The future of tourism: interview with Ian Yeoman about the Journal of Tourism Futures Open Access

My name’s Ian Yeoman. I am a Professor of Disruption, Innovation and New Phenomena at the Hotel Management School Leeuwarden (HMSL) at NHL Stenden University of Applied Sciences. I am also connected to the European Tourism Futures Institute (ETFI) at the same university, as I am co-editor of the Journal of Tourism Futures. All of my background and all of my passion is about the future of tourism. I am also passionate about future studies, scenario planning and Sunderland AFC (Yeoman, 2022a; Yeoman and McMahon-Beattie, 2023).

When you worked as a crystal ball gazer and scenario planner at VisitScotland, you inspired our university to set up the European Tourism Futures Institute in the late 2000s. What was the reason for VisitScotland to get started with scenario planning?

Well, I think there are two questions here. First, why did VisitScotland want a scenario planner and second why did I want the job?

So I’ve got to take you back to 2001. Two events globally were starting to shape the future of tourism and they had an impact on the flow of international arrivals. One event was 9/11 (Holloway, 2008) and the Twin Towers and the other event was foot and mouth disease (Yeoman et al., 2005b). Both events had a significant impact on tourism, but these were events that were in the external environment. They were fundamentally not tourism events that caused a disruption.

Previous to those events, VisitScotland was concerned with marketing and how do we sell Scotland. The organisation was fundamentally about marketing, advertising, segmentation and consumer behaviour. These two external events brought about a realisation. The world’s changing and there’s something more than tourism segmentation that we need to understand. VisitScotland raised the question that we need to understand the external environment and how the external environment shapes tourism.

At the same time VisitScotland had appointed a new Chief Executive, Philip Riddle, who had come from Shell Oil. He came from an environment where they understand the external environment, and it was scenario planning that drove strategy at the oil company (Gilad, 2004). VisitScotland previously had a Futures Department, but it did very little futures work and, therefore, Philip Riddle decided to establish a culture of looking to the future in a more systemic way. He championed the cause of scenario planning and created a post within the Research Department, under Dr. Brain Hay (Head of Research), called a “Scenario Planning Research Manager”. When this post was advertised, I saw it pop up and I thought “oh, that looks interesting” because at the time I was in the final throws of finishing my PhD at Edinburgh Napier University (Yeoman, 2004; Yeoman et al., 2000). I’d been there about seven years and I was getting itchy feet and looking for something else.

My PhD was about Soft Operations Research, or Soft OR (Yeoman, 2004), which was about problem structuring methods and facilitation in a business context. Examples of Soft OR include systems dynamics, cognitive mapping, systems thinking but also scenario planning. So, I knew about scenario planning and the PhD was looking at how different companies operated it, including Shell Oil and British Airways. At the same time, I was an academic in tourism, so I knew a lot about hospitality and tourism.

Anyway, I applied for the job and the first question that was asked by Malcolm Roughead, who was the Director of Marketing at the time, was “why do you think we should employ you?” And I think my opening line was “Well, I’m probably your perfect candidate. I know lots about tourism and I know lots about scenario planning and nobody is going to have that unique knowledge of both. I’ve got depth in tourism and an understanding of scenario planning”, and that’s what Malcolm said got me the job. Within the first two minutes of the interview, he knew I was the right person for the job. But the big decision for me was to leave academia as I hadn’t finished my PhD yet. So, after about a month of negotiations, we settled on a contract and I started to work at VisitScotland.

And what has your contribution been during the time that you worked there as a “scenario planning research manager”?

Well, when I started off, and I didn’t know what the job was about and nobody else did either, I actually wrote a paper about my thinking early on. It was a paper that appeared in Surrey University’s Journal on Hospitality and Tourism Management which is called “Developing a Scenario Planning Process Using a Blank Piece of Paper” (Yeoman and McMahon-Beattie, 2005). Basically, that’s how I started. I started off with a blank piece of paper and I actually brainstormed and produced a mind map of what I thought we should do, and that was clustered into three areas, economic modelling, environmental scanning and scenario construction.

VisitScotland saw themselves as an economic development agency and wanted to work from an economics perspective. So, we started to do work with the Moffat model (Blake et al., 2006) and we started to work with Professor John Lennon at Glasgow Caledonian University and Professor Theresa Sinclair at Nottingham University, constructing a Computable General Equilibrium (CGE) model to quantify events and disasters.

Environmental scanning, was about interviews, understanding the literature, webinars, seminars and a systematic approach to try and identify what are the trends that shape the future of tourism. The scenario construction cluster had two parts. One, we decided to have a set of baseline scenarios that we’d work on for the organisations and I worked with the Futures Foundation (now the Foresight Factory) ^[1] in London (through tender), constructing Scottish tourism scenarios (Yeoman and Lederer, 2005). The other scenarios where about particular topics, like foot and mouth disease (Yeoman et al., 2005b), economic forecasts (Munro and Yeoman, 2005), or technology (Yeoman and McMahon-Beattie, 2006).

So, that was the whole process. My journey started off and I didn’t know what to do. When I started, my boss (Brian Hay) went on holiday and he said it’s up to you what you want to do. There was a new research team being brought into the organisation, with one on branding, somebody on surveys and somebody on the industry stakeholders. Their roles were very clearly identified, but my area was new and vague.

At the same time, Saddam Hussein had decided to invade Kuwait. Because it was an immediate threat, this became the starting point. We asked the question “What would be the consequences of Saddam Hussein’s war in Iraq on tourism in Scotland?” (Yeoman et al., 2005a).

There were lots of people that had different ideas of what to do. It could have been a full Middle Eastern war with high oil prices and scarcity or it could have been a blip that was over straight away. So, in order to gain the confidence of the organisation, I said I would do a scenario set based around that question. I worked with a lady called Miriam Galt, who has a company called Bee Successful ^[2] in Perthshire, and who was doing some scenario planning work. We got together and we worked on a scenario set. I did a first draft of those scenarios – they were just outlines. Then I had a conversation with Philip Riddle and he looked at me and said “This is not going to happen”. He dismissed them. He said there they were “a load of rubbish”, they were “terrible” and that “they’ve got no value to [him] and the organisation anyway”. This was very demoralizing.

However, one of the scenarios, which was called Global Northern Ireland (Yeoman et al., 2005a), basically said as a signal of the scenario, that troops would be at Heathrow airport. Guess what? Three days later, like in the storyline of the scenario, troops were at Heathrow Airport and Malcolm Roughead, the Director of Marketing, said “didn’t Ian say this?”

Malcolm then said that VisitScotland would need to make sense of this situation because it was becoming very fluid. Malcolm then said to me “I’ll have a word with Philip and I want you to get right back on those scenarios and I want you to do two things. First, I want you to bring them to level 2, through interviewing stakeholder and making the stories more robust. Look at the consequences for domestic and international tourism. And the second thing I want you to do is to economically model them. I want you to quantify them from an econometric perspective.”

So, I went back to Miriam and we worked on the full set of those scenarios, strong storylines, implications for domestic tourism and international tourism. We also then contracted out to Oxford Economics ^[3] the economic modelling of the scenarios and we came up with a range of economic indicators for each scenario plus GDP changes, plus they did some forecasts for us over three years. So, the scenarios were quite robust. We published it in the Journal of Travel Research in 2005 (Yeoman et al., 2005a). So, it is all out there.

This war was unfolding very fast and the board didn’t know what to do. So, we used the scenarios internally to make sense of the future. We ran scenario workshops with the management team, with the Board of Directors and Philip sent out a memo to every department within VisitScotland requesting them to do a risk assessment of their yearly plan based upon these scenarios. So, I had to do a workshop with each department within VisitScotland in which they took each scenario and identified risks and decision. At another level, I also worked with several Area Tourist Boards to look at regional tourism in these scenarios. So, basically within a six to eight week period, we had tried to future proof Scottish tourism. I was right in the thick of it. I was doing scenario workshops all of the time and people were looking for implications. Basically, the scenarios established me within the organisation and people didn’t think of me as something vague, or as an extra project anymore.

The scenario set worked because it helped people make decisions about what to do. Within international marketing and domestic marketing, they were able to change some campaigns. They were able to focus on particular segments that wouldn’t be affected by the wars. So, we moved money around within the organisation and within the Area Tourist Board and it worked.

One of the roles of VisitScotland was thought leadership. We’ve done this scenario set before any other agency within the UK Government, and my chief executive Philip Riddle was on Newsnight ^[4], which is like the Ten O’clock News, talking about the scenario set. Thus, the management team and Board of Directors saw the work I was doing and how valuable the scenario planning process had become for VisitScotland.

So that was my first success story. After that my job became easier because I became accepted within the organisation and the stakeholders.

The next phase was establishing scenario planning to drive policy for the Scottish Government. We did this by bringing together all the stakeholders involved, to create a set of baseline scenarios that everybody could talk about using the same language, thus creating a shared understanding about the future of Scottish tourism. This became the foundation of government policy and I could then demonstrate how my work influenced policy (Hay and Yeoman, 2005; Yeoman and Lederer, 2005).

Did it have a long-lasting effect on VisitScotland? Do they still have a dedicated department on scenario planning?

No, they don’t. I came to a crossroads in 2008. I had done a lot of scenario planning with regard to national policy and VisitScotland. So, I made a decision on the direction I wanted to take. I took a position at Victoria University in Wellington, New Zealand as an Associate Professor. In the meantime, I’d recruited Chris Greenwood as my researcher analyst and he took over the work I was doing. But Chris’s perspective of what he wanted and what I was doing were different. He took more of an analytical approach and forecasting perspective with a focus on the short term. In the end, they contracted out all of the qualitative scenario planning work which I did.

So, in 2008, you went from VisitScotland in Edinburgh to Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand and that brought you back into academia. In the years that followed, you developed into an internationally renowned expert in the field of scenario planning in tourism.

First, I would like to briefly talk with you about your contribution to the scientific knowledge development on the future of tourism. Maybe it's difficult to say about yourself, but can you outline what contribution you have made to the development of knowledge regarding scenario thinking and scenario planning and tourism at large, globally?

Firstly, I was the first person to embrace and champion tourism futures and scenario planning, so I was at the helm of the topic. If you look at the history in the development of future studies within tourism, it’s my name that’s been at the forefront of that (Yeoman and McMahon-Beattie, 2023).

Secondly, because I was the first at the gate, I’ve also created a critical mass. One of the benefits of working with Dr Brian Hay at VisitScotland, was that he has done a PhD and that he encouraged me to write. I wanted to write because I knew I would only be at VisitScotland a certain amount of time and then I would go back into Academia. So, I used my time at VisitScotland to write some very good papers on the future of tourism and the methodology, therefore, I was also the first person to write about the future of tourism from a science knowledge perspective. The first publications in that field were mine, and as a consequence of doing that I have been seen as the champion of the future of tourism and scenario planning since those days. I have quite a high profile and I am highly cited.

So, I’ve contributed substantially to knowledge development in scenario thinking and scenario planning. I was first at the gate, I’ve produced a substantial body of knowledge, and my name is associated with the future of tourism, when it comes to scientific publications. It’s all published in my most recent paper Future past of tourism: critical reflection’s on the rise of tourism futures (Yeoman and McMahon-Beattie, 2023).

One important milestone, of course, closely associated with the European Tourism Futures Institute, was the establishment of the Journal of Tourism Futures. Can you describe what prompted you to start with this journal?

Well, I was working with yourself (Professor of Scenario Planning at ETFI) and Jeroen Oskam (Programme Manager of the ETFI) at the time. Basically, you were at the University of Applied Sciences and the role of applied sciences is to help, assist and guide industry on some of the problems that you’ve got around you. That’s why the ETFI was set up. You had a problem of uncertainty in trying to make sense of the future of tourism within the province of Friesland. But to me, it’s also about creating a legacy. It’s not about consultancy, it’s about good scientific knowledge. If a topic area has to evolve and move on from a science perspective, it needs to be published in high quality journals. At that time, I thought there was room for a specialist journal about the future of tourism.

So, that’s what we tried to do and that’s how it started. And I think Jeroen Oskam (Yeoman, 2017c) and yourself were quite keen to do that, so we worked together to establish the journal.

There’s so many journals out there. Was there any room for another journal in the field of tourism?

You’re quite right. I’ve had this debate with several people. The more successful journals in tourism research are journals that are very broad, such as, Tourism Management, The Journal of Sustainable Tourism, The Journal of Travel Research or Annals of Tourism Research. They’re all very broad and they cover everything. However, if you look at the evolution and development of a subject, they have a degree of specialism. You only have to look to medicine. Medicine is a very broad Church in the terms of science. You have big journals, like The Lancet, which are the publications of the British Medical Association, which cover everything, but at the same time medicine is a series of specialisms: oncology; paediatricians; ear, nose and throat; obstetrics; etc. They’re very specialist and there are research journals in all of these fields.

So, we had specialist knowledge and I made the decision, in discussion with you, that “we need[ed] to take that specialist area forward, we need[ed] to do something around the area of tourism futures and with the ETFI” and say “this is the type of specialist knowledge and it makes a contribution towards tourism”. That’s why I thought it was really important to establish the specialist Journal of Tourism Futures ^[5] based on that research, because, you can’t change the past, and to me, the only thing researchers can change or influence is the future. Whereas very few people were talking about the future of tourism, I thought the journal needed a different approach from many of the other journals, which to me were very historical, or looked at the present, or looked backwards.

So, it started, if I am not mistaken, with the first issue in 2013. Can you describe how the Journal has evolved over the years?

Well, it’s changed quite a lot because, like any new journal, the question is how do we start it? First, we tried it as a subscription journal and I think we pitched it to Sage and Taylor & Francis. But I don’t think they were interested. So, in the end, we said we’ll publish it ourselves as an Open Access journal. Initially, we were going to talk to Henry Stewart but it didn’t happen for a number of reasons. So, we sent a speculative email to Emerald to ask whether they would be willing to publish this journal and they came back saying “We are just going to start off Open Access journals or journals published by companies or universities. We would be very keen to support your journal and take it forward because you would be our first journal.”

So, they were very keen for us to work together. They were thinking about starting these Open Access journals because that’s what they said the future was, while we were the first one to ask them for some sort of partnership. So, we were in the right place at the right time. So that’s how it all started.

Once Emerald had said yes, they gave us a costing. We took it to the Board of the University. When they said yes, we decided that the Journal of Tourism Futures would be the legacy of the Future of Friesland project which was the EU project that got the ETFI started.

Initially, the Journal struggled, because, like any new journal, you are starting off at the bottom. They’re about 150 research journals in tourism, hospitality and events, and we would have been ranked at #150. So that was very low down. Therefore, we struggled to get papers. We just had to tap on people’s shoulders, like yourself or your network, to convert case studies or projects into papers. So, it was a very slow start and it was only two issues a year at that time.

What have been key success factors for the further successful development of the Journal of Tourism Futures?

We did a couple of things. With the Editorial Board, we appointed some very senior people from the industry and we initiate a number of special issues. Dr Eleni Michopoulou did a Special Issue on the Future of Accessible Tourism (Michopoulou et al., 2015). Craig Webster and Stanislav Ivanov did a Special Issue on Political Ideologies as Shapers of Future Tourism Development (Webster and Ivanov, 2016). You did a special issue on your PhD topic of overtourism together with Dorina-Maria Buda and Katharina Gugerell (Postma et al., 2017). So, we had a number of success stories and they sort of built up the reputation of the Journal. The content started to build up and because it was Open Access, we then started to see some good papers appear in the specialist issues. Every year it got better. But I think the key flip point was COVID-19 as it was the big disruptor on tourism. International arrivals fell off the cliff and dropped by 81–85%. This was the one event which people didn’t know how to make sense of and at the same time, there was a lot of critical uncertainty about what the future of tourism was going to be. Consequentially, more people started to write about what future they wanted to see. There’s the saying in the literature “in a world of disaster, the only thing you can think about is hope.” In other words, if you have dystopia, which COVID-19 was, you look to Utopia. You look for that preferred future, that better future.

So, in 2021, you started to see a lot of writing on regenerative tourism, sustainability and the preferred future that we wanted. This brought future studies right to the centre of tourism academia. We had a record number of submissions to the Journal around that period on these topics.

At the same time good academics were coming forward for special issues, such as Professor Joseph Cheer, who is the Editor in Chief of Tourism Geographies. He came to us and asked for a special issue on Transformational Change and Global Crisis (Cheer et al., 2021). Another big name was Professor Pauline Sheldon, who asked for a special issue on Regenerative Tourism (Ateljevic and Sheldon, 2022). We had some very senior people submitting papers and being guest editors of the Journal, so it just sort of came together and worked.

Can you back up the Journal’s growing reputation with figures?

As a consequence of these developments, we’ve been a Q1 journal for the last three of four years. If you look at the Scopus index, I think we’re ranked at #12 and so we’re in the top 2–3% of journals and, for the first time, only two or three weeks ago, we’re on Google Scholar rankings for hospitality and tourism journals and we ranked at #19.

Once you’re in that top Q1 quartile, it fundamentally drives other people to want to submit papers. We are in a situation now where 89% of papers that are submitted are rejected, because we’re driving higher quality and also a lot of papers we have submitted to us have nothing to do with the future of tourism, I’ll be straight with you.

So, I think that’s where the Journal is at the moment. I think the Journal is a voice for researchers and a voice for industry about the future of tourism.

And what would be your aspirational scenario for the next 10 years of the Journal? What are your ambitions?

Well, the Journal needs to maintain where it is in the terms of research. I’d like to see the Journal as an A+ journal according to the Australian Business Deans Council ^[6], which is a top five journal, rather than being in the top 20.

It’s only three volumes at the moment. I’d like to move the Journal to five or six volumes, and I’d also like to broaden the range of papers that we’ve got. But I still want the Journal to be the voice of long-term futures thinking for tourism.

What do you mean with broaden the range of papers?

Well, I think that’s important to me. Research is not just about academic research. To me research has to be cutting edge. Industry does a lot of cutting-edge research. We need to engage with the World Bank, the World Tourism and Travel Council or the World Economic Forum and their research needs to be published in the Journal of Tourism Futures.

So, the Journal of Tourism Futures should be a broad journal of high-quality research, some very empirical and academic, but also some that’s very opinionated and things that represent industry. It has to be high quality and accessible.

What role does scientific knowledge about the future of tourism play in this scenario that you have? Given that the development of scientific knowledge in this domain is in its infant stage?

If you are at the cutting edge of medicine, science or geography, the way you established your work as cutting edge is to publish it. So, cutting-edge research in medicine is published in The Lancet. Cutting-edge research in climate change is published in Nature. Cutting-edge research associated with the future of tourism should be published in the Journal of Tourism Futures. That research is high quality, peer reviewed and it becomes the source of information or the source of knowledge to guide where industry and stakeholders want to take us.

So far, we have been discussing your contribution to scientific knowledge development on the future of tourism, but now I would like to turn to your contributions to scenario thinking and scenario planning in practice, in the tourism industry. What influence has your work had on futures thinking in the tourism industry itself?

I think there’s lots of things here. I think anybody that’s looking at the future of tourism and that would do a literature review, would stumble across my work. That’s the starting point, that’s one contribution. I think all of the previous studies that I have done are good case studies, so people can learn from them.

If you’re looking at how to influence industry, I can answer that question in several ways. From an industry perspective, I am often invited to industry of destination conferences to talk about the future of tourism (Observatory, 2024; Yeoman, 2017a, b, c; 2022b, 2023), and I’ve written several reports about the future of destination from a policy perspective (Hay and Yeoman, 2005; Yeoman, 2023).

From an academic perspective, when anyone is writing about the future of tourism, I have a high media profile and am often quoted in trade magazines, newspapers and television. I have even featured in Inflight magazines for Virgin Atlantic and Qatar Airways.

What was your impact on New Zealand tourism?

I arrived in New Zealand in 2008 and I replicated the work I did at VisitScotland. That work fed into government policy. I received a large research grant of NZ $850,000 in 2009–2013 to create a set of scenarios about New Zealand tourism set in 2050 (Yeoman, 2012; Yeoman et al., 2015; Yeoman and McMahon-Beattie, 2014; Yeoman et al., 2013). When COVID-19 came along in 2020, many people thought it would be over in six months. That’s what the New Zealand Ministry of Business, Innovation and Environment (MBIE) thought. During that time, I don’t think the Ministry knew what would happen. They set up a Future of Tourism Task Force with a focus on regenerative tourism, aligned with the research of Anna Pollock (Bellato et al., 2022; MBIE, 2021; Pollock, 2012; Pollock, 2019). But it was too utopian (like many visionary projects), so it failed. In 2021, they took a more practical approach using a Tourism Industry Transformational Plan focused on specific futures and problems. I was commissioned by the MBIE to create scenario sets on the Future of Work (Yeoman and McMahon-Beattie, 2024) and the Future of Sustainable Tourism (MBIE, 2022).

Didn’t you also do something in Norway?

You are quite right. At the same I was involved in the formation of the ETFI. Between 2012 and 2016, the Norwegian Government was looking to the future and they asked the question, while here was a big push on policy “What does Norway look like in the next 20 years without oil?”. They wanted to look at the consequences for a number of sectors and one of those sectors was tourism. What would the tourism industry look like with post oil in 2040? So, the Norwegian Research Council commissioned a series of scenario studies to delve into this topic. Because Norway is a very expensive destination and a very niche tourism product, it helped them make sense of where tourism was going to go, but also where they should put a focus on experiences and product development (Enger et al., 2015).

If we look at knowledge development about the future of tourism, again in the industry, are there any trends or developments that you observe here?

I have always had this thing about what is future studies, what we should be doing and the things we should be involved in. My grasp of future studies at the moment, is that we should be doing things that nobody else is doing. There are two big flip points in tourism at the moment: artificial intelligence and climate change. We are in a situation now where the tourism and hospitality industry has become conscious of these flip points and, therefore, there is a heavy focus on these two. Take the AI perspective, ever since the emergence of ChatGTP one and a half years ago, people are aware how search models and decision-making models could change. Artificial Intelligence is fundamentally machine learning and we’ve been talking about machine learning and AI for the last 20 years. But it wasn’t conscious. The areas that we should be looking at are those where the industry is not yet conscious of. These are fundamentally the weak signals. We should be talking about and developing scenarios and pathways of understanding around some of these weak signals and how important they are to the industry in the terms of going forward. And that takes me into philosophies of whatever’s happening in science fiction we should be looking at, in the terms of how that would shape the future of tourism (Yeoman et al., 2021).

Would that also be the advice that you would like to give to the industry?

My advice to the hospitality and tourism industry is that when you are thinking about the future, you need to think the impossible and you need to think the unlikely. Why? Because AI could be a radical disruptor in the future. We need to ask, is the future general manager just a computer? Are we about to see the end of the hotel manager as we know it today? What does AI mean for humanity and hospitality? These questions are scary questions.

When you are thinking about the future of hospitality or the future of tourism, you need to be thinking a lot harder. This morning, I had a conversation with Lesly Vella, Deputy CEO of the Malta Tourism Authority) (Yeoman and Vella, 2024) and we were talking about the circumstances or the series of events which would lead to the end of tourism in Malta, because if you can understand the end, you can understand the future. I think there’s too much normative thinking in futures studies at the moment. I think we just need a bit more creative and imaginable (Yeoman et al., 2021).

What does this mean for the Journal of Tourism Futures?

One of the problems with the Journal of Futures Studies is that reviewers are very rational and normative creativity and speculation is missing from published, peer review research. Remember that Dator’s Laws of the Futures is that a scenario set should have a degree of sceptism (J. Dator, 2009; J. I. Dator, 1981). If it doesn’t, it’s not good futures research.

Thank you, Ian, for the interesting conversation about the history of futures thinking in science and in the industry. I learned a lot of new things. Is there anything you would like to add?

There’s one thing I need to add as well. In the evolution of tourism futures and scenario planning it’s also down to the people that are involved in the topic. So, one of the things that’s really important to mention, is the success of the ETFI and also how you’ve (Albert Postma) led the team. Recognition must be given to yourself and the way you have been a facilitator, coach and mentor to many of the people around you. A lot of the success with the ETFI, I’ll be straight with you, has been down to you and that mustn’t be underestimated. I think you’ve been a good mentor and a good coach to many people within the team and I think you have brought a system to tourism futures, which is systematic, science focused and pragmatic.

This paper forms part of a special section “10th Anniversary of the Journal of Tourism Futures”, guest edited by Dr Stefan Hartman, Prof. Albert Postma and Prof. Ian Yeoman.