Tourism Futures Convention 2024: Tourism Innovation and Learning – Are We Ready For the Future?
Conference: Tourism Futures Convention 2024
Date: 13th November 2024
Location: Heilbronn, Germany
Website: https://www.hs-heilbronn.de/tfc2024
Following the 2023 theme “Value Creation in Times of Change,” the Tourism Futures Convention 2024 shifted focus outward, raising the question of whether the tourism industry is genuinely equipped for future challenges. This year’s event approached the topic from multiple angles—including tourism education and business travel—emphasizing the urgent need for innovation and resilience. A talk by an early career researcher offered insights into the changing academic landscape and how PhD students are navigating a rapidly evolving world. The convention concluded with a forward-looking session on entrepreneurship and technology.
Session 1: Learning for future challenges: tourism futures deep learning applied to teaching the UN SDG
Presenter: Martin Robertson, associate Professor, Edinburgh Napier University, Scotland
This session explored how higher education can address “wicked problems” (Huber et al., 2016) by applying Design Thinking. Using sustainability as a case study in a business school curriculum, Robertson demonstrated how educators can transition from problem identification to solution orientation. Future visioning techniques (Robertson et al., 2015), grounded in real-world applications (Ferdinand and Robertson, 2019), were presented as tools to foster meaningful academic engagement.
Session 2: Sustainable business travel: challenges and solutions for the future
Presenter: Adrian Müller, University of Bern, Switzerland
Business travel remains a vital component of corporate life, facilitating networking, relationship-building, and market exploration. Despite advances in digital communication, face-to-face interaction continues to be indispensable. Yet, in light of accelerating climate change, making business travel more sustainable is increasingly urgent.
Müller proposed a new perspective: historically, business travel emphasized the exchange of information. Today, especially in the MICE industry, the focus has shifted toward building and maintaining relationships. In a digitized world, transactional and relational aspects have gained significance. This suggests a reorientation of business travel—from informational exchange to relational engagement—thus enabling opportunities to reduce travel conducted purely for information dissemination.
Session 3: Voices of future researchers
Presenter: Prof. Dr Ralf Vogler, Heilbronn University of applied sciences
This panel featured three emerging researchers (Kristina Epple, Nadja Schweiggart, and Sophie Henne) and a representative from a travel industry association (Tim Deisinger). It explored how young academics perceive their future in tourism research and practice. The discussion was marked by a blend of enthusiastic idealism and soft frustration. While the panellists’ passion was reminiscent of early-career optimism, there was also a clear concern that empirical findings in many areas have neither yet echoed by the tourism industry nor translated into meaningful change in tourism practice.
Session 4: Rebooting our future: we didn’t wait for innovation – we engineered it ourselves!
Presenter: Anna Kollmer, Managing Director, elysium audio solutions GmbH
This session chronicled the transformation of a traditional family business into an AI-driven startup specializing in 1:n live translation for tour guiding. Entrepreneurship, as Kollmer described, is a formidable journey. Initially, the company attempted to integrate too many features into its product, resulting in confusion among users. The breakthrough came with a return to the drawing board and the creation of a streamlined interface focused on core functionalities. Since TFC2024, the product has progressed from beta testing to initial real-world applications, showing promising developments.
Conclusion of the tourism futures convention 2024
The Tourism Futures Convention 2024 provided a multidimensional lens through which to examine the preparedness of the tourism industry for an uncertain and rapidly evolving future. Across all sessions, several core themes emerged — interdisciplinary innovation, the redefinition of educational and professional paradigms, the urgent call for sustainability, and the pivotal role of the next generation of researchers and entrepreneurs.
Design thinking as a transformative educational approach. The application of Design Thinking, as highlighted in the first session, extends far beyond its traditional use in product development or business innovation. In the context of tourism education, it functions as a pedagogical framework that encourages critical reflection, creativity, and actionable outcomes. Rather than focusing solely on identifying challenges, this approach equips learners with the skills to construct alternative futures and implement context-sensitive responses. Especially when addressing “wicked problems” such as sustainability or climate adaptation, education must evolve from passive transmission of knowledge to active problem-solving and future visioning.
Business travel in the anthropocene. The session on business travel underscored the paradoxes inherent in business travel. On one hand, it fosters economic activity, cross-cultural collaboration, and organizational growth; on the other, it carries a significant environmental footprint. By proposing a shift from information-based travel to relationship-based travel, the session challenged participants to rethink the very purpose of mobility. This reframing is not merely semantic — it suggests a potential path for reducing travel volume without sacrificing value creation. It also highlights a broader imperative: to design tourism and mobility systems that are aligned with ecological limits while remaining economically viable.
The future research landscape: between idealism and disillusionment. The “Voices of Future Researchers” panel was a poignant reminder that the next generation of tourism scholars carries both the burden of unresolved issues and the hope for transformative change. Their reflections revealed a dual consciousness: an acute awareness of the inaction that characterizes much of tourism policy and practice, and an undiminished belief in the power of research to make a difference. This dynamic is emblematic of the so-called “attitude-behaviour gap” that plagues sustainability efforts across sectors. Nonetheless, the intellectual energy and ethical commitment demonstrated by these scholars suggest that the academic community has a vital role to play in closing that gap.
Entrepreneurial innovation as a mode of future-making. The final session, featuring a live case study of technological reinvention, offered a concrete example of proactive future creation. Innovation here was not a buzzword but a lived process marked by setbacks, iteration, and bold decisions. Importantly, the session illustrated that successful innovation is not only about technology—it is equally about user-centric design, strategic humility, and the capacity to challenge entrenched assumptions. The journey from legacy business to agile startup encapsulates what many tourism enterprises must now consider: the future may not be a continuation of the present, but a radical departure from it.
A shared ethos of reflexivity and courage. What unified all sessions was a shared ethos: a willingness to reflect critically, to challenge the status quo, and to envision alternative futures. Whether through academic inquiry, pedagogical transformation, business redesign, or policy advocacy, the participants demonstrated that shaping the future of tourism demands courage, creativity, and cross-sectoral collaboration. Particularly striking was the alignment between academic and practitioner voices—a convergence that suggests the boundaries between research and application are becoming more porous, and rightly so.
In summary, the Tourism Futures Convention 2024 did not merely pose the question, “Are we ready for the future?”—it answered it with a tentative yet hopeful “We are getting there.” Readiness, in this context, is not a fixed state but a continuous process of learning, unlearning, and reimagining. It involves equipping students and professionals with future-facing competencies, reassessing the values that underpin tourism systems, and fostering an innovation culture that is not afraid to start over. The Tourism Futures Convention 2024 confirmed that the search for a better tourism future is still animated by idealism—but it is now tempered with pragmatism, informed by data, and energized by diverse voices committed to shaping what comes next.
This conference report has been written by the author and improved using AI (LLM model ChatGPT 4o) for better readability.
