Mission Statement?
How companies can still participate
in the marketplace of communication
You’ve only got time to read the abstract?
The writing is on the wall: the era of unilateral pronouncements is over for global corporations. On the internet, anyone and everyone can exchange opinions with everyone else about a product or service. Manufacturers and providers are left without much of a say in the matter.
Companies wanting to be understood in this changed sphere of communication need to make a dramatic transition: they must have a mission and understand themselves as the embodiment of one. They are obliged to become projects for the betterment of the world and life within it: projects that fully realise they can only exist as a business model, yet only truly prosper when they connect to the longings and needs of real life.
The future of any company, most especially one in the tourism industry, will lie in the fact that such an enterprise can only survive if it comes across to clients as a useful aid in the fulfilment of their desires and the finding of retreats of longing, and does not merely treat them as a commercial resource.
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Wolfgang Scheppe
A latent awareness appears evident in all quarters: the era of unilateral communications seems to have come to an end for global corporations. The distributed network of the internet has effectively finished off the prospects of classical advertising and other such monopolistic propaganda. Now anyone and everyone can communicate with everyone else about the weals and woes, the advantages and disadvantages of a product or a service. Manufacturers and providers will be left without much of a say in the matter. New forms have to be found to liberate these players from the isolation of the announcer role, turning them into credible participants in a debate no longer able to recognise the difference between transmitter and receiver.
In no other realm does communication’s capacity for achieving resonance and careful, nuanced precision have as much significance as in the field of leisure travel. In most personal biographies, holiday travel – embodying the last remaining refuge of selfhood and self-determination – receives the focus for all hopes of individuality. That makes consumers of this commodity very demanding. Travel becomes a fundamental need, following close behind the basics of food, clothing and shelter. Consumers assign exceptional weight to this need, an aspiration that refuses to be circumvented, and insist upon the right to pursue their happiness therein. By its very nature, this fundamental expectation clashes with the business-like organisation of all travel as a commercial product.
The future of any company, most especially those in the tourism industry, will therefore lie in the fact that such an enterprise can only survive as an economic entity if it comes across to clients as a useful aid in the fulfilment of their desires and does not merely treat them as a commercial resource. This usefulness has admittedly become a complex affair: it encompasses a rapidly evolving culture of needs brought forth by increasingly differentiated individuality, which furthermore insists that the products being offered are conceived so as to embody what is required of them in today’s world. And it is anticipated that the proffered goods be the communication of an idea. Communication is effected through personal contact with an individual of valued competence and expertise.
In the past, profit-making objectives were aimed primarily at financially solvent consumers in generalised target groups and milieus, and all too rarely at the vital interest people have in use values and non-material goods that go towards satisfying needs in an ever more complex context. In the networkings of the future, fewer and fewer people will want to have anything to do with a company that discernibly disregards the concrete lives of individuals. Therein lies a dramatic transition: companies must have a mission and understand themselves as the embodiment of one.
They must become projects for the betterment of the world and life within it: projects that fully realise they can only exist in the form of prospering business models which, in turn, can only prosper in connection with the longings and needs of real life. These will be projects that invent and design a commodity that does not yet exist, one that formulates solutions and which is derived from the changed conditions of this world. Nowhere is all of this of such sensitive importance as in the realm of longing and in the depths of desire, which are linked to the enjoyment of the foreign and the faraway as a departure from everyday life.
This is what the title of this self-understanding by Kuoni is all about: A Better Tomorrow. The name captures the programme of a company of the future and also the central idea and the hopes that accompany each and every kind of holiday and travel.
Glossary
A Better Tomorrow
The essence of all travel is the unfolding of a hope. It is the expectation of a metamorphosis brought about in the traveller through the change of place. For this year’s reflection on travel and holidays in a newspaper format, Kuoni therefore adopted this programmatic name, which incidentally also cites the English distribution title of a famous early martial arts film by John Woo.
Brand Report
Three years ago, Kuoni introduced the Brand Report as the third section of its annual report, which met with considerable resonance. The goal was to give concrete form to its reflections on the essence of the company and to allow the public to share in the process.
détournement
Détournement is a term from the Letterist and Situationist movements in France around the middle of the last century. It refers to an artistic and political practice of alienation and misappropriation. Literally it means “diversion”.
detourist
The neologism “detourist” chosen to head up the poster of 100 quotations has multiple connotations: the idea of reactivating the Grand Tour, the circuitous route of the detour and the Situationist détournement, which involves the alienation of conventional cultural domains. Destinations are best reached by taking the long way on the road less travelled.
Getaway Council
Once a year, Kuoni organises a gathering of self-reflective travellers where participants are able to talk as freely and radically as possible about the present and future of travel. The first Getaway Council convened in 2008 in Zurich with protagonists from the fields of fashion, pop culture and music. In the following year, it moved to London and took up position within the context of contemporary art at the Serpentine Gallery. In 2010, the participants at the meeting in Venice were philosophers, authors and sociologists.
Grand Tour
The Grand Tour was the name given to the journey of education that flourished in the eighteenth century among members of the noble classes who set off to visit sites of ancient and mediaeval art as well the courts of European princes in order to accumulate worldliness, language skills and life experience.
Kuoni
Now a globally active Swiss travel organization, Kuoni was founded in Zurich by Alfred Kuoni back in 1906 and grew to become a pioneer in the culture of travel. Based on its values of Reliability, Passion and Authenticity, Kuoni aims to create “Perfect Moments” for its guests on their travels. In order to continue its great tradition and be thinking today about the travel of tomorrow, Kuoni initiated such projects as the Getaway Council and the Brand Report.
Theodor Fontane
Born in 1819, Fontane was an important German novelist and poet. Infused with subtle irony, his critical stance toward social conventions was informed by poetic realism, a literary movement of which he was one of the leading exponents. He died in 1898 in Berlin.
Venice Protocol
This was the name given to Kuoni’s third Getaway Council in 2010, which was held in the library of the Palazzo Querini Stampalia in Venice. At this gathering, Kuoni joined with European intellectuals to examine the development of travel in a future of transformed social conditions as the globalised economy spreads to every corner of the world. What will the needs be and which kinds of infrastructure will be able to satisfy them? The resulting discourse is recorded in the newspaper A Better Tomorrow and continued on the Detourist website.
The Dream Machine
Where the journey leads: an instruction manual
Wolfgang Scheppe, Thomas Steinfeld
Tourism is an intensively worked field of trend analysts and future researchers, theories and forecasts, manifestos and proclamations. It has been a long time, however, since any objective attempt was made to understand it. But only accurate knowledge can bring forth practical conclusions. Simply hoping and asking will lead nowhere. All such efforts come down to this basic maxim: desire cannot be measured against reality. Yet that has invariably been the case when addressing the notion of the holiday: it has always been held up against the mirror of “soft tourism” and “new tourism”. There are far too many debates focused on explaining tourism only in terms of how it should be and what it should refrain from. But, like all reality, tourism has failed to correspond to the hopes placed upon it; instead, it has developed along its own lines amidst the unforeseen vagaries of history.
A holiday is an unknown quantity. It is something we try to imagine, something far in the distance. That applies to the holidaymaker and the holiday industry alike. Just as tourism harbours a distant hope for its clients, as a sequence planned in advance but with an unknown outcome, so too do its organisers require the skills of anticipation if they are to conduct their business in the way demanded by a rapidly and chaotically changing society and environment. Both beg the question: where will the journey lead?
Instead of clinging to fabrications of beautiful fantasies or free-floating divinations of trends, the discussions initiated by the Venice Protocol chose to deduce all insights into the culture of travelling and its possible developments from the concept itself and its history, against a backdrop of massive change, with all the conflicts society must endure in the acceleration towards a globalised world society.
Tourism has proved to be not only arguably the biggest and most important industry of all worldwide economic activity, but also the business sector that is the most geographically scattered and the most deeply anchored in the psychology of its clients. At the same time, that also makes it the most vulnerable branch and the one most exposed to the developments of history. All manner of natural, cultural, political and sociological events, such as we read in the newspapers – volcanic eruptions, floods, plagues, wars, religious conflicts, diplomatic disputes, popular uprisings, economic fluctuation, changes in employment legislation, the re-emergence of piracy, music (lambada), fashion (tanga bikinis from Brazil), Hollywood films (The Blue Lagoon) and bestsellers (Eat Pray Love) – immediately become, on a daily basis, factors that affect leisure travel and the search for meaning. Travel behaviour is a veritable seismograph that logs the instability of the world and its cultures. In both the short-term ripples and long-term waves, it is a branch of industry that scarcely allows for calculation.
However, since a thorough knowledge of its own commodity is necessary for any business enterprise seeking to define the relation of need and benefit in the individual lives of those with whom it wishes to communicate, the following takes a different tack in attempting a phenomenology of leisure travel. The question that must be asked is this: what contours are taking shape for figures of the future traveller, these abstracts, or figures of thought, of the complications and longings that motivate them?
1.
Three weeks are an eternity. There seems to be an endless, insatiable yearning for a life that breaks the fetters of routine and yet remains within the bounds of the familiar. Everyday life does not come to a stop – nor does it get any easier, which is why the notion of Otherness is enhanced to the point where it actually becomes a fundamental element of self-determination within the sphere of the familiar. With the rising prosperity of newly industrial nations, the number of individuals requiring such compensation will rise too.
2.
There is no way forward: the more we travel and the more forms of transportation are underway, the sooner the collective movement will hit its own impasse. We can see this happening in the waiting rooms, the zones of transit, the traffic jams, the missed connections, the diversions and the lost baggage items. The more precious a holiday becomes, the more such a waste of time and energy represents an intolerable obstacle. Not only those who wish to savour the luxury of travel, but also those who are constrained by the limits of shorter vacation times, are eager to avoid such waste.
3.
The recumbent and the upright: the traditional seaside holiday that panders to the tourist’s every need and allows a generous indulgence in leisure will continue to exist. But there will also be a freer and more luxurious form of travel that will contrast with it, founded on the concrete specificity of a destination or of travel as a way of life. There will be an ever greater distinction between holidays spent within the confines of all-inclusive package treatment and the culture of travel in the broader sense. Indeed, new forms of nomadism and constant mobility are likely to emerge.
4.
Otherness is always elsewhere. Holidays are a distant horizon, its reality is a feeling, something never to be reached. Any traveller arriving at some prescribed destination realises that the longing remains unfulfilled. Advertising cannot meet such expectations. The more travel is internalised as a first-hand experience of the unattainable beyond, the more important the narrative becomes. Every destination deserves its own story. In short: the sense of longing and need are not geared towards an actual physical location, but towards a narrative-driven idea.
5.
Some individuals travel, others do not. The more expensive travel becomes – as it will continue to do if fuel prices rise still further – the more it will reclaim elements of elitism. In recent years, however, travel has been increasingly devalued by its affordability, allowing almost anyone to reach almost any destination for relatively little money. Were it to once again become a more limited commodity, prospective travellers with a higher disposable income would be the ones to invest more planning, energy, effort and expectations into each and every journey.
6.
Never clock out. The world of work is changing. There is a new generation of global commuters for whom the clear separation between business and pleasure, holiday and work, no longer applies. That is ensured not only by today’s gadgets of digital communication but also, and above all, by the expectations of mobility in the labour market of the global village. This creates a clientele for whom the idea of a home from home within the transitory or a sanctuary in the midst of uncertainty will play an increasingly important role. For them, inaccessibility, being out of reach, will become the greatest luxury of all.
7.
The good things lie so close. Holidaymaking and travel are now inherently bound up with a quest for the unspoiled and pristine, for a lost Arcadia. This fundamental yearning to commune with nature clashes violently with an awareness that tourism itself, especially on such a massive scale, can also cause environmental problems. As a result, a new category of tourist is emerging, with a renewed interest in holiday destinations a short and manageable distance away. Nearby places of longing with a historical past are coming to epitomise a newfound form of luxury, while environmentally friendly forms of transport are adding to the appeal of such destinations.
8.
Travelling means getting to know the route. That takes effort. Over the past few decades, travel costs, especially airfares, have plummeted, leading to an increasingly disinterested attitude towards the journey itself. Most holiday destinations have come to be regarded, not only as equally distant from home, but also – another consequence of globalisation – equally similar in their structures. With the de-valuation of the destination comes the re-evaluation of the journey itself as an increasingly important part of the travel experience: to travel is to arrive.
9.
Me, myself, I. While tourists flock from the newly developing economies of the Far East to the sites that have long been central to the traditional tourism of the western world, the future old-world tourist will increasingly have to come to terms with the fact that the hyper-culture of globalisation is making the planet an ever-more homogenous place, full of increasingly interchangeable and indistinguishable places. That western tourist will long all the more for enclaves of uniqueness and will yearn for a distant sense of Otherness that cancels out the all-around accessibility of the world. Such islands of retreat must be invented or constructed. They will be the future places of longing.
10.
True luxury is well advised. The more a universal economy asserts itself, the more the world brims with ever-identical inventories, and the greater the desire for the external trappings of an Otherness beyond our grasp. The rarity and inaccessibility of this special uniqueness demands a form of inside knowledge and personal contact with an agent who holds the key to all that is rare and difficult to reach. The very nature of such unknown, clandestine territory is producing a new type of tourist and, with that, a new form of tourist industry founded on the craft of the narrator, an artisan of travel planning, a connoisseur with knowledge of a precious commodity.
