This text is part of the special Business Tourism section
At the end of last January, the Transat Tourism Chair brought together several hundred people from the industry to the meeting room Pierre-Mercure from UQAM for the unveiling of the 2024 Trends Notebook. This new edition, based on a survey of 1,000 respondents and augmented by observations from the team, which follows more than 750 publications on around fifty sectors and themes, says a lot about what is in store for tourism this year. business.
“Predictions over three, four, five years, we no longer make them. We judge that it is more useful to tell SMEs what is happening now,” explains Marc-Antoine Vachon, professor of marketing at ESG UQAM and chair holder. He says he had his lesson on predictions with his 2016 Trends Notebook. “We “predicted” where tourism would be in 2020.” And then COVID came…
The six trends identified fall into various themes: the quest for happiness; travel as a luxury that has become essential; capping responsible travel; business opportunities and versatile lifestyles; the impact of inflation and climate; as well as technology (specifically artificial intelligence) in the customer journey.
“One of my surprises was to see the stabilization of the hybrid travel market, which had declined last year. » Hybrid travel concerns travel that merges work and pleasure, whether it is people who extend their leisure stay to telecommute or people who travel for business and who decide to extend their stay to visit. “Now we know that it is a market that has been created and that is here for good. »
Mr. Vachon notes a real increase in shoulder-to-shoulder and other team-building activities. With the widespread use of teleworking, it has become more difficult to create a team spirit or develop a common vision. “Employers are finding it much more difficult to send their people on the road. Therefore, business activities must now have a strong dimension of pleasure and personal achievement. »
Pleasure, more and more
Thomas Giraudo, president of Altitude C, an agency specializing in corporate events, is one of the ten specialists interviewed for this notebook. He observes that this very strong quest for pleasure comes in several ways. “Employers must now create events, memorable moments. This type of activity has tripled for us compared to 2019.”
Among the concrete manifestations of this trend, he highlights the “event legacy”. As part of the business gathering or conference, participants will participate in a charitable activity, such as making lunch boxes for the Breakfast Club. “Congress organizers will ensure that the organization collects food for charitable organizations or will commission a work of art that will be bequeathed to the community. »
This tendency towards pleasure permeates everywhere, and it does not only have positive sides. One of the downsides of this is that conference attendees become bored more easily due to lack of attention. “Our client is a conference on the energy transition that completely bans PowerPoint presentations,” says the consultant, whose 21 employees are dedicated to helping the event organizers format multimedia presentations.
The growing integration of culture is part of this logic. Mr. Giraudo tells the case of this health congress which hired the National Improvisation League. “A few actors came to improvise on the theme. The participants had a great time and it set the table for some reflections. I also saw a climate conference hire professional curators to organize several art exhibitions on the theme. »
AI, yes, but intelligently
Artificial intelligence brings a lot of new things. Although it has been present for a long time in business tourism, particularly for plane tickets and room reservations, Mr. Vachon notices a real resurgence of chat systems based on conversational agents. This tool allows organizers and participants to get an idea of what the destination has to offer in order to plan their activities outside the conference — fun, always.
Mr. Giraudo notes more specialized uses, for example the use of AI in simultaneous translation, very popular at international conferences. “Some systems translate into 60 languages for a fraction of the cost,” he says. And participants see the subtitles appear on their phone. »
Another technology that is becoming more widespread is concierge AI. No more need to set up a booth with staff capable of recommending activities or an agenda to delegates or their spouses. “There, there is no need to program the responses in advance. The robot develops directly. »
The holder of the Transat Tourism Chair still invites organizers to be careful with this technology, in particular by ensuring that their destination is correctly referenced and documented with a good level of accuracy. “The other day, I was doing research on Saguenay, and the robot sent me to see Montmorency Falls! »
This content was produced by the Special Publications team at Duty, relating to marketing. The writing of the Duty did not take part.