Don’t Put Your Heart in Airplane Mode: Happiness Emissions, Hotel Towels, Elephants, Mental Health, and Tourism
If we vacation to heal our wounds and wound hospitality workers in return, we do nothing net-positive for the world. So, how do we ensure that we don’t care for ourselves at the expense of others?
We need genuine and positive interactions with other humans to feel well. One positive human interaction can change our energy and outlook. It can make our day and (through us) perhaps make someone else’s day.
Improving our well-being, expanding our minds, meeting new people, having adventures to forget our current troubles, and transitioning after a significant life inflection point (a layoff, death of a loved one, or separation) when we are vulnerable are often our goals when we travel.
Destinations provide more than picturesque views; they offer spaces for emotional and spiritual restoration. Tranquil environments, cultural encounters, and moments of reflection aid in calming the mind and renewing the spirit. Tourism offers a way to contribute to better the mental health of both travelers and those who serve them.
And yet we move through the travel space on holidays, often like zombies, failing to recognize the cast of hundreds and even thousands of dedicated people behind the scenes. Our motivation for escaping, often to deal with emotional discomfort, shouldn’t negatively impact those who serve us while we heal. We rarely think of the 400 million+ people who make it possible for us to vacation, visit loved ones, improve our well-being, and realize dreams.
In providing those services, those workers heal our minds, bodies, and souls. Their service makes our lives matter in often very subtle and special ways. Sometimes, it is invisible to us; sometimes, it becomes the basis for experiences that are profoundly important to us.
These individuals have billions of customer interactions every year — and are constantly reminded to think about how their service affects us. But we tourists don’t always notice workers. We see our interactions with them as one-way streets — with only one beneficiary.
We might care about offsetting CO2 emissions when we fly, but we rarely reflect on the emotional pollution we exhaust by being rude, dismissive, entitled, and blind to those who make travel and tourism possible.
This piece suggests how to expand tourism’s human handprint and “happiness emissions” to exponential impact.
Stressed travelers meet stressed infrastructure.
While Gen Zs report being very concerned about the environment, and tourism accounts for 8% of GHG emissions, they continue to travel. And a life well-lived on social media demands new content. Unfortunately, travel bragging (Cha et al., 1995; Liu & Li, 2021) can facilitate arrogance, a sense of superiority, and a willingness to intimidate and derogate others.
A character in the HBO tourism satire White Lotus sums up the Instagram vacation in which we cannot get away from ourselves:
I’ve been feeling so depressed at home, and I just thought I’d come here and feel something.…And now you come somewhere like this and it’s beautiful and you take a picture and then realize that everyone’s taken that same picture from that exact same spot.
Pent-up demand from the pandemic has caused a spike in tourism, especially to some key destinations. Notes Prathish Nair, Chief Brand Architect, Transcend Consulting India:
Overtourism poses significant challenges to our communities, cultures, and the very environments that attract travelers worldwide. The unbalanced concentration of visitors in popular hotspots has strained our infrastructure, eroded local authenticity, and threatened the natural landscapes we hold dear. Overcrowding disrupts the daily lives of locals, strains resources, and diminishes the essence of the places visitors come to experience.
The stage is set for a continuing boom into existing travel-related congestion issues and worsening staff shortages. Part of the reason is poor working conditions but also shame. A restaurant owner said their staff felt ashamed posting about their work on social media. Tourism graduates are avoiding the industry partly due to its perceived low status. The once iconic Ecole Hotelière de Lausanne is now EHL Hospitality Business School.
Finally, essential workers who went home due to the pandemic often didn’t return to their jobs. As a result, the travel industry is pushing to source talent to maintain its workforce and expand into new locations. As it does, it significantly impacts ecology and people. Cultural differences exacerbate as workers travel further for work. Tastes and behaviors once taken for granted now require new training. A tourist in the Mediterranean, once accustomed to Central and Eastern European staff, might now interact with someone from Southeast Asia or Africa.
Employees far from home, working on short-term visas and/or under poor working conditions, perform high-quality service work under less-than-optimal conditions. Migration can be a lonely and even traumatizing undertaking, even when it is done voluntarily and for a decent job. Marginalization, exploitation, and discrimination are just a few of the adverse experiences migrant workers face.
Hundreds of millions of hospitality and tourism workers move around constantly, and they return to their countries with experiences that shape how they engage with others at home. “The people in Country X are racists,” “customers are jerks,” and so on, will spread bad press and fail to promote peace and cross-cultural understanding. Notes Aradhana Khowala, Chair of the Group Advisory Board, Red Sea Global:
For an industry that prides itself on being the most human and fun, in reality our human resources are not always viewed as human. The staff gets slotted and crammed into labels, designations and name badges and confined to lines of progression from which escape is rare.
We forget but our deepest human need is not material at all: our deepest need is to be seen and acknowledged.
Escape. Seek. And Contribute.
The figure below (Iso-Ahola, 1982) shows two motives for travel: escaping (everyday environments and problems, routine, tension, etc.) and seeking (intrinsic rewards and psychological benefits). Both motivations have personal and interpersonal components and are not mutually exclusive.
What would a “contributing” dimension look like on this table — impact to be made as a tourist and wellness consumer?
Don’t put your heart on Airplane Mode. When you travel, ask the staff how things are going and if their employer treats them well. If a certain hotel or a chain seems to treat workers poorly, try to go elsewhere and write to the head of the hotel or chain. Let them know that employees are dissatisfied, causing you to take your business elsewhere. A few thousand of those letters (and a concrete reason for the decline in business), over time, can have a substantial impact on employer behavior. If service quality is still high (even if their employers are not treating them well), mention that talent is in high demand.
Monitor your behavior. The worker and guest are like two mirrors facing each other. If the guest is kind to the hospitality worker — it makes the world a better place. Otherwise, you have one functioning mirror (the hospitality worker) and one broken mirror (the unsatisfied, difficult guest) — which creates a reflection no one really enjoys. A guest’s anger is reflected in the sadness of the hotel worker, and the worker sees their future in the guest’s actions (“if this is going to be my day-to-day, I’m going to find something else to do with my life”).
So don’t be on your phone when you are being checked in, for example. There is another human on the other side of the desk. We say hello to perfect strangers but not to those in the service economy. “Hospitality staff are there to serve,” we think. “Why should we bother being polite to them?”The hospitality worker must be nice to us — no matter how unpleasant we are. You can reciprocate service to our server and treat them as we wish to be treated.
Open your minds. If we believed in the underlying relational value of tourism, we might make more of an effort to see locals not as backdrops for our videos and selfies but rather as individuals who, like us, have stories. One of the most powerful benefits of travel is interaction with other cultures. Take the opportunity to learn. Interacting with a given culture doesn’t require traveling to its place of origin: hotels have among the most diverse staff of any industry. Hospitality staff (wherever we travel) are, therefore, global ambassadors of their cultures — just as we are of ours.
As a traveler, focus on tipping that overall equation towards inquiry, curiosity, and respect, not disdain and dismissiveness. Children, often along on holidays, are keen observers. If they see parents and others see and treat humans as robots, lack of empathy perpetuates generationally. And empathy ends up in short supply all around.
See or feel something good, say something good. Most guest feedback tends to be complaints. Service expectations are higher, and the sheer volume of customer complaints reflects our collective mental health deterioration. In a couple’s life, they report that one should praise their partner four times for every criticism. Putting this into practice as you travel — and leaving a trail of positive commentary behind you wherever you go — will force you to pay attention to others. Recognize all the service that made your travel the magical and often spiritually healing trip you envisioned (and sorely needed).
Leave no other trace: Operators and municipalities can help tourists educate themselves about responsible waste disposal, minimizing environmental impact, and leaving natural areas as they found them. We can all aim to follow the seven leave-no-trace principles.
Accounting for impact at the national, local, and operator levels.
Countries and municipalities should not just count heads and spending on tourism but also assess the impact of that spending on visitors. Green spaces, parks, gardens, and tree-lined pathways within cities offer tranquil environments amidst the urban landscape, provide a place for relaxation, recreation, and a break from the hustle and bustle of city life.
Also, countries and municipalities should measure the success of tourism in adding value to local communities. Smart tourism solutions leveraging real-time data from tourist arrivals, GPS, cellular data, and other sources can manage tourist flows and alleviate stress and overcrowding and in high-traffic urban tourism sites.
Real-time data analysis can provide valuable insights and aid in distributing tourists across different areas to reduce congestion in popular spots. The industry can move from “extracting and demanding” to “including and enhancing.”
Changing to this overall dynamic would require society to give up on pejorative notions of those who work in service management. Young people give up on dreams of being waiters in Southern France because of the negative notions and prejudgments about the service industry. But as an old member of the French Resistance once said, “all work is noble.” If everyone thought that way — no job would be beneath anyone. No one would be beneath our notice (or respect). Like Harry Bosch says in the Amazon series — “either everybody counts, or no one counts.”
Operators need to better support staff to improve service. For hospitality workers to excel at service and customer focus, they have to experience it themselves from supervisors. Good social relations, good workplaces, good tourism, it’s all about the same thing — turning off defensiveness. It is a skill that we learn. Curiosity, kindness, and appreciation replace defensiveness, and the less delightful experiences become something to laugh rather than lash out about.
We also heard from a hotel that the receptionist’s title was changed to “Experience Officer” to increase applications. The industry must focus on more than just what customers need.
A central need in this effort will be the training of front-line managers. By some estimates, less than 20% of managers in the US are actually capable of holding their positions. This means that managers unused to service or failing to understand its underlying principles become poor managers.
And so, what do hotel towels, elephants, and scorpios have to do with all of this?
Recently, I returned to a hotel room, which was generic, until I noticed an elephant made out of bath towels on my bed. It made me smile. The elephant matched one of my scarves on the dresser. When I crossed paths with the housekeeper the following day, she laughed when she realized that her artwork was donning a woolen hat and a scarf. The next day, the next creation had relaxed — smoking in a bikini and wearing headphones.
I could not wait to return to my room at night. Anticipation of that interaction — the next chess move — made the room oddly homey. Two strangers with no common language shared a very important human connection. Interestingly, language skills and what we say don’t matter all that much in creating connections. Social interactions are often more about emotional cues than language. Her note now hangs in my office.
Tourism is one of the last fundamentally human industries, requiring constant care and, yes, love on the part of providers of that travel. It is vitally important to support the providers of those services through management and operator action — but also something simple and fundamental: Our own willingness to engage with those workers and treat them not as servants but as fellow stressed life travelers.
In a complex and chaotic world, our gestures can be simple and mindful.
Happy Holidays!
Written in collaboration with Sidal Yasar, with contributions from many others, including ZeSean Ali, Matthew Hanson, Aradhana Khowala, Jayanth Kolla, David Evan "Daven" Morrison M.D., Prathish Nair, Sehnaz Cehreli Shefik, and Susanna Sjoberg.
