The Importance of Connecting/Reconnecting – IRL (In Real Life)
PATA CEO Liz Ortiguera shared a message with the PATA community on November 2, 2022, with recent updates on revived travel in the Asia Pacific. The full message has been reposted below:
Dear PATA Members and Industry Colleagues,
This past quarter has just flown by. One industry colleague mentioned to me, “It feels as if twelve months of events were just crammed into six months here in APAC". As predicted (or in part driven) by one tourism minister, "Asia-Pacific will have an event-lead recovery".
The importance of meeting face to face to enable and fuel business development is driving a large part of the revenge travel we're seeing now. As one five-star hotelier mentioned to me recently in Manila, "We've never seen so many CEOs come through at once before". With recent events including WTM, CAPA, HICAP, WTTC and our own Annual Summit in Ras Al Khaimah - people had a wonderful chance to reconnect after the long hiatus or in many of my instances (being new to the association world) finally had the chance meet for the first time IRL (in real life) after having purely Zoom introductions earlier. I believe the ability to meet face to face is more valued and treasured now. It's what fuels commerce, trusted business relationships and significant partnerships.
Six years ago, during a Stanford Executive Program, one of their esteemed professors in marketing and innovation, made a provocative declaration to my class consisting of 80 senior executives from 62 destinations from across multiple industries (with a high proportion in tech).
The professor declared "The future of business travel is dead". His rationale being that with the enablement of video meetings and augmented reality (AR), he stated that the technology at that time already existed to meet someone virtually and even simulate shaking their hand. Sitting in a class in Palo Alto with a significant proportion of Silicon Valley tech executives, I anticipated that the only two travel executives in the room (me coming from Amex GBT and the other representing United Airlines) would be completely outnumbered in confirming his sentiment.
To my surprise, it was the tech executives who argued against his claim. Memorably, the general sentiment was that as good as technology was getting, it could still never truly replace the intangibles of meeting someone in person or visiting the site. Even if the tech could replicate the sentience of shaking someone's hand - there were a lot of intangibles that could not be replicated. They all advocated that the level of trust and partnership that can be built in person could not be simulated virtually.
As one critical mass, culmination of the plethora of events in Asia-Pacific, we were fortunate to have Asia-Pacific take global center stage for 12 days of important summits: ASEAN in Phnom Penh, G20 in Bali, and APEC in Bangkok.
While the other regions may have purely focused on the Biden - Xi Jinping dialogue or the Biden-Putin lack of dialogue, here in the region we also focused on the intra-regional initiatives forged including the APEC leaders’ declaration and New Indo-Pacific Economic Framework.
We're honored to have diplomat and geopolitical advisor Prof. Kishore Mahbubani as our keynote speaker to unpack some of what transpired at these key summits and their implications for the region's travel recovery.
Join us for his keynote during our imminent inaugural PATA-GBTA APAC Travel Summit in collaboration with GBTA. The event will be hosted in Bangkok on December 8-9 at the newly opened QSNCC venue - location for the recent APEC summit.
I look forward to seeing you there.
