60 Challenges in 60 Minutes: Academic Panel Session Recap

With just 60 minutes to go through 60 challenges, the X-Nordic Academic Panel had its hands full in the first session of convening the six panel members. Climate change, destination degeneration and tourism workforce issues were identified as key challenges to the sustainable and competitive future of Nordic tourism. Panel discussions focused on how these challenges can be transformed into opportunities to add more value to Nordic tourism, which is also where the second panel session will pick up in the first week of June 2023.

Hosted by Group NAO and Nordic Innovation, the virtual session on March 6, 2023 brought together tourism experts and researchers of the Nordics to identify and unfold the biggest challenges facing the Nordic tourism industry. The session ‘60 Challenges in 60 minutes’ was carried out in 3 parts: Identify, Prioritise and Unfold.

To kick off, all participants identified the ten biggest challenges based on their experience and expertise, followed by collaboratively prioritising the challenges in order of relevance and impact, and later unfolding the most pressing ones to have a deeper understanding of the causes, impacts and solutions. A range of topics and challenges were covered including the gap between academics and business practice, workforce issues, domestic/local tourism in the Nordics, climate change mitigation, travel emissions, economic leakage, seasonality, use of technology and destination degeneration. The panel agreed on three key challenges to further unfold: Climate change, destination degeneration and tourism workforce issues.

Tourism in the face of climate crisis : It’s time for action!

Starting with climate change mitigation, Stefan Gössling from Sweden’s Lund University and Linnaeus University pointed out that agreements are signed every year but there is a need to strictly integrate these guidelines into national policies especially in the aviation sector. He further added that ‘clearing the misconception that tackling climate change will negatively impact tourism businesses’ is extremely important; it will rather allow tourism to prosper. Highlighting some successful examples from the Nordics, Juho Pesonen of University of Eastern Finland emphasised that businesses can be economically sustainable and profitable without relying on long haul tourists. For example, Vision of Scandinavia stopped marketing their products outside Europe or how Finland Lapland managed to relocate their target visitor market from China to the UK and rest of Europe. Besides, Håvard Utheim, Founder of Nanook and Travelopment.com, commented that there is a higher possibility of short haul tourists to become return tourists therefore adding a higher lifetime value.

Furthermore, the ongoing X-Nordic Travel Contest startup mapping also revealed that mobility, specifically shared and sustainable transportation, is clearly a dominant focus of many Nordic travel-related startups. Hence, it will be interesting to see in the coming phases what alternatives to long haul mobility can be proposed and how businesses can reinvent proximity tourism to address the climate crisis.

Focus on the place rather than the destination: Local First!

The second most important challenge discussed was Destination Degeneration. Carina Ren from Group NAO who is also a professor at Aalborg University proposed to look at the opportunities on how tourism can help destinations prosper instead of degrading them. Trude Furunes, Head of Institute at the Norwegian University of Hospitality and editor of Scandinavian Journal of Hospitality and Tourism, added that focusing on the place itself rather than seeing it as a tourism destination might be a good starting point. Therefore, making locals the pivot of development, not the tourists. Anne-Mette Hjalager from University of Southern Denmark seconded the opinion that the concept of destination is evolving and people power i.e. the locals can be a vital resource for sustainable destination management, which is often neglected and unexplored. Slow travel is considered one way of avoiding the problem of destination degradation as it focuses on authentic and responsible local experiences at the destination as opposed to visiting commercialised places. Nevertheless, to address this multifaceted challenge, various combinations of legal, economic, and social measures should be evaluated.

The dilemma facing higher education and industry in tourism

Lastly, workforce shortage and employee retention has been one of the key challenges for the tourism industry for a long time. The panel agreed on the image of the tourism industry currently as a low-skilled profession which needs little or no education. The numbers also depict that it’s leading to poor enrollment in tourism courses at university level in the Nordics. Universities are concerned that employer organisations are not able to show the bigger prospects of working in the tourism industry which negatively impacts the status of tourism. Therefore, bringing together the universities and the employers should be one of the cornerstones of the X-Nordic Travel Contest.

What’s next?

As the next step of X-Nordic Travel Contest, once the challenges of Nordic tourism businesses have been mapped through the ongoing workshops, the second panel session will pick up in the first week of June 2023. The findings from the challenges mapping exercise will be shared with the academic panel and the members will use their expertise to draw a bigger picture of the Nordic tourism industry by connecting the dots. It will play an important role in deciding the key challenges to be solved in the upcoming phase where Nordic startups and the innovation ecosystem will join forces to look for the best solutions to these problems.