I spoke last week to Jennifer Tombaugh, president of Tauck, the global tour and cruise operator. She’d just returned from Morocco, where she was attending the company’s annual tour directors meeting. That’s where Tauck pulls together its directors of tours, river cruises, and small-ship ocean voyages around the world. If you’ve ever experienced the gentle dynamism of a tour director in action, you can well imagine the sparks that were flying through the atmosphere in that exotic setting where Tauck had brought together hundreds of them for a conference.
For any tour operator, the tour director is where the rubber meets the road. For the traveling clients, the tour director is the face of the company, the person who keeps the show on the road, solves problems, is master of ceremonies, directs everything and takes care of everyone. It’s a helluva job. Not many are suited for it. Now the end of winter is on the horizon, and the travel season is taking shape. Pulling together tour directors in their slowest season was a little like waking hibernating bears. They are hungry, and ready to go into action.
Tauck has its own name for them: Tauck Directors. It’s part of a larger vocabulary that the company has developed as one of the oldest, largest, and most highly respected institutions in the hospitality industry. It’s been a major leader of the tour industry since its founding nearly a century ago. At innumerable junctures in that winding history, Tauck has been at the forefront as the industry moved forward and evolved.
Tauck was the first federally licensed tour operator in America, because its founder, Arthur Tauck Sr., took a case to the Supreme Court to win the freedom for tour operators to travel across state lines, after the newly formed Interstate Commerce Commission had declared “the whole business… illegal.” That’s one page in a long history.
As an operator of more than 100 itineraries on seven continents, Tauck has a great global perspective on what is happening in its industry. Operations require it to deal constantly with suppliers from all segments of the industry around the world. No one has a better perspective on the global leisure travel industry than Jennifer Tombaugh. It was good luck to catch her fresh from a meeting of minds with directors who practice their profession in various locales around the world.
“We were in Morocco for our tour directors seminar, which was unbelievable,” she said. “It was so great. I gotta tell you, being around a couple hundred tour directors—their energy! It was pretty inspiring.”
Cut to the chase, business is booming.
“I can tell you that the state of union is robust,” she said. “We are seeing a dramatic and strong rebound to business overall.”
The phrase “revenge travel” has been circulating to describe people coming out of the pandemic, hungry and eager for travel. Ms. Tombaugh prefers a kinder description.
“I call it ‘hopeful travel,’ because everyone had their hopes and their wish lists piling up for years while we were all locked down. And they’re just going. We’re seeing that manifest in a significant comeback. We’re not out of the woods yet. But there was some trepidation going into the winter, like, ‘Are we going to have another Omicron, like last year?’ And what would that mean for cancellation rates and lapse rates and the like? But we’ve seen none of that. We’ve seen people wanting to travel, eager to travel, excited about the favorable exchange rate. They’ve seen air fares come down, particularly for Europe, and they’re just making up for lost time.”
Tauck is seeing a strong comeback in destinations across the globe, with obvious exceptions, such as Russia and China.
“There’s some softness in Eastern Europe, because of the Ukrainian war,” she said. “But even the Danube is starting to pick up again for us. Now we’re starting to see some pickup in Australia and New Zealand, which were suppressed because of air fares that were extraordinary because of the lack of capacity.”
Now capacity is returning to those routes. Prices are declining and booking rates are accelerating. Of course, there are always things for a tour operator to be on guard for. Every change brings new challenges in the service chain. Covid has receded, but many of its effects are lingering, such as supply chain breaks, staffing shortages and training challenges. Yet Ms. Tombaugh is highly optimistic, with appropriate caution.
“I don’t want to be Pollyanna-ish about it,” she said. “There is plenty still to navigate—for the entire industry—as we all get back to working with many new players on our team, at hotels, at restaurants around the world.”
As the industry rebuilds its service staff, expectations that service levels will be up to those of 2019 are unrealistic. Travelers are likely to encounter more problems than in their pre-Covid experiences.
“The industry has done an incredible job hiring, training, and getting people back on their feet,” said Tombaugh. “In 2019, some people had been in their roles for decades. You had the wealth of experience, and now you have a lot of newbies. So, there’s a lag here. That’s just natural. And it’s something that we will have to wrestle with as an industry. I think we are tackling it extremely well, but I think we have to acknowledge that we’re not out of woods yet.”
High expectations have no doubt arisen from the fact that things have been going so well overall that it feels like things are back to “normal.”
“This morning Dan [Mahar, Tauck CEO] was doing a town hall update,” she said, “and I just kept thinking, ‘Oh! If someone had told me this three years ago, it would have been so much easier to get through the last three years.’ It’s been tough. But it’s true: land, small ship, river—everything is quite strong.”
Another post-Covid challenge for tour operators is dealing with the actions taken by some tourist destinations to solve the problem of overtourism. The objective is good, but achieving it is a complex matter. As destinations try to put in place more stringent regulations regarding group size, or numbers of motorcoaches, they have to be careful of the side effects of such changes, as tourism flows continue, and find ways around their restrictions.
“Cities like Venice, Amsterdam and Barcelona are pausing and saying, ‘What kind of traveler do we want? And what kind of access do we want to provide?’ So, you’re seeing policies starting to change about coach restrictions, and the like.”
Reducing overtourism is in line with Tauck’s objectives of providing more intimate and authentic experiences, as well as its long-held beliefs in sustainable travel. But there are many possible ways to approach the problem of overtourism.
Jennifer Tombaugh is on the board of the European Tour Operators Association, which provides a platform for tour operators to speak with one voice to negotiate with municipalities and destinations to find good solutions to balance the needs of the local populations with the demand for tourism.
“Given the challenges around sustainability globally, I don’t fault the cities at all for some of the actions they are taking,” she said. “But that being said, I think it has to be dialogue. For example, if you ban a coach, but allow cars to replace those, are you really solving the problem? So, I think a lot of these solutions need to be a conversation between what is right for the cities and what’s right for the travelers that are inevitably going to come. And how do we find a balance that’s a win-win. It doesn’t have to be a situation where one side wins and the other side loses.”
David Cogswell is a freelance writer working remotely, from wherever he is at the moment. Born at the dead center of the United States during the last century, he has been incessantly moving and exploring for decades. His articles have appeared in the Chicago Tribune, the Los Angeles Times, Fortune, Fox News, Luxury Travel Magazine, Travel Weekly, Travel Market Report, Travel Agent Magazine, TravelPulse.com, Quirkycruise.com, and other publications. He is the author of four books and a contributor to several others. He was last seen somewhere in the Northeast US.
