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[music] [music] Boreda. Bore da, Brav. My grand winning Cardiff. Spring has arrived here in Swansea.
Professor Terry Stevens reimagines tourism's future, emphasizing kindness, sustainability, and community-centric travel post-COVID.
Key Takeaways
- Tourism must evolve from volume-driven growth to a balanced, community-centered approach.
- Kindness and spontaneity are key values for both hosts and visitors in tourism.
- Addressing tourism paradoxes is essential for sustainable development.
- Future travelers should care deeply about environmental and cultural impacts.
- Tourism has the potential to be a powerful force for peace and global connection.
Summary
- Tourism recovered strongly post-COVID, with 1.2 billion international arrivals and $1.9 trillion economic value in 2025.
- The traditional focus on volume and value in tourism needs shifting to a balanced approach prioritizing better places to live and visit.
- Personal background and influences from T.S. Eliot and William Dampier shaped Stevens’ perspective on travel and culture.
- Kindness to strangers and spontaneity are foundational lessons for reimagining tourism.
- Tourism is full of paradoxes, such as the desire for difference versus familiarity and growth versus sustainability.
- Future tourism must prioritize environmental care, community respect, and cultural understanding.
- Tourism can be a power for peace, reconnecting people with place, self, and the world.
- A new manifesto for tourism calls for care about people, environment, and meaningful experiences.
- Some countries, especially smaller ones like Slovenia and Croatia, are leading the way in adopting sustainable tourism models.
- The transformation of tourism requires fresh thinkers and a paradigm shift towards empathy and community focus.
Chapters
- 00:00Introduction and Context of Tourism Post-COVID
- 00:56Tourism Statistics and Economic Impact
- 01:34Shifting the Tourism Paradigm
- 02:16Personal Background and Influences
- 05:21Lessons from Early Career and Kindness
- 06:54Spontaneity and New Approaches to Tourism
- 08:20Tourism Paradoxes and Challenges
- 09:21Future Vision: Care, Peace, and Sustainable Travel
- 10:58Examples of Leading Countries in Sustainable Tourism
- 12:45Closing Thoughts and Call to Action
Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown
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Croeso. Welcome. That's what tourism is about. A welcome. Reimagining the future of tourism. Two weeks ago, my thesis was very clear and very strict and very obvious.
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The last two weeks have shifted the deck of cards considerably. Post COVID, [clears throat] tourism recovered remarkably well, astonishingly well.
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In 2025, tourism attracted 1.2 billion international arrivals and was worth 1.9 trillion US dollars to the global economy.
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At that stage, we were seeing issues like overtourism, concerns about the balance between host and guest, concerns about environmental pressure.
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And we were talking at the beginning of this year about the need to reimagine the future of tourism.
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Holding on to a tenant, which was very simple. Better places to live are better places to visit. Shifting the paradigm from a volume and value in terms of the way we measure tourism into one where we saw a more balanced
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approach. And clearly, tourism will recover. We can be optimistic. You know, tourism is capable of bouncing back despite these extraordinary times and all the existential factors influencing it.
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Now, that's the thesis. That's the message. We need to change. We need to reimagine.
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But, you need to understand where I've come from in order to hopefully convince you that this new approach is necessary.
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I was born in the village of East Coker in Somerset. East Coker, the second of T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets.
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It's a poem, eponymous poem East Coker. The famous line, you all know it, "In my beginning is my end, in my end is my beginning." Now, my father buried T.S. Eliot.
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He was dead at the time, thank goodness. My dad was the village carpenter, which meant he was the village undertaker.
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And he had a letter one day from Valerie Eliot saying would he do the honor of interring the ashes of Thomas Stearns Eliot into the parish church in East Coker.
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And that was remarkable, especially as he didn't have a clue who T.S. Eliot was.
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My father would never take a job that meant he couldn't walk home to lunch.
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So, his world was literally a square mile. He never had a holiday. And here we are, one generation on, and I've had the honor and the privilege and the luck to exercise my human right in traveling.
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And I've worked in 55 countries. I've traveled in more. Eight percent of the population have never flown.
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So, imagine what could happen in a recovery of tourism when the rest of the world is capable of exercising their human rights.
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So, it was Eliot that started my interest in this world of travel and tourism.
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Please read [clears throat] what Eliot says in his definition of culture written in 1945 where he describes the odyssey of the human spirit.
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And it's one of the best definitions of tourism that you'll ever read. The other cultural giant from our village, in addition to Eliot, was a rather flawed buccaneer and pirate, naturalist and explorer called William Dampier.
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In the 17th century, he circumnavigated the world three times. He mapped Australia 100 years before Cook.
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And his definition of tourism, he didn't see it as that, he called it exploration, is another worthwhile quote to remember.
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He said, "An inextinguishable curiosity makes us all natural travelers." So, here am I now interested in what these two people from my own village are saying.
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And I think I want to be part of this world. So, like many of our students around the world, you begin behind a bar.
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You begin helping out at events. You then progress. And the lesson I learned from that progression, which is relevant to us all, is that kindness to strangers is actually really important and can lead to mutually beneficial respect and activity.
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So, my first ever job, I was working in a bar in a pub in Reading earning a crust whilst doing a master's degree.
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And into this pub one night came a guy who looked so down on his uppers, as we say. He looked miserable.
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And I, a barman, a student, gave him a pint of beer. At the end of the evening, he said, "That was a remarkable gesture.
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Here's my business card. You have your first job." And he was a managing director of a company called Ready Mix Concrete that was extracting gravel from the grounds and the geology around Reading to create Thorpe Park, one of the world's most famous theme
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parks. So, there was an entry point. So, remember, be kind. Be kind to strangers. And I think that's a grand statement for the way we should reimagine tourism.
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Kindness to strangers. Be you the visitor or be you the host. The second lesson I learned was spontaneity.
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Be willing to take a risk. Try something new. And in trying something new, you will go somewhere different.
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So, that's my encouragement of this mantra of better places to live, better places to visit. We've got to try something new.
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We have to enter the world of transforming the way we think about tourism. We need help to do it.
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We need help in the way we've got to create fresh thinkers who would take the volume value equation in tourism and twist it round into one which is more empathetic, more balanced, and which puts community at its heart. So,
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therefore, we're at the start, we're on the edge of a transformative era. And transformation means a shift, a paradigm shift.
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We have to move to a place where all of us involved in tourism are thinking about our responsibilities to our citizens, the community, the host community, but that citizenship and those guests that visit us.
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In doing this, we have to address the issue of paradoxes. Tourism is wrapped in paradox.
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You know, we no longer collect air mi- we we collect air miles, not emotions.
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We make decisions based on algorithms, for goodness' sake, not desire. We have an industry that says we need to grow. And politicians, for goodness' sake, are only ever interested in tourism when it causes a problem, or when they can talk about growth.
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We have to change these paradoxes. We want to visit places for difference, yet we all love familiarity.
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We all want the local, yet international brands dominate the tourism industry. So, the transformation only happens if we're prepared to deal with the paradoxes.
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We've got to address them. And in addressing them, have optimism. Tomorrow's travelers, young people in this audience and listening to this, our hope is that you will care. You'll care about the environment.
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You'll care about your impact on the environment when you travel. You'll think more about the communities you'll visit.
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You'll care about those communities, about what they stand for, what their languages are, what their cultures are, what their customs are.
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So, I have hope. Hope that tourism can change. Tourism more than a power for good.
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Tourism a power for peace. That's where we need to take this. So, in taking this argument to a kind of logical conclusion, that's really what we're about in tourism.
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Is reconnecting people with place, with themselves, with understanding our world, creating memories and visions.
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So, that means we need a new manifesto. A manifesto for change. Which says, we care.
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We care about the people we visit. We care about what we're doing to the environment when we travel.
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We care about the experiences that we take out of those journeys. I used to work for Van Morrison.
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And he has a wonderful song where he says, "Didn't I come to give you a sense of wonder?" And I think that's the job of those of us working in the tourism industry.
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Our job is to give our visitors a sense of wonder. And there are countries in the world which are doing this really well.
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So, in all of my 50 odd years working in the industry, there are countries which stand out.
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They're already ahead of the game. They're adopting this manifesto, this new approach to tourism.
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And they're doing it really well. They are, I'll give you some examples and start making your list for your new travel.
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Without a shadow of doubt, Slovenia. Ten years ahead of any other country in the world.
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In terms of the way it imagine
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Interestingly, many of them small countries. Slovenia, Croatia, relatively new countries, only 30 years old post the breakup of Yugoslavia. And within those countries that are doing things well, that's where you find the destinations, the communities that have already adopted this reimagination
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of what tourism could be. And I'll happily tell you where those places are at a later stage.
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But they're out there. People who understand that change was needed and transformation needed. So I leave you with the thought, as all potential travelers, start traveling with a new mindset.
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Start believing that better places to live are better places to visit. And treat the places you're visiting with the respect and balanced approach that those host communities deserve.
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Diokuma. [applause] [applause]
Topics:tourismsustainable tourismpost-COVID recoverycommunityenvironmenttravelTerry StevensTEDxSwanseakindnesstourism paradox
