hope I got that right. Welcome to the show, Bob.
Bob:
Thank you. Glad to be here.
Chris:
So it’s fascinating. I was talking to Bob before the show, we were just going over a little bit of what we were talking about and he was telling me some interesting stories. So before we get into where you are now, what I prefaced there just in the quick beginning with COVID, I mean, tourism, you can tell it better than anybody. I want to understand a little about yourself. We just really met. And Bob, we’re recording this in Albany, New York at Overit Media which is on New Scotland Avenue in Albany. And Bob was telling me that… So we’re in a converted church. The principal and owner Dan redid this church to make this beautiful place. And Bob was telling me that he grew up right around the corner, right? And came to church here when it was a church. So tell me a little about your background and where you grew up and about yourself.
Bob:
Yeah. I made first communion and confirmation here.
Chris:
That’s so wild.
Bob:
My sister had her wedding here. So yeah, this takes me back quite a bit, especially since when I walked in the front door, the former altar is your reception desk. So I wasn’t sure if I should [inaudible 00:02:21].
Chris:
That’s funny.
Bob:
But I took an interesting path to get involved in tourism. I kind of backed into the industry. My career actually I spent 30 years with the Hearst Corporation. I was chief marketing officer here in Albany and led the innovations task force that worked nationally with the newspaper division and retired from there in 2005 and took a position noncompeting market in New Jersey with Advanced Media, again, as chief marketing officer for their New Jersey properties.
Chris:
But you’re a New Yorker born?
Bob:
New Yorker born. I was actually born in Long Island, but spent most of my youth here in Albany, New York. And when I took the job in New Jersey, I never left, we have a small rural property in Northern Rensselaer County and I commuted 375 miles round trip going down Mondays, coming back on Fridays. But when I say I took a circuitous route kind of backed into it, one of my roles in terms of leading innovation was beyond technology. I mean, I was working with the internet in 1991 when internet penetration was below 2%, but cultural innovation and innovation and practice was another big piece of what I led and getting the media companies involved in Hearst and economic development was something we led here in Albany. And we lead from the middle of the room as a catalyst. We identified things, we convened the discussion. We couldn’t be news makers. The newsroom was not involved in this initiative, it was the business side.
Bob:
And essentially we tried to help the community steer a better path for economic as well as quality of life improvement. And that’s where I first began to discover the potential of tourism. And I served for many years through several different term limit sessions as a board member for the Albany County Convention And Visitors Bureau is involved in the founding of a sports foundation, the local organizing committees to bring in NCAAs. I did the research that actually advocated that we do have a civic center in Albany and that’d be located downtown that led to what is now the Times Union Center.
Chris:
Before you keep going, interesting, you mentioned community-driven, right? And when you think of tourism, a lot of people think of I’m going to visit a place that I’m not from, it’s not my community and I want to go there, I’m going to have a good time and then I’m going to leave. And we talked about this a little bit before the show, and you just said a lot of this interest in tourism and driving it comes from the community. It’s community driven. So talk a little bit about that because I feel like when I’m talking about, it makes a lot of sense, but it’s not really the first thing on your mind.
Bob:
Right. It’s counterintuitive to I think that tourism serves the resident.
Chris:
Correct.
Bob:
But ultimately in the mission statement for our organization which we migrated to when I got involved in 2018 is that we advance economic growth, job creation, community revitalization, small business success, quality of life and pride of place. By realizing the potential of the tourism industry and facilitating the success of our members.
Chris:
I see.
Bob:
Now and I’m pleased to say that at least one national tourism organization has adopted a version of that as their mission.
Chris:
Okay.
Bob:
Because it really articulates the end goal, tourism is not a goal. Tourism is a means to an end. If you look at tourism in the state of New York in 2019, before the pandemic, it had grown to become the third largest industry in the state of New York. It was a huge success story, and it will be again. It continues to be in many local communities, but spending was about $72 billion, direct spending, economic impact about 115 billion. It drove employment for 960,000 New York state residents with a payroll income distribution of about 39 and a half billion dollars. When you think about it, upstate tourism was either number one or number two as an industry in the upstate communities with agriculture. You get into New York City, it’s finance, of course.
Chris:
Right. Right. Of course.
Bob:
But-
Chris:
Right. I mean, that’s a hard thing to surpass, right? Yeah.
Bob:
I laugh and I’ll maybe illustrate my generation when I say we’re the Rodney Dangerfield of the business world.
Chris:
I know Rodney Dangerfield.
Bob:
We get no respect.
Chris:
We get no respect. Yeah.
Bob:
People think tourism, they think fun and games. They don’t see it as big business. They don’t see it as serious business, but in 2019, the spending from tourism drove $9 billion in state and local tax revenues.
Chris:
Wow.
Bob:
And if tourism hadn’t been doing that and the state needed to raise that money, it would have been another 1200 or more dollars per household in the state of New York.
Chris:
[inaudible 00:07:50]. So really going into the pandemic, tourism had one of the strongest efforts which could have, I imagine possibly helped, I don’t know, going into such a devastating time financially for the state. I imagine there was a lot of other things and I’m sure there was pulling from places, but it was really peak and then-
Bob:
It was peak. Unfortunately during the pandemic year travel spending declined 54% in the state of New York. The tax revenues declined 45%. 334,000 hospitality workers, people involved in tourism lost their jobs. 32% unemployment, the most heavily impacted industry by far. And I really want to express my support for the folks in New York City because they took the brunt of that loss. The closure of international borders and travel and air travel being suspended to a huge degree, impacted them way disproportionately. And in fact, during the COVID year, the roads less traveled of upstate New York were discovered.
Chris:
Right. Correct.
Bob:
And many communities in upstate New York actually had not only healthy years, but some of them had their best years. And if you look back on COVID, there’s no way anybody would say, well, if I had to do over again, yeah, let’s have a COVID. We lost people but if you look at that year and say what did we derive from this year that we can use to shape a better future? It’s the fact that millions of people had their attention deflected from out-of-state destinations or foreign destinations, vineyards in France or California-
Chris:
Right. They were kind of forced to look around them, around here.
Bob:
And particularly the New York Metro area, New Jersey, Long Island, New York City, they didn’t want to get involved in having to quarantine. They said, well, maybe I should travel in state, where do I want to go? And suddenly they discovered New York’s vineyards. They discovered our ski areas. They discovered the outdoor trails. And what happened is a huge number of people discovered a New York they didn’t know existed.
Chris:
Yeah, it was in this time of sort of peril when you’re forced to, and you’re in this struggle, there’s this reversion to being human. Like old school human, evolutionarily human and that is getting outdoors, a refocus on what’s around, let me get out in the earth. Let me get out in the air. Let me go out on a ski. And that’s exactly, I know, because when I was forced in isolation and quarantine, I used to ski, we don’t anymore. And then I said you know what, let’s get out there. And I couldn’t get anything. Everything was booked. There were tickets out. You couldn’t get on it. You had to wait and it was incredible. So there were aspects of it and I know people from New York City that lived there, that were all coming up here.
Chris:
If you were trying to find a vacation rental that you want it to just get away and maybe go just up, nothing was available. So while it seemed like tourism when you’re reading and flying and all this stuff was shut down, it seemed very active to me being upstate because people were looking and like you said, if you have to find silver linings in this situation for New York, that’s got to be one of them is that the eyes were on places that might not have been on them before.
Bob:
Right. And the real benefit is to not just take that as a passing.
Chris:
Right. How do you keep that going, right?
Bob:
But how do we build a better future for the entire state? I have no doubt that once and we’re well into a situation where New York City is able to fully relaunch and reassert itself, that it will again be the world’s number one destination city. No doubt about that.
Chris:
You know that 100%.
Bob:
Yeah, absolutely.
Chris:
Yeah.
Bob:
For all the right reasons. I mean, arts, Broadway, museums, restaurants, it’s such a phenomenal place to visit as well as live. But for upstate New York, we need to capitalize on the situation. We need to seize this moment, because concurrent with us, what’s the opening of the Empire State Trail, 750 miles of contiguous canal and waterway with bike paths. And visitor services along the way. It’s the largest contiguous network of trails in the United States. And suddenly it’s ours. They knitted together all the old towpath routes and things of the Erie Canal, the Champlain Canal and so on. So we now have a future if we can grasp it, seize it, to be the place for bikers and hikers, peddlers and paddlers, people who want to kayak or canoe, take their bike, or for that matter, they can drive it.
Chris:
They can drive it.
Bob:
Now we can put bikes on trains, you can get a bike, get on a train, come upstate, get off at one train station, get on the path, pedal for several days, kind of a land cruise.
Chris:
Yeah, like a land cruise. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Bob:
And then get back on the train at another station and come back. It’s fabulous. And this is in addition to the incredible network of trails and the Adirondacks and the Catskills, the Finger Lakes in Western New York that already existed managed by the department of environmental conservation in the New York State Parks and Recreation which incidentally New York State Parks had a record year in the pandemic-
Chris:
I’m sure they did.
Bob:
…with the campgrounds.
Chris:
I’m sure they did.
Bob:
They did just exemplary work. And I have to salute the executives of the tourism industry, Don Bennett, who heads the Campgrounds of New York, a phenomenal job of getting the state to clearly articulate what were the conditions of reopening and the standards of hygiene and safety that needed to be maintained in order for those campgrounds to operate successfully. Scott Brandi from the ski New York, the Ski Areas, very few people know that New York has more ski areas than any other state.
Chris:
I just learned that.
Bob:
Yes, and Scott worked tirelessly to get the state to relax the constraints and enable the slopes to operate I believe it’s 75% capacity and their facilities indoors to operate at 50%. And I’m sure that saved a lot of people’s businesses. It’s not that people didn’t have hardship, I don’t want to diminish what they went through, but-
Chris:
But it could have been. Yeah.
Bob:
Mark Dorr who leads the New York State Hospitality & Tourism Association which represents the bulk of the hotels in the state of New York also worked tirelessly to be sure that the standards for the hotels were clearly articulated. Restaurant Association is still working hard because those are probably the most heavily impacted folks of any individual category. And it’s just a great example of heroic work being done at the local level and individual businesses, individual market, destination marketers, but also here in the Capitol with people trying to look after the needs and priorities of their constituents.
Chris:
So just for some context, talk to us a little about what the association does. In other words, who are its members? Who are you serving? In other words, some people might think that it’s me as a traveler, as a tourist, but that’s not what it is. So give us a little context about what it does.
Bob:
We’re an industry association. So about a third of our members are the destination marketers who represent communities, mainly counties. Each county in the state of New York has to designate a tourism promotion agent that represents the county and does their county tourism promotion and receives the matching funds from the state of New York. Those folks are [inaudible 00:16:49].
Chris:
And that’s a requirement by New York state?
Bob:
That’s statutorily required if they want matching funds.
Chris:
Okay. If they want. So they don’t go through that, then they’re on their own. They have to self-fund everything, so why wouldn’t they do that?
Bob:
Yeah, yeah. And I don’t believe there’s a county in the state-
Chris:
Who would not do that. Right.
Bob:
Some counties share representation with a single TPA, but we have a monthly call for all of them. During COVID, and we’ve had never had such a thing. We met quarterly but it was actually March the 18th. We had our first statewide virtual call with all the TPIs, we met weekly right through the reopening with, I love New York participating robustly to provide their insight, guidance, answer questions, Ross Levi from I Love New York just stepped up in an incredible way. And then after we reopened and we were getting into the summer months, we moved to bi-weekly and we now continue to meet monthly.
Chris:
Okay. So what is being provided to them if I’m in this, right? So what is this level of support and what am I receiving?
Bob:
Well, it goes beyond obviously communications, networking, sharing information, and best practice, but let me tell you about the rest of the membership because that’s the third. Another third of our members are the actual destination assets whether that’s a museum or a casino or resort, Legoland is an example, the baseball hall of fame, the wild center in the Adirondacks, casinos, the Akwesasne Casino, these are all members of ours. And the final third are what we refer to as industry partners. Those people like Overit, who work with our members to facilitate their success.
Chris:
I see. Okay.
Bob:
All right.
Chris:
All right. So anyone, they’re assisting in the effort, if you will?
Bob:
Exactly. And in some cases, for instance, with some of those partners, we put together co-op programs, so that our members can pull their expenditures and get lower rates and bigger deals. We facilitate marketing in certain types of media. We facilitate travel show, participation across the Northeast in Massachusetts, Connecticut, New York state, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Ohio, as well as in Canada when we are allowed to stay.
Chris:
So working with other states not just being New York.
Bob:
Well, we work with our members to represent them in those other states.
Chris:
I see. Okay.
Bob:
If there’s a AAA show in Columbus, Ohio, or Hershey, Pennsylvania, and so on. The other thing, for instance, right now, we have incredibly robust participation in an initiative we’re doing with Uber Marketing and Rove. It’s being led by Rove Marketing out of Toronto, Canada who are a longstanding member. And it has to do with tracking cell phone numbers, people who give permission for their cell phone location to be tracked. We are now tracking cell phones throughout the state through 52 counties and over 600 points of interest to better understand the traveler’s journey. Where do they go? How much time do they spend? We don’t know anything about any one individual.
Chris:
Right. It’s not necessarily about what I’m doing, it’s just more about picking up patterns and understanding-
Bob:
It’s the collective data.
Chris:
Right. Yeah.
Bob:
There’s no invasion of privacy.
Chris:
Collective data is something that I am so interested in. My thing is data and collective data is really where things are moving. So for example, we work with a lot of pest control companies. We market for them. So you market for one up here and one down in Florida, one down in Georgia, one in North Carolina. And then what happens is you now take one and now you’ve got 12. So I take all of the data from the 12, I put it together. That gives me now, it’s not just a perspective of this pest control company, but it gives me a perspective of the industry. Now I can start to see, are there higher level trends in that vertical rather than just looking at the specific business, because the more data you have, the better you are, right? And so if you can start to aggregate and pool, patterns start to appear where they might not normally on one level.
Bob:
Well, I can tell when we launched this in April, the initial download was 3 billion lines of data and kudos to the folks at Rove and James Sauter and his team. All of our members now have an easily navigated dashboard that enables them to track the points of interest or their county or the region that they deal with and see who’s visiting where, how much time they spend, where they go when they leave, where they came from before they got here, the only information that it gets close to home for these cell phone users is that we are made aware of their common daytime and nighttime zip code.
Chris:
Okay. We get a sense for where they reside, if you will?
Bob:
Essentially, the definition of a traveler is 50 miles. You’ve traveled 50 miles or more. And anything that’s long enough to consider-
Chris:
That’s the criteria.
Bob:
It’s one of them, but basically-
Chris:
Because you don’t know their actual hard address.
Bob:
No.
Chris:
Correct.
Bob:
Not at all.
Chris:
Because you [inaudible 00:22:17]. All is you know is that there’s a number, it’s moving.
Bob:
Yeah.
Chris:
Right.
Bob:
Exactly. And we don’t even know the number.
Chris:
Right. The mobile ID, whatever, they call it.
Bob:
Yes, yes.
Chris:
Right, the ID. Yeah. Right.
Bob:
So in any case that information enables us to better strategize possible itineraries that would appeal to certain groups of people, types of people. And there’s another company that’s a member called Epsilon that also works in credit card data in the same way. Again, you don’t know anybody’s individual patterns, but you can look at the collective data. I’ve been working in database marketing since 1992 with Hearst.
Chris:
It’s big spreadsheets.
Bob:
Oh, well I was part of a collective that met every year in Snowmass, Colorado for an event called the Aztec Roundtable. But it was applied segmentation technology. And beginning to tap into this digital world that was just emerging, how do you deal with tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, or even millions of people and finesse the ability to treat them individually. And that’s part of where tourism has been going and where the future lies, enable to anticipate needs, to look at behavior and say, I can improve their experience based on what I’m learning, but all in all, I’m going to come back to the fact that the overall goal is to improve your community.
Chris:
Correct.
Bob:
And I’m going to be perhaps a little crude or undiplomatic and say one perspective on tourism, it’s the importation of money.
Chris:
The importation of money.
Bob:
You import money. People come in, they leave their money behind. They go home, they place very little burden on your infrastructure. But they leave money behind, particularly international travelers come from further away, they stay longer and they spend more per day.
Chris:
Spend more money.
Bob:
And so the goal is to bring those revenues into our communities.
Chris:
This might be getting off a little bit, but there’s no data then on… There’s a mismatch in the data. So if you have my mobile ID and you see that I traveled 75 miles and I went to this destination, the destination is of tourist interest. It’s some sort of tourist spot, wherever, let’s call it, I went place X. How do you match the amount of money I spent linked to that mobile ID? Are you capable of doing that as of yet?
Bob:
That’s why we were looking at the credit card data.
Chris:
I see. Okay. So they can sort of match the two, a phone number to a record?
Bob:
Exactly. Looking at somebody, for instance, who may be traveled 75 miles either in state or from, let’s say, Pennsylvania or Massachusetts to go to a winery and do they also stay at a hotel.
Chris:
Right.
Bob:
And do they stay overnight? Do they then also go to a restaurant? So and that’s-
Chris:
So you can start to put together on an average a 75 mile journey yields 1.4 hotel stays and you can start to do things like that.
Bob:
Exactly. The other thing to note to better understand tourism is based on the economic models. And I’m going to give approximate percentages, forgive me if I don’t have them memorized. But out of the average dollar spent locally by a tourist, not the money they spent to get to your community.
Chris:
Okay. So they’re here now.
Bob:
But the dollar spent locally, 29 cents goes to their lodging.
Chris:
Okay.
Bob:
21 or 22 or 23 cents goes for food, restaurants or purchasing food.
Chris:
Almost half.
Bob:
Yeah. And then you have a significant amount of money that’s spent on local transportation and buying gasoline or Uber or taxis or-
Chris:
Right. A bus or a public or something like that.
Bob:
Exactly. There’s money spent on retail. And then ultimately about 10 or 11 cents out of that dollar is spent on entertainment or tickets.
Chris:
What you’re actually doing.
Bob:
Exactly.
Chris:
The goal of it.
Bob:
Well that might be a sidebar. It could be that [crosstalk 00:26:34].
Chris:
Right. We don’t know what the primary was.
Bob:
Exactly, so for instance, when we work with a museum, let’s face it, the Corning Museum of Glass, the Strong Museum of Play, the Wild Center, the Baseball Hall of Fame, these are destination museums.
Chris:
Correct.
Bob:
And people travel to those communities in many cases specifically because they want to go to the museum.
Chris:
Correct.
Bob:
So if a museum can track where do my visitors come from. And how long are they staying? They can do a little, just give us your zip code on your way in the door, but if you can answer these questions, we’ll give you a 50% off to return tomorrow, kind of thing.
Chris:
Right. But ultimately the community around the museum has an interest in understanding how much I spend when I go, or what am I doing, right?
Bob:
Exactly. And it also means something to the museum because, let’s face it, if you think of that economic model, the museum may only be getting 11 cents out of the dollar.
Chris:
Right. Right.
Bob:
But they’re the reason-
Chris:
Right, they’re the minority, but there’s… Right, exactly.
Bob:
They’re driving the 29 cents on lodging, the 23 cents on food, the retail spending as people are going to shop at boutiques and craft stores and local distilleries and wineries. If they’re the reason to be there, they’re driving a tremendous amount of economic growth. And they need to be able to document and articulate that when they [crosstalk 00:28:04].
Chris:
Correct. Hey, without me, right, you’re not going to that restaurant. You’re not going to this café.
Bob:
Exactly.
Chris:
Right, right.
Bob:
When they look for support from local government, from a not-for-profit foundation-
Chris:
Right, it’s not just about their revenue directly.
Bob:
Exactly.
Chris:
Right.
Bob:
It’s what they do to benefit the community around them.
Chris:
And so you’re amassing all of this data and it’s provided to the members, how does that work? In other words, you see this project you’re talking about-
Bob:
We work with them more on, well, the data belongs to the members who bought in. So 52 counties have signed in out of 62. So that’s pretty good.
Chris:
So the overwhelming majority, yes.
Bob:
Yes. And when I talk about museums, I should also do a shout-out to Erica Sanger who’s the head of the Museum Association in New York and the work she did during COVID. But quite frankly I admire the work she’s done before and since. And she just does a spectacular job with that organization. And we work closely with her. The situation that we need to develop and appreciate is how to consistently give them more reasons to come and more reasons to come back and marketing to a repeat customer, you want to spend a certain amount of money acquiring, and you want to spend a certain amount of money retaining.
Chris:
Correct. Right. Spend more getting them on the first time. Yeah.
Bob:
Developing a relationship is the secret sauce that we want to talk to. And another program I should mention, in addition to that, we call it the mobile intelligence dashboard was simply a cause campaign that we launched in May of this year. And that campaign is called Roam The Empire. And the idea here was to encourage the people of New York who did travel in state in 2020 because they were limited, because in many cases, they found things-
Chris:
Right. They were just looking to go somewhere around there, right?
Bob:
They had great experiences and we wanted to reinforce that. But we also wanted to reinforce the fact that if you took your money out of state when the travel restrictions were lifted, that you actually could be considered to potentially do harm whereas you could do good while doing well.
Bob:
You can have a great world-class vacation in New York state any year, but this is the year we needed to put 300,000 people back to work. This is the year we needed to support businesses that were still struggling.
Chris:
Right. So it’s more than just your vacation here. Right?
Bob:
So the whole theme this year was travel safely and responsibly and have a great vacation, but while you’re at it, help us restore vitality to our communities. And so we launched Roam The Empire in the early May. Tremendous pro bono work done by one of our partners, a competitor of yours. Do you like me to mention them?
Chris:
Sure.
Bob:
Mower. Mary Hendrin from Mower was just phenomenal in working with her team and putting this together and working together with Rachel Markel from our staff. A young lady by the name of Elena Gonzales work with us to launch a suite of social media products. I got a report on our Roam The Empire Facebook page last week, 23,000 visitors.
Chris:
So very engaged.
Bob:
Very engaged and the whole purpose of the campaign is to simply give people more reasons to roam. Did you know here’s another place to look.
Chris:
Right. It’s a great name by the way, Roam The Empire. It’s great.
Bob:
Well, it kind of was evocative of Star Wars. At the same time with the words roam and empire in the same phrase, some people took it in that manner. I wanted to say Roam The Empire state because I wanted to be a little more literal, but regardless, it’s been embraced. We have almost 100 different markets and destinations that have signed on and are using it and are including that in their tag. Hey, we just opened three new outdoor trails, more reasons to Roam The Empire.
Chris:
And where do I go to look at this?
Bob:
Just Facebook, Roam The Empire. It’s a page. Instagram, same thing. If you’re a business, and this is the thing with this campaign, the folks at Mower did this with absolutely no fees associated. There was never an exchange of checks for anything. Advanced Media donated, I think, close to $25,000 in visibility. The Hearst Corporation donated I think close to 15,000. The folks at the New York State Press Service donated ads in 300 newspapers across New York state twice to get this launched and get the word out. And there hasn’t been one paid media dollar spent to build it, but it’s something we launched in May.
Bob:
We had traffic of about 500 the first week. By mid June, we were at 5,000. By mid July, we were at 10. And it just continues to escalate.
Chris:
Yeah, it’s feed forward, yep.
Bob:
And we get more organizations. If you go to our website, which is N-Y-S-T-I-A.org, nystia.org, you can click on the link right on the homepage, learn more about Roam The Empire and it explains what it is. At the bottom of the page, you can register to participate, no charge. You don’t need to be a member. Any restaurant, any museum, and there’s a list of the current participants there. But you can download right from that page. The logos, digital ads, posters, window clings, a complete digital toolkit available on that page for people to participate. And whereas we had thought that this, and I hate to use the word hope, but we kind of were hoping that the pandemic conditions would ease before the end of the year. And this would be a short-term program with the COVID variants, Delta, and otherwise raising.
Bob:
We’re actually seeing a groundswell of increased participation. And we’re looking at how can we better use this to support the state’s I Love New York campaign because that is the tourism brand for the state. We want to feed that engine. That’s the evergreen brand.
Chris:
Yes. I grew up in New York, I know that.
Bob:
And Roam The Empire was intended to support that so.
Chris:
And we’re coming up on one of my most favorite times to travel around the state, and that is fall. I mean, everybody knows that about coming up to New York. And I imagine it’s poised to position for a great fall.
Bob:
I haven’t said enough about the destination marketers in this state. And nothing I can say could diminish the heroism of the healthcare workers. I mentioned the heads of the various associations, but in every given market and at every major institution, there was heroic efforts and particularly on the part of the tourism promotion agencies and the DMOs and the convention and visitors bureau. So there’s a lot of acronyms, but they all essentially perform the same function. The very first week of New York Pass, they pivoted in a matter of hours to refocus their social media, their promotion, their digital presence on the resident instead of the traveler. Okay. We don’t have travelers, but our restaurants need to survive. Our businesses on Main Street need to survive. And across the state, what came out of those early discussions was a concerted effort to encourage takeout, delivery, buy now or spend now, shop later.
Chris:
Right, like gift card type things. Right.
Bob:
Exactly. And literally, I have an example from that first week of New York Pass, because I got a newsletter from the Cortland Visitor Bureau and that’s what they were already doing. They had pivoted and they created entirely new websites that were basically only the restaurants that did food service take out. Only curbside, only delivery. And when we did the Tourism Excellence Awards in May of this year looking back on 2020, we created a whole new COVID category for people who just did incredible things during that period of time. Duchess County, the folks there working with Malane Rottkamp who’s the president and CEO did a fabulous job of not just supporting the local restaurants and businesses, but also engaging in the Q&A with the community about health and protocols associated with safety.
Bob:
The leadership award went to the leader of the Sullivan Catskills Visitors Association and Roberta just did some incredible things, including a very inspiring campaign called The Dove. And now that’s the home of the Woodstock. And they brought that identity, the Dove and peace, tranquility calm, and they launched a whole campaign called Catskill Confidence about their ability to provide a safe and responsible destination for travelers and residents.
Chris:
Interesting.
Bob:
So there’s terrific work-out and Ontario county, Valerie Knoblauch launched an entire sanitation warehouse of cleaning supplies, face masks, gloves, you name it for local businesses to be sure-
Chris:
To make sure that they were equipped.
Bob:
Buying in bulk and then reselling it to them to keep the supply and it became a major asset to the county in an area they never expected a visitor’s bureau to step up.
Chris:
Right. Exactly.
Bob:
So.
Chris:
One of the things that goes along with this idea of community and I’ve just checked the time, we have about eight minutes, and I want to make sure we talk about it because I found it to be fascinating. It says we have transformational tourism. You mentioned this to me. And something I never thought about, again, going along the lines of looking at tourism shortsighted as the visitor who goes and spends the money and leaves. Can you explain a little bit about this concept, what it means and give a little bit about that?
Bob:
Sure. Yeah, and it harks back to my work at Hearst and innovation. At Hearst, before the days of corporate and social responsibility, that phrase hadn’t been created. In 1988, we launched a program called Doing Good While Doing Well which was the art of aligning our longterm strategic business objectives with community engagement and philanthropy to be a good neighbor, but always in a way that in the longterm made good business sense. I mean, Hearst has a foundation that does donations.
Bob:
This was out of the local business operating units that they’re changed with making the money the foundation gives away, but I said community engagement philanthropy can contribute to your success in that environment as a for-profit organization. So in the area of tourism, if you go back a couple decades or less, in some cases, the major strategic initiative or plan is how do we achieve next year sales objectives? Okay. It’s that simple, but it’s not because in many cases, we’ve found what’s developing over time is the increasing over utilization of resources. Trails that are being abused in the Adirondacks.
Bob:
Overcrowding, if the goal of tourism is to improve quality of life at a place, you can’t damage the community.
Chris:
Right, it can’t just be that you’re coming and spend the money and just leaving it for waste, right.
Bob:
Yeah, or compromising the quality of life in a community. So what developed was the concept of sustainable tourism which I wholeheartedly support as an initiative that you want to adhere to, but I don’t feel it’s adequate. Sustainable tourism says we’re going to maximize our economic effectiveness while doing no harm and adhering to our commitment to quality of life. I think that concept needs to be folded in under the umbrella of having a horizon of planning, a vision for the future that extends far enough out, that you can actually affect change for the better, that transformational tourism is how can I improve my destination?
Bob:
Some of those things will be tangible. The Empire State Trail.
Chris:
Not just financially we’re talking, correct?
Bob:
Right, right. So some of them will be tangible. The Empire State Trail, transformational for most of upstate New York. I mean, it touches over 300 communities, taking an empty former railroad passenger terminal in Chautauqua, turning it into the National Comedy Center. Taking a 600 acre farm that was slated for probable development as high density housing and instead creating the largest Legoland resort in the world.
Chris:
Yeah, the Legoland. Yeah.
Bob:
Now we’re looking at, hopefully by the end of ’22, having the New York State Coastline of Lake Ontario designated a national marine sanctuary.
Chris:
Oh really?
Bob:
Oh yeah, just awesome. And so these are things that are going to drive growth, but at the same time, embracing things like inclusion, diversity, equity, and inclusion, making sure that we work with our community to make it more welcoming. That the people in our community are more culturally aware and comfortable with people of diverse backgrounds, ethnicity, and so on. Bringing more people into the industry as employees and staff. In particular, working with our local youth to bring them, this was a big deal in Newark when I was involved in New Jersey was developing docents and cultural ambassadors among our high school and college students.
Chris:
What about people that might say, that might be resident and say, I don’t know, this is really scared me with COVID. So I don’t know if I want to get into a career or a space that’s so sensitive to something like that. What would you say to a comment like that?
Bob:
Well, I can’t blame people who are going to be hesitant and cautious about that, but there’s two responses I would have. One is there’s going to be a future where personal contact is safe. To a degree, it is already if you’re vaccinated. Yes, you can have a breakthrough infection, but even if you read the articles in the New York Times and the Epidemiologist from Johns Hopkins, that infection doesn’t mean the vaccine is not working because you may be infected, but you’re not sick.
Chris:
Right. Correct.
Bob:
So.
Chris:
which is how we’ve our life up to this point.
Bob:
Exactly.
Chris:
Sick, but okay.
Bob:
Yeah.
Chris:
And not all the time.
Bob:
Yeah, exactly. And the other aspect of it is you’re thinking of tourism as the front desk at the hotel, the wait staff or-
Chris:
Right, I mean that’s the problem.
Bob:
But you see some of the foremost digital marketers in the world, urban planners, community planners. There’s all kinds of jobs in tourism that are not visitor contact generated. They’re the people managing the websites, they’re the people designing the materials and the brochures, articulating the message, developing the strategy. It’s like any other industry.
Chris:
It’s like any other business. Right?
Bob:
Well, you look at Walmart. Yes, you have certain number of people staffing the store, but you’ve got a national supply chain network along with a national headquarters and buyers around the world. It’s a very diverse industry. And when you look at 2020 where we lost 330,000 jobs, most of those jobs lost where housekeeping and wait staffing and people whose function when we didn’t have consumer contact was no longer affordable. But that left us with 630,000 people still employed and many of these people are not in that direct contact world.
Chris:
Right. I think you’re right. I think people think the fault to that thought when you say tourism. They think of the people I’m handing the ticket to, or the person, not necessarily the bigger industry of tourism and all that goes with that.
Bob:
Exactly.
Chris:
Which still went through COVID and was still operating and happening more frequently like any other business.
Bob:
Yeah, and some of the most brilliant work in marketing was done under those extreme circumstances. I want to quickly just go back to those TPAs, in addition to doing the spend now shop later and incentivizing people to do restaurant takeout and support local restaurants, they all put up virtual experiences not just for the visitor who can’t come visit and give them an opportunity to get a look at the things they miss, but we heard from the residents because we promoted to the residents, hey you know what, we’ve got this whole array of things up on your local visitor website.
Bob:
We’ve got jigsaw puzzles for the kids and game books. And we’ve got virtual tours, all kinds of activities. So that people who were isolated in their homes had an opportunity to explore. And the message, I had no idea this was in my backyard.
Chris:
Right, right.
Bob:
And so we created in a way, if you consider it plowing the field and laying down the seed of the staycation initially. There is a good reason-
Chris:
Right. You set something right for going forward.
Bob:
There is a good reason to plan a staycation. But also in the process, we continued to so pride a place in the community. And that’s the big key. There was a health study done relative to tourism at the national level. And what came out of it was the tremendous improvement in mental health and stress reduction that came not necessarily from actually taking the trip, but just contemplating it and planning.
Chris:
Yes. Well, planning calms the brain down. There’s studies done for a long time in neuroscience about the art of planning. We know people always want to plan vacations. They book one, they start planning the next one, or they’re constantly thinking about planning, it’s because when you’re putting order, the planning process is very well, I want to do this, I can do this. It’s you’re creating a procedure and that is very soothing. And it has a very distress, that’s why people like to do that.
Bob:
I taught marketing at Sienna Business School when I was with the Times Union for about a decade. And then when I went to New Jersey, I taught at Rutgers Business School. Ultimately, I spent one year as executive in residence with them working on the culture of the business school which is another story. But ultimately, when I worked with my students, I usually taught the intro to marketing and the capstone course. I had the yin and the yang. I was the first and last professor they saw. And one of the things I used to help them understand planning was the concept of a trip. Articulating first of all, you needed to find a destination. Where are you taking the company? And then you need to say, how do I get them there? Strategic decisions. And then-
Chris:
What’s that journey like? Yeah.
Bob:
Tactically how do I make those strategies play out in the real world? And the students were much quicker to grasp the concept of developing a strategic plan when you put it in something as simple as that, then however, and this is a sidebar, I would say to them, how many of you have a strategic plan for your life? And they would just look at me. And I said, you’re already in college. Do you know where you want to go? Have you defined your career destination? I mean, you can change the goal, but you need to have a plan. And when you think about parenting, I did this with my kids, where do you want to be when you’re 25? And I’d asked them that when they were 10 and how do you get there?
Bob:
And they understood very early I get there by doing well in school now, so that I can get to high school, do well in school and then get to college and get my degree so that I can be a doctor, a lawyer, an astronaut, even if I want to be in the NBA, I got to play NCAAs. So it’s a very useful skill on a very practical learning-
Chris:
It’s about that journey. And the journey doesn’t have to be defined and set in stone.
Bob:
It never should.
Chris:
But it has to be a strategy around a journey in self.
Bob:
I would use that analogy with second graders.
Chris:
Yes. Correct.
Bob:
And how many kids know what they want to be when they grow up and they all know. They can change their mind tomorrow, but the one thing you could get them all to understand in the course of a very brief visit to the classroom is they were in second grade not because their parents forced them to come to school or that the state required them to come to school, but because they needed it to fulfill their dreams.
Chris:
Right. They need it to get to the next place.
Bob:
And once they understood that, teachers shared with me that it changed their whole perspective.
Chris:
It’s true.
Bob:
School wasn’t forced on them anymore. It was a means to an end which is their life.
Chris:
See, so the journey is more than just tourism journey. It has a lot bigger implications in both business and their life.
Bob:
Yeah, exactly.
Chris:
Everything’s a journey. And we talked about in the Get Over It! Podcast is it’s never linear, you’re always going to hit a roadblock. You’re always going to stumble. And the question is, do you have the ability to keep going through that and keep redefining the journey as you go, because you’re going to hit something. And it’s the people that can say, okay, this is not the right street, I got to go here. And I got to keep going. It’s when you continue to try to go through that roadblock over and over and over again, right, and you get yourself frustrated, you get worked up, you lose the confidence, you lose the drive. That’s what you don’t want. You always have to know, I’ve said this before in the show, life is just a rainstorm that eventually little sun will come out. So once you see that sun, you got to make the best of that sun, right, because eventually the clouds are going to come back out and that’s okay, but you got to keep going. You got to keep moving forward.
Bob:
Yeah. There’s two things I would want to add before we close. And that’s that you need to own it. Nobody can make you a failure and nobody can make you a success. Some people are going to help, some people are going to hinder, but it is entirely on you. And the 10 most powerful two letter words in the English language are if it is to be, it is up to me.
Chris:
If it is to be, it is up to me.
Bob:
Exactly. Just that’s the mantra that a young people should have. It’s a mantra that people who do incredible volunteer work have. The second thing is that that plan needs to be dynamic, as you were just saying, but there shouldn’t be a need for abrupt traumatic change. You should embrace evolutionary change. You should be constantly thinking and tuning.
Chris:
Right. Correct. Optimizations.
Bob:
Evolutionary change is adaptation. Revolutionary change is trauma. Think of the images that come to the mind with revolution. I mean, it’s bodies in the street, tragedy but evolution, it’s a constant ongoing process that enables the survival of the fittest.
Chris:
It’s true. The thing I struggle with as a scientist and as someone that really believes in science as a whole is that sometimes the technology, most of the time, technology evolves faster than humans do. And that can because disruption and problems and how we in our brains because our brains are very primitive still. We thrive on emotion first, rationale second. And so when there’s technology that is designed to arouse our emotion and get us emotional and do that, it pulls away from what us humans were supposed to be.
Chris:
We’re only supposed to use emotion for fear and for fun. We were never supposed to live in a constant state of pleasure, a constant state of fear. They were only there to protect and help us thrive. And so technology has come up with ways to help us to pick at our emotion and to exploit that a bit for their own gain. And you have to be able to adapt in this world and pull yourself away from that, center yourself and keep going because you’re much easily distracted off your journey nowadays than you were in the past.
Bob:
Let me give you my organizational culture statement that I embraced when I was leading marketing for major companies. And that is that you need a culture of lifelong learning and constructive change.
Chris:
Constructive change.
Bob:
Yeah, and some cases that change involves deconstruction, but cost-cutting is not a success strategy, it’s a short-term [inaudible 00:55:43].
Chris:
Short-term. Right. Right. Exactly.
Bob:
So constructive change is something that builds a better future and greater success. Along with that, needs to be the ability to learn from mistakes and failure while celebrating success and achievement because too many organizations have a culture of punishing failure rather than learning from it and fail to acknowledge their successes and their achievements. And people want to feel like they’re working for a winning organization. And so long as you walk like a winner, talk like a winner, celebrate and have those, then people say, hey, we’re going places.
Chris:
And I want to be there with them. Right. Bob, this was fun. I mean, there’s so much more we could talk about, but the time is up today. Can you just let some people know once again, if they want to learn more information, where do they go? Both from maybe the business side or just if I’m in New York and I’m looking to travel, where do I go to find more information about tourism?
Bob:
Yeah, well, I want to tell you to go ahead and visit the Roam The Empire Facebook page and have some fun. There’s absolutely no better single omnibus source than ilovenewyork.com.
Chris:
Okay.
Bob:
If you in turn, want to visit a particular part of the state, every county has a tourism site. And every region has a tourism site. And you’ll find it very quickly by searching, but start with ilovenewyork.com because even then you can say, what’s the itinerary I’m interested in? I want to hike. I want to zip line. And they will help you identify the places you can go that you didn’t even know existed.
Chris:
Cool. Great. Great. Thank you. This has been awesome. Thank you so much for this conversation and I really appreciate it. Nice talking with you.
Bob:
Thank you.
Chris:
Thank you.