Sustainable Today, Successful Tomorrow
In “Sustainable today, successful tomorrow” Anne and Rik (Good Tourism Institute) explore real-world sustainable tourism stories that actually work.
Sustainable Today, Successful Tomorrow
Using AI for positive impact with Equator 🤖
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Can AI make tourism more sustainable?
AI is everywhere, but it’s not always used in the right ways. 🫢
In this episode of Sustainable Today, Successful Tomorrow, we talk with Edmund Morris fromEquator about how AI and data can become tools for smarter, fairer, and more sustainable tourism.
Together, we explore how AI-powered insights help travel businesses and destinations move beyond carbon and understand their true impact. đź’ˇ
Edmund shares how small, data-led changes can make travel better for both visitors and local communities.
Because when we use data the right way, it doesn’t just measure sustainability. It helps create positive impact. 🙌
If you’re curious about how AI can help shape a more positive future for tourism, this episode is for you. 🎧
How well are you communicating sustainability? Apply for our free Sustainable Marketing Scan 👇
https://goodtourisminstitute.com/scan/
Anne: [00:00:00] Welcome back to Sustainable Today, successful tomorrow, where we explore real world sustainable tourism stories that actually work. In our last discussion episode, we already shared a few highlights from my interview with Edmund Co-founder of Equator and Equator provides data insights on travel trends using big data, AI, and statistical models, helping the tourism industry measure impact.
Anne: Today, I'm excited to bring you the full interview. Edmund and I talked about what AI can do to genuinely support sustainable tourism and what that looks like in practice and impact. I really enjoyed our conversation and I hope you find it as interesting as I did. Enjoy.
Anne: AI is everywhere, but let's be honest, it's not always used in the best ways. So how can AI actually support sustainable tourism and can it [00:01:00] really help destinations and businesses make more responsible choices? Today we're exploring that with Edmund Morris, co-founder of Equator, one of my favorite, AI tools out there.
Anne: Edmund and his team use data to uncover tourism and travel trends, helping the industry make smarter evidence-based decisions, because at the end of the day, aren't we all just looking for reassurance that we're making the best choices? Edmund, thank you so much for joining me and to kick things off, I have one quite big question for you, and we'll keep it short and simple before digging deeper, but can AI genuinely support sustainable tourism?
Edmund: Thank you so much for having me. Uh, it's a pleasure to join you. yes, it can. That. I think that's gotta be the rub of this one, is that AI is a very early stages. So we're just starting to figure out what it can and can't do. And I think we're still pretty far away from understanding its full potential and how it's gonna be used.
Edmund: But the early signs from both the usability of things [00:02:00] like machine learning, which is very old, and the more recent developments in generative AI and like larger language models suggest that. Yeah, I think there's a massive potential to use AI to uncover what we get rights about travel and tourism and really help fix what we don't.
Edmund: So in short, yes, but with some caveats.
Anne: Okay. Okay. No, that's a good start. And, well diving into, equator. Yeah. Can you tell me a little bit more about what it does, how it works, and how you feel? overall it supports sustainable tourism.
Edmund: Yeah, sure. So I should talk a little bit about my background in order to understand what equator is and what, where it came from. most of my career was spent in U-S-A-I-D in humanitarian and development work. So it worked across mostly in the Middle East, but in, in parts of Africa as well. And my job there was on economic development. So it was specializing in understanding how to spend US government money to tackle things like refugee [00:03:00] crises, extreme poverty alleviation or, developing certain economic sectors to help foster sort of better trade relations. And it was through that work that I discovered, travel and tourism. So. It was on A-U-S-A-I-D project called Lens, um, which is about $65 million fund. And that project, focused on rural poverty in Jordan. And what I found again and again and again, was that travel and tourism was incredibly good. alleviating poverty, getting money into rural areas while simultaneously protecting things like heritage conservation. it was the only industry I'd worked in where a woman cooking bread in the sand was seen as an economic asset, right? So if you think about, you know, an economist or a management consultant, they would look at this and go, Hey, we should give her an oven so she can make more bread. Tourism says, leave it exactly as it is. Don't change anything. It's, it's perfect.
Anne: [00:04:00] Local. Oh
Edmund: what made it great because what didn't mean we had to retrain or like change entire systems. You could sort of embrace what made something unique, cultural diversity, heritage, and conservation, and then just invest in that.
Edmund: And it was really through that work that I began to move more and more into the understanding that travel and tourism is this brilliant sector that can do extraordinary good when it's done right. The challenge however, was that it was really bad at data and still is like, I think tourism is. wildly underfunded, it's poorly understood. and I think as a result of that, I, I took a lot of the. Tools and systems we'd built. Really the approaches you build in humanitarian work are pretty, pretty kind of like trade and industry practice and started adapting them for travel and tourism. So that's kind of the genesis of equator. And from there, what [00:05:00] we started to do is to build like mapping tools, um, economic impact modeling, uh, emission measurement. Are we just tracking where visitor flows are going? So where, where is the movement of people? What are they doing? And we started to build dedicated software approaches to that. and that's really where we are today. So we, we sort of combine many different layers of modeling to help our clients. Uh, they could be hotels, tour operators, destinations, understand the impact of tourism.
How well are you actually communicating sustainability? We see many travel businesses and destinations working hard, yet they still struggle to talk about it,
Anne: and maybe you feel the same. You're afraid of being seen as greenwashing, unsure what to share, or just not really connecting with your travelers.
Anne: We've been there with a lot of travel brands and we get how frustrating it is. So with years of experience in sustainable tourism and marketing, [00:06:00] we've created something simple to get you started.
Rik: It's called the Sustainable Marketing Scan. You just answer a few quick questions. We'll take a look, and if it's a good fit, we'll invite you for a short call to go through your opportunities.
Anne: You can start today@goodtourisminstitute.com slash scam and turn uncertainty into a clear, compelling story.
Yeah. And then what specific, topics do you. Focus on within equator.
Edmund: So I think the big one for me. Well, I should start with saying our big thing is to help the companies that are doing the most good outcompete, those doing the most harm. So my, my view is that we want to try and help companies that are really dedicated to supporting communities, using tourism as a force for good and change, and giving them the insights they need to be more competitive in markets.
Edmund: Because, you know, speaking to my broader philosophy here, I think one of the most effective ways of [00:07:00] changing, structures around sustainability, changing mindsets is to prove that,sustainability does actually sell. It's just probably not in the way that I think a lot of people think. And so
Edmund: our job is to try and help the companies that have incredible stories, have amazing impact, have invested massive time and energy into doing travel light, but then don't have the resources to kind of turn that into a competitive advantage. Don't have the data or the insights they need to know, like, well how do I actually take market share from you know, this massive corporation that dominate SEO or marketing and advertising and you know, everything you see on LinkedIn and Facebook. So my view on this was like, can we build tools for them? And those companies can be big, they can be small, but at their very core, they have to be doing something right in travel and tourism.
Anne: Yeah, no, absolutely. And I think also that a lot of travel businesses underestimate how important data is in their communication and their marketing, uh, because that's actually what you can [00:08:00] prove. and I think the main, I. Topic at the moment around data is around carbon and climate emissions. Uh, it's a very hot topic in the tourism industry, and also there are already a lot of calculators out there.
Anne: What do you think makes equator, different than what's already there?
Edmund: I should say we're not, we're not really a carbon calculating company, so we do it, we measure emissions for companies, uh, mostly for operators at this point. what makes us different? So,most consultants will use what's called the haine approach to measure emissions is it's essentially, for layman's terms, it's a, as the crow flies. So
Edmund: it's a straight line between two points.
Edmund: What Equator does is we actually load a tour through navigational software. So it will
Edmund: map the exact route and it will factor in things like topography changes. So elevation. So if you're driving uphill, your emissions are gonna go up by a significant amount, um, if you're gonna be stuck in traffic a [00:09:00] lot.
Edmund: So we're really looking at things like distance, elevation and time and then tracking that through the route taken in order to estimate emissions. So already I think it's kind of a step ahead in that approach 'cause we're very software focused.
Edmund: The other thing we do a lot of is, automating the reading in of itinerary data.
Edmund: So our clients, we don't get our clients to fill in Excel spreadsheets, at all ever. Really what we do is we take, HTML files, so their web pages, we might take text descriptions of itineraries, however they're storing, their information. Then we load that into our system, and our system actually maps it automatically.
Edmund: So there's no lengthy process of having to fill in thousands of forms in, if you've got 500 tools mapping every single destination you travel to every single day trip you take, can take hundreds of hours. That process is now automated at Equator. So we just take it from you, we just load it into our system, [00:10:00] and then we do, testing and fact checking on it.
Edmund: So we'll kind of run through different tests to make sure it's working. And so that's, and that's a good example of how we use ai. So a
Edmund: lot of that reading of a tool takes place through a language model.
Anne: Yeah. And then what exactly is the purpose of providing that data? what's your goal that you deal with it?
Edmund: Look, I mean, I think a lot of the clients will use it for reporting purposes, so they'll put it into their B Corp calculations and, you know, BIA Earth check, um, travel Life certification. That's the kind of boring version of how our data's used. I, it's fine, but I, I get much more excited when people use our tools to think about the competitive advantage that they're gonna get from using them.
Edmund: So looking at how off the beaten path they go. how many, my favorite one that I did recently was on cultural preservation,
Edmund: which is that the client came to us and they didn't have a clear idea of what they were doing, right. They just were like, we know there's something we're doing. Here are some stories. Can you use your software and your system to figure out what we [00:11:00] do that's different? So it was kind of experimental and we got this ability to say, Hey, you are traveling to all these places which are listed as culturally endangered or at risk of extinction. So these are spoken languages, these are traditions, cultures, and because they are going to such remote locations and they're spending time there. It means the tourists are spending money and so they're contributing to the livelihoods of these places, which then helps sustain these cultures. And I think that's where travel is at. Its very best and it's what enables equator to come back to the company and say, Hey, all the big firms, all the kinda like mass tourism operators, you know, sun Sea and San Tourism, they do X amount.
Edmund: It contribute to, you know, 10 to 15% might stay in the local economy. You guys are going to really remote locations. You are helping preserve languages, you're helping keep heritage alive. And you know, 70, 80% of [00:12:00] visitor spend is staying in that community. So that gives them their ability to talk to their guests in a very different way than I think they would normally be able to.
Anne: Yeah. Yeah, because it's not empty promises or empty claims, basically. That's, I think that's the whole point. I think it's really good to see, that you're using ai. Beyond carbon. 'cause I always feel that the tourism industry is kind of stuck on the carbon emission, part. And also another issue that we often see as, for example, the unre reporting or the over-reporting of data.
Anne: So either they underestimate how much emissions they have or they overestimate because they kind of want to make sure that they will calculate everything. How accurate is your data or do you kind of keep, a ratio in that?
Edmund: So we don't actually keep a ratio 'cause it's, it's too difficult to do, to be like, oh, we know we're 23% higher than some other company. 'cause it also changes, like we update things regularly. but so on, on the two fronts to this. So [00:13:00] in terms of using, using like AI and data to do things other than carbon, I think this is the thing that travel has gotten so wrong, which is that we obsess over emissions. The tourism industry is like, you know, rightly kind of concerned about, its, its, contribution to global CO2. Sure. That is definitely a problem and should be addressed, but a lot of that does come from airlines and from accommodation sector. So where I think travel does a terrible job is in talking about all the things it gets, right,
Edmund: Sustainability isn't just carbon. It can be things like water consumption, plastic waste, but it can also be social preservation, cohesion, fostering economic equality, elite combating or alleviating poverty so it doesn't do anywhere near enough, you know, conversation around that. And that's, I think, the part that it's really under invested in because mining, gas, petrochemical companies, fashion industry, they're very quick to jump on the things [00:14:00] that they are getting right. In their industries. And I think tourism is stupendously bad at it. it just can't seem to get out of its own feet and break ahead and provide insights into like, the things that it's done in the last 10, 20, 30 years or what it's about to do that make it so important. So like, just as an example, during COVID when travel shut down, poaching went up in Africa. Alright, brilliant. that's a very strong case to make for the Continuity
Anne: Travel. Yeah.
Edmund: travel and tourism. But it's also, you know, you see it in other things as well, which is if you have this massive land amass like the Serengeti or the Marla and those places are essentially being preserved for tourists who want to do safaris on them and you know, to en encourage biodiversity and the preservation of those areas. If you don't have tourists in those locations, [00:15:00] governments will start to get, more demand from the mining gas lobby to say, well, that land's not being used for anything. Why don't we do some exploratory drilling? Why don't we see if there's something there? Same for agriculture, is that we could build an agricultural industry off the back of this place. So it's really in the presence of travel and tourism that you can retain something as it is, most other industries will inherently seek to destroy it or fundamentally change it. And that is a story that I don't hear a lot of in travel and tourism. I don't hear a lot of people say there was an opportunity cost in, in, you know, essentially in the investment in travel and tourism
Edmund: and that, that's where I'm really kind of bullish on the prospects for tourism, which is, it needs to do more of that. And back itself more on what it gets. Right. And so, yes, like from a, from an mission point of view, it's important we do it. But I'm far more excited by the projects that get, you know, that enable me to [00:16:00] say tourism is awesome because,
Anne: And I still think there's a lot of people in the tourism industry who don't seem to acknowledge over tourism and carrying capacity for what it is.
Edmund: I think there's this still this idea that it's somehow the tech industry which can grow forever. when it can't. There's just, there are physical limits to this, which, you know, pretty obvious whenever
Anne: absolutely. Yeah. And over tourism is definitely another huge challenge. And I remember earlier before you told me something about how, like that you have a lot of data that can actually combat over tourism.
Anne: how do you measure over tourism and what are the well solutions that you can offer?
Edmund: so over tourism is my, is one of my big things right now. I think it is the ex outside of climate change. It's the existential crisis for the industry. So
Anne: Agree.
Edmund: kind to set the scene, Fort Tourism in 1950, you had about two to 3 million people globally, worldwide who could afford to take a vacation, right?
Edmund: So it's, it's a tiny portion of the world's population, I think less [00:17:00] than 1% of global population. As of today. That number sits between 600 to 700 million people.
Edmund: So an absolute massive increase in the universe of potential customers for the travel and tourism industry. And, and make no mistake, once you earn enough money to travel, it doesn't mean you take one vacation a year.
Edmund: You might take four or five. So that growth from 2 million to 600 million is, the equivalent of, you know, 8 million trips or 20 million trips into several billion. That I think is part of the problem, which is we are nowhere near peak tourism, right? So 650 million people who can afford to take a vacation that's less than 10% of the world's population, and by
Edmund: 2050, that's expected to double, right?
Edmund: So
Edmund: iata, the International Airline Transportation association estimate [00:18:00] that total passenger flights will hit 10 billion by 2050. And I think that's conservative. So if you consider what is to come and you look at what's already happening today, so you've got water pistol protest in Barcelona
Edmund: and you've got people queuing in the death zone on Everest.
Edmund: You've got Mona Leeza, right? So the Louvre, I'll give you one of the greatest museums in the world. Is rapidly losing star ratings and reviews because it's too crowded, you know, where
Edmund: the head of the gallery has to say, this is a crisis. Like, we're at breaking
Edmund: point, our staff are going on strike. So if the lieu of cop withstand over tourism, why are we so confident that everywhere else is just gonna be fine?
Edmund: That's kind of like the realization I think that still most people in the industry haven't yet come to, which is that visitors and residents, the era really
Edmund: of travel, being a force for good and being welcomed by [00:19:00] everyone that I think is over. I think tourism is no longer going to enjoy this status as an industry that's just seen as a good thing by and
Anne: for everyone. So how do we go about measuring that? Well, we deploy a bunch of different tools and there really isn't one solution that fits all. I would know I have tried, Of course.
Edmund: So, so what we do is a few things.
Edmund: So one of them is to make the case to businesses that they should take this seriously. We'll look at visitor experience and visitor sentiment data. So what are guests, what are customers saying about a place or a hotel or an experience that relates to crowds or anything associated with overt tourism.
Edmund: So, not to get too technical or nerdy about this, but you analyze several hundred thousand reviews and you look for like terms or phrases that you would associate with things like, tourist trap or I got there early before it got too busy, [00:20:00] or thank goodness I got up at 5:00 AM because by 8:00 AM it was packed and I could barely move so I left. Those are all signals around overt tourism. So even if they give it a four or five star with, we're noticing crowds are. A problem that are having to be planned around. you have the direct issues, which are people saying, two star, one star, three star because of crowds where the complaint was the people or the exploitative pricing was too much, or it felt very inauthentic.
Edmund: So all of these type of, sentiments that are expressed on social media, on blogs, even in like media articles by journalists, we process all of those. And then we use the same sort of scale to measure different attractions at different places. So we might, for destination, we might look at 20 to 30 attractions and see which ones are suffering and which ones are starting to lose a visitor experience in terms of quality. So where their star rating is [00:21:00] dropping off, for example, or where the, a significant amount of content published online is negative. So that's the Vista sentiment side. From a resident side, we look at, subreddits. A lot of places have like, you know, a subreddit for your community, for your town, for where you live. so those are really good examples like Facebook as well. we'll scan those to understand how do locals feel about these things. We also, differentiate between languages. So where we see people post in, let's say Indonesian or one of the Indonesian languages, um, and what they might say about it versus what someone writing in Japanese or English or Spanish might say about it.
Edmund: And we can map out the difference in views on that. We actually had a client recently, we did this for in Bali, where the Balinese were much more upset at the behavior of tourists and the crowds at temples where they
Anne: Hmm.
Edmund: spiritual places were being overrun and it affected them far more. Tourists didn't seem to have that concern. They weren't as [00:22:00] bothered because. Largely 'cause it's not their religion,
Edmund: or statistically speaking probably isn't their religion and they don't understand its sacred status in, in the religion of, of Hinduism or Buddhism. In contrast, tourists super upset about busy beaches are like, oh, you know, the beach is packed.
Edmund: There's
Edmund: too many boats in there, too many people are hated it.
Edmund: So,
Anne: It's priorities. Your own perspective on how you want to see a destination, I
Edmund: yeah. Yeah, exactly. and that I think is really the problem one of the things we do for both destinations and for companies is we look at the sentiment data side of things and warn them the places they are investing in.
Edmund: I was just wondering if you, base your data on like, if destinations are too crowded only on what you find online, what travelers or locals think or write about it, or if you also take instrument account, like infrastructure or, I dunno, satellite images, Something like more tangible data, like not an opinion.
Edmund: yeah, absolutely. So most of our data gets layered, [00:23:00] so we don't
Edmund: use one group set of data. So we're not just gonna look at sentiment data, we're gonna look at things like arrival data. we'll look at things like occupancy, short term rentals. So it'll be. Everything from a supply side as best we can, demand aside. and then sort of a combination of the two. But there were also other patterns drove tourism that we're beginning to notice and explore. So my favorite one, I haven't found a commercial reason to use this yet, but, and I need also haven't quite landed on the term. It might be the Panini index, but essentially it's how many restaurants are there.
Edmund: The idea came from Florence where I saw a social media post on Instagram where someone was complaining that this street used to have many different types of restaurants. But since, the Lanco, I think, which is a panini place in Florence, went viral in 2014.
Anne: Oh, I saw that. Yeah.
Edmund: It's now just a street of panini places. So everywhere now sells panini. And so what we do in this case is we start to look at the homogenization [00:24:00] of infrastructure. So are we seeing. A high density of the same type of food restaurant, the same pattern of businesses, so many souvenir stores, plus an h and m plus a Gucci. and when you start to see those patterns, you can start to say, this place is getting very homogenized. And I, you think
Edmund: about that when you visit big cities, you often see the same type of stores in high streets. So h and m, ZAWA, mango, McDonald's, and those things can be indicative of high volume of demand for travel and tourism.
Edmund: Gucci's a good example because the biggest buyer of Gucci handbags are Chinese tourists. So where you find Gucci stores, you should assume that Gucci have already invested in the data to understand where Chinese tourists are going to be.
Anne: Yeah.
Edmund: And they themselves become magnets, right? They have like this gravitation of pull and that is where. we use [00:25:00] points of interest to start to model and map and understand where these people are going.
Edmund: So it's a combination of all these different approaches, that help us tell this story.
Anne: And then when you've identified like, areas or destinations that are too crowded, based on data, do you also provide alternatives and what do you base these alternatives on?
Anne: So, yeah, we, we do, if we asked, so like if we're working with a destination, we won't tell the destination, here's another destination they can go. within a destination, maybe. 'cause for example, talking about Bali UD
Anne: it's becoming a no-go to travel to the center of ud. But then how do you determine like suitable alternatives for a similar experience that the travel is equally or maybe even more excited about?
Edmund: So if it's within, if it's within a country. For sure we will provide alternative towns and cities that simply don't have the, infrastructure to that, that would suggest they have a massive tourism base. So in Bali, like a really good indicator, like a leading [00:26:00] signal is things like avocado on menus or flat whites. So these are weird
Edmund: things that a lot of companies wouldn't, you know, wouldn't think to look for. But we
Anne: It's true.
Edmund: putting this stuff
Anne: Avocado toast.
Edmund: yeah, exactly like avocado toast, flat white, and yoga in Bali, which is like, the more offerings you see of those things
Anne: Yeah.
Edmund: side, the greater the likelihood there's going to be that there's a significant amount of demand for them.
Edmund: So if you look in the
Edmund: north of Bali, you don't see anywhere near as many flat white on menus. nor do you see in many short term rentals. So you can use those things to say that yes, this place might be from a supply side, less developed. But a lot of it to me, in terms of the experiences that you can have, would suggest, I say, well, these places will have local cuisines.
Edmund: They will have incredible places to see or heritage or community experiences that can be developed that offer something to tourists
Edmund: that a will feel more authentic because there are less tourists around, but it will also then help with [00:27:00] dispersal. So in that regard, yeah, we absolutely, we make recommendations.
Edmund: So yeah, absolutely. from, you know, recommending where else people can go, for sure. It's, it is part of it, but. Whether or not the client or whether or not the operator or destination wants to act on that from a commercial point of view? Yeah. that
Edmund: can be harder to make the case.
Anne: Yeah, because do you feel for example, the clients you work with, like, are they always excited about the data that you provide? Or maybe sometimes they might be a bit, I don't know, disappointed about the outcomes that they didn't expect?
Edmund: Uh, yes. Yeah, they are mixed. I don't, I think this is kind of good or bad and problem in my business fundamentally, which is I don't always tell clients what they want to hear. Like, you know, when we're
Edmund: gonna do this analysis, it's not always going to be the answers I think clients want them to be. we had this with, with emissions recently, which is because we use what polyline calculations like we, the actual route, and because we factor in elevation, [00:28:00] and traffic. Most of our client's emissions went up by a significant amount.
Anne: Yeah.
Edmund: a lot of them just said, yeah, we're not gonna use you because you are
Edmund: reporting higher emissions. Yeah. and the EU or regulations, or B corp, they're satisfied with the consultants,or a third parties emission calculations, and they're not gonna dive deep into like, did you use polyline calculations? But so, you know, as a result there, we've lost clients because we've told them their emissions are going up 40, 50% across the board
Edmund: because their offsets are gonna go up significantly as a result of it.
Edmund: And in their next annual carbon report, they're gonna be forced to declare that their emission targets are wildly off base subtly, and then they have to back calculate everything else to see well, Hmm. Okay. Are all the other trips and all the other previous reports we've produced
Edmund: different And so, yeah, I, I. We do lose clients because of that. But I, I think of it as like the ones they want to keep [00:29:00] are the ones that
Anne: What I think
Edmund: at that and say, yeah.
Edmund: And they're just like, okay, cool. We'll do it better. and I, if
Edmund: a client's gonna say, well, I don't like your data, so no thank you, then okay, fine.
Edmund: We probably won't right for you. So there is that, and you know, that stings, but it's kind of just part of the job. The, my favorite part though is when we get clients, and this is most of them, is when we get clients and we tell them, did you know you're doing the following things? Right? So a lot of the time we'll look at clients, they'll send us their work, they'll have, they'll give us a brief for what they want. And I know we really want to understand this. let's say like, how impacted are we gonna be by agritourism? Are we at risk of contributing to over tourism or. Are our visitors or visitors generally enjoying these places as much as they used to? Should we start to look at new destinations? One of my favorite things about that is the part, the process we used to get to.
Edmund: The answers inevitably lead to discovery that we share with clients [00:30:00] that was saying, Hey, you are spending three times longer in destination than the average two operators. Or your hotel supply chain is radically more local than the Wyndham or the Marriott or the Shang la and you should emphasize that.
Edmund: Or the, you know, the fact their menu choices are carbon neutral accidentally by not on purpose. Those
Edmund: things can be really, rewarding. And I think clients kind of
Edmund: get excited about the prospect that there's a moment of discovery in seeing their, their products or their, you know, experiences, their destinations. be explored with data. I, my favorite
Edmund: part of my job as well.
Anne: yeah. No, but I understand because I think also like with sustainability, a lot of travel businesses feel like it's always a hassle and it's an investment, and it's a lot of time and they have to make change that they don't want to, and it's Focus on the negative part of, and not like on the positive part, like sustainable tourism can bring [00:31:00] you a lot more in even like better travel experiences.
Anne: happier, travelers. But yeah, I think some businesses are kind of stuck on the negative side. So I really think like the reassurance of, okay, this is what you're doing, well do more of it, is really gonna make them feel more confident in sharing what they do. and then of course that also kind of triples down to their marketing, which will and attract hopefully the better type of traveler.
Anne: so there will be kind of a snowball effect.
Edmund: I think a lot of sustainability, well, I think it's okay, I'm gonna go off on one here, but almost everything about sustainability has been designed by and for corporate interests, right? So sustainability reporting isn't mandated by governments. I think for the most part, uh, very until recently in the European Union.
Edmund: But globally speaking, there aren't legal structures in the same way there are with tax reporting or health. So a lot of it's voluntary. And as a result of that, you know, you pick and choose what you [00:32:00] report. And the origins of the reporting sector came from big energy mining, and it was designed around their massive needs and their material impacts on people and the planet for better or for worse. And what has essentially happened. Through that is that small businesses have essentially adopted the exact same framework of the corporations. You know, so I still hear small businesses talking about the UN SDGs sustainable development goals. why are you talking to your customers about the SDGs?
Edmund: I worked in development for 10 years. We didn't talk about the SDGs. it, your customers don't need to know that UN's framework for poverty alleviation. They're going on
Edmund: holiday for god's sake. So, I think the reason sustainability feels so boring is because we've inherited it from some of the most boring companies on the
Anne: Yeah.
Edmund: who
Edmund: their [00:33:00] entire sustainability mandate wasn't that they were gonna build revolutionary new products that, you know, save the planet. It was to protect the primacy of shareholders, right? To protect their interests. Just making marginal two to 5% improvements every year. Right. We will reduce our emissions by 2050, you know, we'll halve them. Great. Okay. that makes sense for you because you are a mining company and changing your operations overnight is impossible.
Edmund: I get it. But for small businesses, they don't produce anywhere near the emissions of mining companies. So if you're spending your entire time justifying your carbon, I think you're missing your point, which is like, that's not your strength. Your strength is most of your things are sourced locally. You are supporting local jobs, you are building a center of community.
Edmund: You are helping preserve livelihoods and place, and those things are marketing [00:34:00] assets. So a lot of the sustainability dimension that we have today is the result of corporate sustainability. Legacy as it were, that's just being adopted by smaller and medium sized companies. And I think that doesn't, you know, it doesn't make any sense at all if you wanna go down that road, good for you have at it. But that isn't where the opportunity for like marketing is. It isn't going to
Edmund: help you
Edmund: new customers or convert them
Edmund: because
Edmund: you are just, you are doing what corporations are doing and they don't really want to do it in the first place. The marketing teams at
Edmund: corporations don't sit there waiting for the sustainability report to be produced.
Edmund: In order to write good content. It's, you have to create that emotional attachment. If you wanna sell a sustainable product, make sure that whatever you have aligns to the value of your customers and your customer wants to be a good person. So find the thing that you do right and tell them about it. And if you [00:35:00] do that, there's a very good chance you will reduce emissions. The process because you're taking market share from big businesses. I just going on land again here. But the point on this one is if you are Carnival Cruisers or Royal Caribbean and you are producing it on these mega ships, you are emitting somewhere between 300 and 600 emissions per ber per day. If you are a hiking company or a small operator pretty much anywhere, your emissions are gonna be around 20 to 30. I think Intrepid. We usually on 36 kilograms of CO2 per day per tourist Wilderness Scotland, or Wilderness England. Off the top of my head, it's somewhere around 10 or 11 per day. Alright, so if Wilder and Scotland take 10 passengers from a cruise liner, they have essentially saved 400 and 540 kilograms per day per tourist they take. And that's the gain, like that's the advantage there.
Edmund: I don't think Wilderness Scotland reducing emissions [00:36:00] by 10% a year makes sense. I think them taking market share is better
Edmund: because they will actually save emissions globally far more effectively than they could by reducing it 10% a year.
Edmund: But that's, yeah.
Edmund: that's me on this one.
Anne: Yeah. I think that's a very interesting take as you're kind of turning it around. So it's taking emissions from another company by doing it better yourself. this is also the whole, well sustainable marketing, strategy that we have at the Good Tourism Institute that we teach, travel businesses and destinations is yeah, have the commun communicate sustainability in a transparent, effective way, but in a way that appeals to your specific client.
Anne: Because what you said, they usually don't care about the STGs. They care about, okay, what kind of experience am I gonna have? and why is this a good thing for me? what am I going to gain basically? so I think this is really good. reassurance, I think for travel businesses, if they find out, okay, this is what we're good at, how can we do even better on these aspects?
Edmund: Yeah, travelers want to know that they're a good person. They wanna feel good and cruise liners [00:37:00] make them feel like that. You know, you get on board, you will watch a video on how they do water recycling. So
Edmund: you get so many passengers coming off boats going, ah, cruise is so sustainable.
Edmund: No it isn't. It definitively is not. But Cruise liners know that reassuring passengers is part of the game. If you are a small business and all you talk about is emissions and you know, you make that your thing, you are really just reminding customers of guilt.
Anne: And that I think is why like sustainability has this sense of it's boring or that it doesn't sell. It is boring, it's stupendously dull when you are doing SDG reporting for like GOI or B Court, et cetera, oh my God, it's so dull. But from the storytelling angle, it really doesn't have to be, it can be incredible. And you know, the whole point is, and I'm, you know. From a marketing point of view, you alluded to this, you wanna make your customers feel like heroes.
Edmund: They wanna feel
Edmund: like good people. They, it's their impact, not [00:38:00] yours. You are not the main character when it comes to marketing. They are. And
Edmund: they don't buy your product because they've had some lengthy sort of reasoning process around emissions.
Edmund: It was an emotional attachment. It was a moment where they felt aligned to what type of experiences they wanted to have and the type of tourist they wanna be, you know, is aspirational. And that, I think is where sustainability has got it so well, is that
Anne: been marketing validation, we've been marketing incremental change for slightly softened products, whereas we should be telling the amazing stories of what travel gets. Right.
Edmund: Yeah. And, so talking about marketing, how do you think travel businesses or destinations can use, for example, a creator data or another AI tool data, in their marketing? Because like we, you don't want to make it boring, you don't want to overflow them with like graphs or with numbers, too much.
Edmund: But how do you still like back up your claims? Like we do this really well, with data that can [00:39:00] still be Interesting for travelers. Yeah, I think this is a really good question and I, we have a process at Equator where we generally, when we do any data work for a client, we want to understand as much as we can about their identity and their customers. So we'll spend an, I actually take on a client if I. And I really don't like being boxed into sustainability teams because marketing is where the drivers of decision making are, is going to take place, you know, sales. so if we can understand something about the customer, so their aspirations, their brands that they align to, demographic data, really kind of the identity that the traveler kind of aspires to that allows us to start to look for specifics in their tour design or their hotel design, or even in their investment strategy for the hotel investor or property developer or destination [00:40:00] that says, what is it about this place that is going to land or resonate with that traveler? What are the things that's gonna, you know, help them? sell a story that the customer going to invest in personally, and that is not going to be the UN SDGs, it's not gonna be B Core or Travel Life. It's much more likely that they want to be away from crowds. You know, they wanna be somewhere quiet. They want to be known that they're traveling to a place that only 350 people on average see a year. That's cool. That's a great thing to know. You want to, you know, you're gonna feel good if you're traveling and someone says, this tour you've just completed helped preserve a language that is at risk of extinction. amazing.
Anne: Yep.
Edmund: I'm saving languages by going on vacation. that is awesome. So telling those stories and making sure that they are backed up by data, you know, so, so you can actually show them the academic [00:41:00] articles that, you know, derive the information, or highlight how the calculation's being. You know, computed. Yeah, that's critically important, but the tourist doesn't need to see it unless they ask for it. So, you know, put the narrative, the story front and center, but have the data ready for when it is questioned. 'cause it should be questioned. It will be questioned,
Edmund: and you have to make sure that it's validated and backed up.
Edmund: Otherwise, trust disappears very quickly.
Edmund: Very true.
Edmund: But then with the use of ai, I think we've seen, kind of a growing concern about confidential data and that people should be kind of careful about, like with certain tools, but also with AI coming up with solutions are answered that are simply not true or based on fake news or with, Phil's data.
Anne: How do you balance that? Like how do you balance the excitement of AI with ethics, transparency, trust, maybe.
Edmund: Yeah, so we, last year we [00:42:00] went all in on building AI tools and. We, we were training in AI on half a million academic articles around tra tourism, so particularly on sustainability. And we're loading in sort of like public API data sets all of it, open source. So the idea was that we could build an AI agent that could tell companies what to do, how to be better. And it was a disaster because it just hallucinated all the time. and it really took, you know, we did as much engineering as we could, and then came to the realization in the end that the, it was the absence of data that was the problem. it wasn't necessarily just the AI itself, it wasn't the model. Even a more sophisticated model would do the same thing. And the reason is that we haven't studied enough, we haven't produced enough data. To be able to tie, you know, generate the type of insights required and large language models, which is normally what people mean when they talk about [00:43:00] AI these days. They're really bad at data, they're bad at mathematics. They're not reasoning. So, at least not in the way that, you know, I think we, we think so in terms of applying logic and critical thinking through a problem, which is very natural to a data scientist, natural to someone, you know, 15, 16 years old, doing mathematics. AI it doesn't follow that approach. And as a result of that, hallucination is much more likely and generating really poor examples.
Anne: And. That scares me a lot and it scares me a lot as well. we have some clients come back to us recently and they said, well, why would I use equator when I could just use ai? You know, I can ask it. What are the trends, for Gen X on travel at the moment? And it's gonna gimme an answer. No, it isn't. It's give you an answer, but you're not sure if it's actually the right one.
Edmund: yeah, I mean, it's giving you something,
Anne: Yeah,
Edmund: but I'm not sure I'd be kind enough to say the word is the answer. I think it's
Edmund: giving you a response
Edmund: and so [00:44:00] I worry enormously about how companies use ai. Actually, you know, Deloitte this week in Australia, Deloitte were found out for using AI for a half million dollar government report. And it was an AI generated reports, and it had just invented things that judges hadn't said. It invented precedent in law that didn't take place. And this is Deloitte. the funny part about this was that they were using the cheapest model, but the, that is shocking. And it wasn't found by the government.
Edmund: It was found by an independent researcher who said, I know
Edmund: those people. They didn't write these books. Like, these books don't exist. What are you talking about? And Deloitte's quality assurance failed. The government's assurance failed. And it was just taken as like, this is true when it isn't. And so this is an era where entering into where having that sense of trust and like doing the extra research to know the data is sound [00:45:00] is critically important and that these papers actually exist and that they have been peer reviewed, or that the government. Data that we're using to generate reports or insights is also sound 'cause it's not gonna take much for this stuff start to start leaking into the system and
Edmund: once it's in, it's very hard to get out. You know, a fundamentally corrupted database is a nightmare for any company.
Anne: Yeah. No, and that's also what you see in like in a lot of marketing,
Anne: sustainability pages on websites, for example, from two operators. And then there's this whole well clearly AI generated story. And then I'm like, the more I see AI in it, the less I believe you're actually doing.
Edmund: Yeah, I, you can't help that. Right? You kind of feel like a natural when you start to see the M dash being used a lot or it's not this, it's that and
Edmund: that, you know, these verdant is a word I see a lot more than I used to.
Edmund: Or sentence, starting with picture this.
Edmund: oh my god. Yeah, that, that's another one. It's just so [00:46:00] annoying. And so I think
Edmund: the other thing that, you know, you, you see as well as on LinkedIn, which is why I hate LinkedIn more. I mean, I've always hated LinkedIn, but now I really hate it
Anne: Well, I hate it more and more now too. It's,
Edmund: people just
Anne: I spend three weeks writing like some big data story. I publish it and then I get like 30 comments of people who have just taken my entire article, copied it into AI
Anne: I summarized it.
Edmund: And then they post it on link to boost the LinkedIn algorithm so they appear in more
Anne: feeds so that five years later they become a thoughts leader. they've had, you know, about equivalent, thought of a pistachio. So I don't really, I don't know. I do worry a lot about how pervasive AI is becoming Yeah.
Edmund: in how companies are talking and the research they're doing. Because I think, you know, trust is gonna become trusting data, trusting information, trusting what we see in on images and videos is gonna get harder and harder.
Edmund: so yeah, I do think we are entering a new phase where our information, the information error is far less trusted than it used to be.
Anne: Yeah. Yeah, that's definitely the [00:47:00] downside of ai, I think. But what are you most excited about what AI could do in the future? Like which developments to end on a positive note?
Edmund: Yeah. What a great question I am. What am I most excited about? Where I'm really excited about AI is that I think it is going to enable, millions of companies to. Start conducting their own research because at the cost of analyzing data, of generating insights, of cleaning data, which is, you know, can be 70 to 80% of a project can be cleaning data, suddenly got a lot cheaper and was automated. And, you know, we want on our sentiment analysis now at Equator, we used to have a really complex system that cost a fortune to set up.
Edmund: Now it's so much faster and we've kind of had to rebuild the entire process for how we read that data in and how we analyze it and then how we test it to ensure it's accurate and that we're, it is generating the insights, well and not hallucinating. And we are able to do that at a [00:48:00] much more affordable rate than we ever were.
Edmund: That I think is the part I'm most excited about because we may see that the big corporations, the kind of like booking dot coms, the Marriotts, the Wyndhams, that kind of feel a bit sterile, a bit staid, frankly, a bit lacking in identity. The ones that have the worst impact on people and planet, they are the ones who may not benefit as much from AI as the smaller companies who have already set up their local supply chains.
Edmund: They already are getting 90% of sustainability rights. They just don't have the ability to talk about it. That's the part that I'm excited about because I do think we could see an, we could see an era where small brand about brands are empowered and that excites me a lot.
Anne: Great. yeah, that sounds really good and definitely something I'm excited about too. Thank you so much for Yeah. Sharing all of this. It's been really interesting to, yeah, to kind of find out what you can actually do with data and how it can support sustainable tourism.
Anne: I think there's a lot to come and lot to it. but yeah, no. Great. Thank you so much for sharing.
Anne: I hope you enjoyed [00:49:00] that conversation as much as I did. There's a lot we can learn from AI and how we can use it for the better to steer sustainable tourism and increasing our positive impact all through smarter data-driven decisions. If you're enjoying a podcast, like and share this episode and subscribe to our channel to not miss any of the upcoming episodes.
Anne: Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.