It’s Time to Rethink Travel’s Global Leadership — Starting With WTTC
Photo Credit: The next decade of travel won't look like the last. Adobe / Andrew Mayovskyy
Skift Take
Forced by the pandemic, the travel industry is at an inflection point. After a decade-long bender of growth, it's facing multiple crises and an uncertain future. Can the organization that's tasked with representing the global commercial travel industry adapt to the new challenge?
The Covid-19 pandemic caught much of the travel industry on the backfoot. As it mercilessly unfolds through 2020, it is shining a bright light on the existing strengths and weaknesses across the travel industry — many of which existed long before the pandemic profoundly changed our lives.
Nowhere has this been more clear than with the World Travel and Tourism Council. The non-profit membership organization created three decades ago has certainly fought to regain traveler confidence through past crises, including health scares.
But it’s fair to say that Covid-19 has eclipsed events like SARS and 9/11 by several orders of magnitude. At a generationally defining moment — when the travel industry needs one cohesive voice more than ever before — the organization's attempt at a response has left some to wonder if it is capable of doing anything other than cheerleading for the travel industry's growth, particularly mass tourism, and whether it is out of touch with a new generati
