On the peril of wasting a metacrisis

During the financial crisis of 2008, Barack Obama’s policy advisor observed, “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste, because you miss the opportunity to do the things you could not do before.” I have been reminded of that while writing this article because, exactly seven years ago (9 February 2019), I suggested that Europe’s tourism leadership might need to heed these wise words. I had been invited to speak to the Directors of the European Travel Commission’s annual meeting in Krakow. It would be my first attempt at expressing to such a senior audience my concerns about the industry’s vulnerability and to share my early understanding of the potential of an emerging concept called “regeneration.” While I am a habitual trend-watcher, I have never professed clairvoyance, but I did sense something was profoundly wrong. Fortunately, my host had given me the injunction to “shake things up,” so I did as I was told, took a very deep breath, and opened with the following statement:

As European tourism had just had another bumper year, with numbers up by 5%, I clearly was not trying to win my audience over with flattery. Nor did I have any clear idea as to what might precipitate the breakdown of an entire sector. But I was aware of the seeming addiction to growth in volume, the consequences of overtourism, and the challenges of living in a VUCA world defined as one of enormous volatility, complexity, uncertainty, and ambiguity. Nevertheless, as it happens, I was right about vulnerability – caused then not by too many human visitors but by the undetected arrival of a minuscule bat-borne virus called SARS-CoV-2 that had taken a free ride from a meat market in the backstreets of Wuhan, China. With the onset of the COVID pandemic, Mother Nature was about to teach us a very expensive lesson. A tiny microbe was able to stop not just the juggernaut known as tourism but the global economy in its tracks.