Is your business sustainable, or are you just surviving?

Most tourism owners are caught in a game of survival, working crazy in the high season only to crash in the low season. In this episode, Samantha Smits explains why sustainability isn't only about the planet but also about sustaining your business and your mental sanity.

In this episode, Samantha dives into:

• Why a paperless office in Malta and a loop bus in Thailand changed how she views tourism.
• How her background as a Dutch Girl Scout built the foundation for operational excellence.
• Why sustainability is the most powerful (and overlooked) driver of profit and efficiency.

Connect with Samantha Smits on LinkedIn or her website.

Work with me: Are you a tourism leader looking to professionalise your operations and meet international certification standards? Let’s talk about how to protect your profit and give you your time back.

You can plan a call with me here.

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The Sustainability Edge is hosted by Samantha Smits, your guide to turning sustainability into a competitive edge.

Transcript

Speaker 0:00

Find that you might think that sustainability is another admin, but really it will help your business to not burn out and to diversify. Because burning out your business that is not sustainable and not going to sustain yourself. Hi, I'm Samantha Smits, and welcome back to the Sustainability Edge, the tourism podcast. No jargon, no fluff. We're breaking down sustainability and especially how to turn sustainability in a practical tool that gives you more profit, more time, stuff that's staying, and a business you can be proud of. Let's get started. Hello, hello, and welcome to the first episode of the Sustainability Edge or Tourism podcast. And I'm I'm so excited now to be recording this and for you to hear this later, as it marks the start of something new for me, right? But also for me an extra point to be in touch with you. And when I talk about you, I mean this tour operator owner, this activity provider, the accommodation provider who's working so hard every single high season to then just crash in the low season from all the crazy demands that tourism brings. It's such a crazy industry with all the demands it brings. It's really a game of survival where you work on all the time. And then I won't say nowadays, but the topic has been around for much longer than that. You're also being requested, hey, what do you do for sustainability? You occasionally get this email from your agents if you work with them or from your clients directly, and you're like, oh, sustainability? That's too. Some of you already know about it, already working on it, and others feel like, oh no, not another damn project. And again, it doesn't have to be a project. That's what I want this whole podcast to be about. That it's actually also gonna be working for you because sustainability in its core is about to sustain something. So let's say sustain your business, but also sustain your mental sameness that you can actually go through every high season, sustain the destinations that you offer, sustain the staff that are helping you, sustain everything. That's why it's such a key thing to be looking into. And you might be wondering why does this lady care so much about me and tourism being sustainable? Yeah, that's that is a good question. And that's exactly what I want this first episode to be about. A deeper introduction of me, where you hear more about me and what got me into sustainability in the first place, and why today I care so much about helping you with this. So it is mainly because I've seen also tourism companies from the inside, during my education and my internships. And let's just start from the beginning. So again, hi, I am Samantha Smiths. Proper introduction. I am from the Netherlands. You might catch a funny accent. I always think that my English is pretty good, but no matter where I go in this world, people will always pick me out, you're Dutch. And yes, that's true. So, born in the Netherlands, grown up in the Netherlands, I always had this interest, I think it mainly started with culture and with people, as I always love to talk to others and what others are doing. As young as in primary school, I already got in touch with different cultures. In the Netherlands, there's a lot of Moroccans from the Moroccan community. This is because uh without giving too much of a history lesson, there used to be a time we didn't have enough well people who wanted to do work, so we needed to get some migrant workers to do the work that basically we didn't want to do. That sounds so ugly, but it's honestly the truth, and what is still happening in many western countries today. So a lot of Moroccan men, they were invited to come to the Netherlands to help us with the jobs that we didn't want to take ourselves, and eventually they wanted to reunite with their own families, and this was allowed. So eventually a lot of Moroccan families started to settle in the Netherlands, and therefore, when I was in primary school, I also had people of Moroccan descent in my class, but also of African descent from different countries. I unfortunately do not remember exactly where, I believe one lady was from Ghana. And this already started my curiosity from a young age because I wasn't just in the class with people that only looked like me, and I would go to their homes and just like any play date, you know, and then see the brothers praying, or know when they were not allowed to join me for a swimming party. It already started a lot of cultural questions, my curiosity about people and the diversity and all the different opportunities and eventually countries and the holidays started coming up. I've also been a Girl Scout, or it started with a Cub Scout. I think when I was eight years old, I followed my friend, one of my best friends, into one of her hobbies because I was wondering where she was every Saturday morning where we couldn't play outside. Turns out she was at Scouts. And there's a lot of stereotypes about scouts, and I think it could even differ per country sometimes. But what I really liked about it, it was playing outside all the time. They would always come with like some games or some kind of activity, such as baking pancakes or playing games into the forest. And to be honest, I didn't even get that much education on the plans that were there or whatever, but they always would structure you hey, don't break that twig or leave this here, don't litter this. So just basically, as you were playing, now that I reflect on it, there was always like a lesson behind it or like a life skill, and always already from a young age, how you should behave in nature. And I think there were also volunteer opportunities with a specific strawberry day that you would be helping with the community. So there were so many opportunities by just participating with scouts. As soon as I became a Girl Scout, I think at the age of 13, there was an international jamboree that I could go to in England. I hadn't been to England at the time, was my first time to go from the Netherlands to England. It felt like a world journey, and it was magical. I still look back at it with so much, I don't know the right word, font. And there were so many scouts all around the world, globally on that one camping site. I just remember from a group from Chile, I remember groups from Kenya, I remember groups from all over Europe. So many counts were represented, and we were all connected by this idea of scouts, even though for some it can look more like a military exercise, for some it's more playing. We all were there kind of. I think I would now call it a festival because there was a stage, there were a lot of activities, but it was all child-friendly, and it was 10 days, so that was pretty big when I was 13 years old, to go camp for 10 days with a bunch of Girl Scouts and get to know some new people from England and Sweden. We were camping together, they would judge us for putting chocolate sprinkles on our sandwiches, I would judge them for putting crisps on their sandwiches. So I already got in touch with so many cultures at a young age, and I loved it. I only wanted more and more, and that's definitely where my interest in tourism came from, and that then grew into me actually going to study tourism uh for college. I did international tourism management at the Breda University of Applied Sciences. This was like a four-year bachelor, which was very specific about how to manage tourism, so not so much sustainability yet. But I did realize very like halfway through maybe the studies that okay, I do like tourism, but I also see a lot of things in tourism that I don't like, that even was doubting if I was still on the right course, but I knew I like cultures, I like exploring, I like the languages. I I am at the good place, but I have to find my own way. So eventually, when my first internship came up, in my third year of my bachelor, I had the opportunity to go to Malta, and I still love Malta dearly. I on average visit it every three years. Love, love, love Malta. And again, because I think a lot of people visit Malta thinking for it as a Sun Beach party destination, I didn't even know at the time. I was just mesmerized by the architecture that I could find online, by the rich history of all the different colonizations they went through and the marks it left, so it was still partly British, but also Italian, and even African, there was so much you kind of could see there. And I was like, I have to experience this myself. So I did. I went there for five months, I did an internship in a hotel from the human resources department to just get this overview how such a hotel is run, and because I like the social element of talking to employees, helping them out. And there I already got in touch with my first paperless office. It was unfortunately not the HR office I was working for, that one had a lot of paper, but that contrast was pretty big. All the papers and the printed CVs and everything I was going through in this HR office compared to the reservation's office, which at that time had an intern to help them make their office paper-free. Which made me think, oh, why would someone care about that? And then this is already something where the link between sustainability and tourism started to fall into place for me. Also, because in Malta specifically, there are more cars than inhabitants, which is a very interesting comparison to my home country, the Netherlands, where there are more bikes than inhabitants. So eventually you just start to see these connections. Also, in this five months, I arrived in the high season, so Malta was crazy. I arrived in August, the States of January. So, like every month I saw the decrease of tourists and the increase of inhabitants, and just this difference between the seasonality, what it does with a destination. It was like a life case study of just living there. It was so interesting. And fast forward, I finished that internship. I went back to my studies in the Netherlands, and I had the opportunity eventually to I think then I did the track in tourist experiences. So then I was also very much thinking, how do you design experience? Where there's also space for sustainability. And for my minor, here I dipped my first toes in actual sustainability, even though it was not linked to tourism yet. Here, I think it was called sustainability, uh, corporate responsible responsibility, sustainability, and professional identity. It was a very, very long name. I know that we were all good that we were just with a few people, maybe like 40-ish, but as you know, no one showed, not everyone shows up. And it was so interesting because they went into a lot of different topics that are part of sustainability. And as I went through that minor and I was there together with people from the hotel academy, from Leisure, from some others, I believe, it was so interesting to look at it from different angles and relate it to our backgrounds and to our studies. And that's immediately when I realized, oh, I want to do more of this because this could be a side of tourism that I'm really excited about, and that makes me believe that tourism is something good. Then we moved to my bachelor thesis, and for my bachelor thesis, I got in touch with Fair Tourism Foundation, a Dutch NGO who's doing a lot of CBT, which means community-based tourism work, and I just saw the opportunity to get to know more again about a different culture, dive into it, and I very much believed I should not be writing about someone else without hearing their part of the story. So I decided pretty quickly, no matter how expensive it would be, that I was actually going to visit a community that I would write about. It turned out to be the Cayan in May Hong Song, Thailand, because this is a project that they were working most with at the time. And indeed, I did it. This all happened just before the pandemic. I booked the flights, I first went to Bangkok, did some interviews there in head offices with contacts that were given me. Then I took the two sleeper train to Chiang Mai, and from Chiang Mai I took the Maang Song Loop bus, many, many loops to that province, and from there I ended up in the community. For travelers' perspective, it was already beautiful, but also there I for my study I got to compare two different villages. One village where allegedly a community-based tourism system already was in place, they had already been providing these experiences and have a structure behind it, whereas a neighboring village not at all, but this organization was interested in helping them set one up. So I had to kind of do a feasibility study, see the differences, and even test a hike in between the two. And it was so interesting. I could indeed see the differences between one village where they really were running tourism on their own terms, where they were having activities, and even though they were in place, during my time I could see that boats with tourists would drive, and that these tourists felt so rushed. And the actual community members were very upset, they don't even do the activities. We have activities, but they don't do them. But I could also see those activities were not marketed at all. And when trying to interview some guests, I could barely interview any guests for my thesis, because all of them were in a rush to said, Oh, we only got 15 minutes, we have to be back to the boat, and this and this. And I was like, Wow, why are they so rushed for this beautiful village with beautiful people? In 15 minutes, you cannot even do one of these activities, let alone see the actual village or talk to some people. So that already felt weird, because even though they had some kind of system in the background running, it was not fully working yet at that time. This is years ago. And then after I did the hike to the neighboring village, oh, that was shocking. It kind of was like a market, but surrounded by actual houses of Thai residents. And the main kind of visitors was domestic, it was Thai people visiting one of their own tribes, and it was really just selling souvenirs, there were not many activities, and the ladies were just on their phone all the time, which of course I mean everyone in the world deserves the right to do so. But it was such a different experience. So, here again, this contrast, this whole experience, it made me realize there is a good and there's a bad into tourism. It just really fueled my drive for doing things right in tourism, where the people in it are actually enjoying themselves and that the right guests are attracted or guided to behave right. There's so much that comes into it. So then when I finished that thesis, I graduated with that international tourism management bachelor in the middle of the pandemic at 21 years old. Yeah, that was not a good time for a bachelor in tourism. But luckily, I was so eager to learn more. I wasn't even ready to find a job at that point. And I was very glad that I found a master's in Wageningen, tourism, society and environment. And for me at that moment it felt like everything clicked. Like, ah, this is the side of tourism I'm excited about because I could see that my classmates from the bachelor, some even ended up in IT. A lot of them ended up doing different things in tourism, which I was so confused about. So I go and do that master in the middle of a pandemic, so I think I only had like a few classes on site, and indeed, it was, of course, a very big jump to go from a bachelor in college to go to a university master, but it was so, so rewarding. I learned so many deep topics, I learned how to critically think about them, and very unique, but also this master included another internship opportunity, which I was so excited about. I first decided to do my thesis because I hoped that after that the world would open up again, and I had to resort to the Netherlands, but even within the Netherlands, as I told you, we have a lot of migrants. People say that a lot of Mercedes are very multicultural or intercultural, whatever term you wish to put onto it. So I decided to use a case study of Utrecht, which is one of my favorite cities of the Netherlands, and to compare walking tours or experiences between Dutch learners and Dutch speakers, because there's a lot of experience in there, and I got to know so many interesting people that I still talk to today that you could classify as refugees, migrants, or simply a Dutch learner, and their experiences, their stories, their love for their culture, but also their how they get into ours. It was so I felt like traveling in my own country within one of the cities that I know. It was another amazing opportunity of the power of tourism, no matter if you travel far or even do it in your own country. And then when I had the opportunity to travel again for my internship, this time I went to Tanzania. I always had this curiosity of visiting Africa. I'm aware that that's the continent and not a country. And it took me some research to find out what country I would have to visit. My first country already was South Africa. But people often say, yeah, South Africa is beautiful, but it's not the real Africa, you have to go to the west or the east. So I did my research for those and landed on Tanzania, knowing that the sister of one of my friends did some volunteering there a long time ago. And I ended up helping a tour operator who had already been Travel Life partner by themselves, but they were trying to get towards TrevLife certified for some time, but they just couldn't manage themselves, and they were asking if I could help them out. At that time, I never heard of Travel Life before. By now I know. And I felt like, okay, I'll figure it out, I'll come and do it for you. Did some research, talked to TravLive representative, felt confident I could do it. I went on location, and it was the best experience because I could see it from the tour operator side before actually becoming a consultant. So from the tour operator side, I could see what their bottlenecks were, why it was hard to continue, if only one person worked on it, when it wasn't a whole system yet. This gave me so much, by now I should call it market research, on how these things work behind closed doors. So after this experience, I was graduated again, but now with a master at I think 24. And I already realized at that point that I enjoyed that experience and the country so much that I would look love if I could do it again somehow. But of course, I had to go back to the Netherlands, and once I was back in the Netherlands, I think for six months total, I had my studio again, the quarter life crisis began. What am I gonna do with my life? I have to start finding a job, student loan is over, and all of the student things you can imagine were over. And I remember that I looked at some traineeships, I remember I was looking at some office jobs, I did some interviews, but everywhere it didn't it didn't nearly excite me as much as the thought of returning to Tanzania or to travel. Because even after my Malta experience, I always told myself when I graduate I have to be abroad for a little. And the plan initially always was to return to Malta. But then after that Tanzanian experience, oof, I had a competitor. But again, how could I make it work for me? I cannot go somewhere without a job and without any money. And I start I think I actually posted on my own Facebook to ask for advice in my own network at that time. That I wasn't interested in office job. I was looking for something remote, something I could travel with. And how I I just remembered that at that time I found it very yeah, maybe like a little bit anxious to post that what people think of it, but at the same time, no matter what, it's my life, and what you don't ask, you don't know. And indeed, I got very positive answers, and quite a lot. I could even some people from my primary school connect with me, not in tourism at all, but a lot of them said the same things, you have to become an entrepreneur, start your own business. Oof, that sounded so scary. I was not I was not sure about that. At the same time, I was doing outreach, of course, for jobs I thought could be remote. And I was also talking with TrefLife at the time because I had this internship experience and would love to help more companies. And I know they have a coaching framework. If you become a Treflife member, they assign you a coach. At that time, I thought coaches had like a remote job, and yes, it is remote, but I thought it was like contracted. But then when I asked, I realized it was freelance, so it is a task you can do as a consultant next to a bunch of other things. So at the beginning was like, this is all not as easy as it sounds, but everything started to bustle together. Then I realized, you know what? I can start this business and already have travel life as my first client because I have this experience of helping another company get certified, and I can then actually do this again. So again, being young and feeling like I can every day change my plan and do something new, why not? I took the leap, I registered my business, my sole proprietorship, and I went back to Tanzania and started working with Travel Life, and that is how I ended where I am today. But of course, this is some time ago. I started with my business, I think 27th of March 2023. So we're now later, and I've learned so much in the meantime because again, I I'm so grateful for my clients who have invited me into their offices or who have shared with me their highs, their lows, their hardships, their opportunities, and again to just be be feeling like a contribute to the tourism industry. It is what really really energizes me. So long story not short, but hey, that's why I started the podcast. That is how I ended up where I am today, and still today, I just love to to feel of service, as in being invited into the office and help you fast track the experience certification or to have a call with you and to think about these things, and having learned how to become an auditor, and having these just walking into a room and seeing the opportunities. I just want to show you how to fix it, where your opportunities are, and to stop your office to be full of paper, drowning in papers, all the unnecessary CCs, or your gas or your partner is bugging you about this thing called sustainability, and just for you to be able to see what it can mean for you. So as I just introduced myself, but also if you've heard in the introduction of this podcast, it's maybe not necessarily about saving the planet. I mean, that is the one of the biggest major benefits that we in the end get to do with sustainability, but there's so much more into it. I'm also talking about your business, as I said, sustaining your business. And I see we're already over 20 minutes, and I'm aiming for every episode to be on the short, sharp, actionable side, so to not head towards the hour, but the right introductions can go be a little bit longer. The point is just I just want you to realize that sustainability can really be your edge. And yes, even if in some ideal world everyone would be sustainable, which is a statement which I don't see working at any time. But even then, because sustainability is so big, it goes from people, society to the environment. Even within environment, you have the destination, you have the animals, you have to put there's so many things, but also econom economy from your own bank to charity. There's so much you can look into, which also means there's so much for yourself to diversify in. Sustainability can really help you to diversify if you don't just claim I'm sustainable, because so many can say that. It's the point within sustainability that you excel in. And I just love identifying that for you or showing the opportunities for you, and I'm gonna talk about that for sure a whole bunch more in the upcoming episodes. But the point is you might think that sustainability is another admin, but really it will help your business to not burn out and to diversify, because burning out your business that is not sustainable and not going to sustain yourself. In this podcast, I kind of want to help you change how you look at sustainability, the myths you may have, and everything that comes with it, and just as we go see what's going on, or if you submit a topic, see how I can tackle that, just keep it easy and accessible. So I'm gonna cut myself short now because I can ramble on for hours. Just for you. Stop seeing sustainability as a chore and start looking at it as the opportunity. It can be the most powerful driver of even profit, I dare to say, but also efficiency efficiency that you have. Sustainability at its best is efficient business of resources, human resources, even all of it. And if you're ready to stop firefighting, well if I already have triggered your curiosity and you already want to talk individually about this missing edge, if I dare to say, that we talked about today, go to the show notes. There will be a link in there for you to book a call with me, and let's look at your business together. Then see you in the next episode. Thank you for listening, and congratulations on investing your time today to think strategically about your future, to make sure you never miss a step to understand sustainability better, how to grow your competitive edge. Follow the podcast right now, and if this was helpful, please leave a five star rating. It will help other people like you to find these tools. I'm Samantha Smits, and I'll see you in the next episode.