New professions in the area of tourism

Our new initiative is aimed to try to classify and systemize new professions appearing in the area of tourism and hospitality, in compliance with integration of online technologies.

Professionals in the area of tourism predict shortage of working places in tourism due to digitalization and robotization in the modern reality. However, development of smart tourism makes new appearing professions very demanding. Nowadays, the demand for specialists of new categories keeps growing for the case of almost any hotel, museum, tour operator and other companies working in tourism.

In other words, despite shortage of current employees that do some routine tasks, new professions could make the level of employment in tourism to stay at the same level or possibly even increase the numbers of employed.

Development of smart tourism through introduction of new professions and working places has an impact on accomplishment of 8th aim of SDG and also accomplishment of some other aims of SDG. It is worth noting that most of new professions do not require particular physical conditions and could be done by either men or women, young or aged people, people with disabilities, etc. This helps to accomplish inclusiveness and avoid discrimination in labor market. This property is not related to more classic and traditional professions like loader or security guard, where certain physical abilities are required. Working in the area of internet marketing could be done by vast majority of people.

In relation to the new appearing jobs, it is important to be systematic, which is rarely observed from small and medium touristic businesses nowadays. Having a system would help such businesses to understand what type of specialists they need and whether they require to hire third party or full-time employees for certain tasks. Evaluation of own skills could also show that they could deal with some tasks themselves.

Let us list some potential professions in tourism expected to become popular in the nearest future. It is important that education system should slowly integrate new professions and skills in their syllabus. Further, if a small business cannot afford to hire educated specialists, it is certainly possible to learn required skills for the tasks of the modern world themselves. This would require some effort, but could save significant part of budget for a small touristic business.

Internet marketer of tourism and hospitality

This profession differs from profession of typical marketer in the sense that marketing of any travel business (be that a museum or a hotel) has a lot of properties that classic marketing does not have. First of all, classic marketers usually have uniform target audience, while travel marketer could have audience of people from different regions around the world. Obviously, such target audience would have a collection of different culture and habits. This leads to very sensitive marketing strategy that should be split in convenient way for different segments of the market. Secondly, touristic product is usually something non-material, which means potential customer has no ability to touch a product, especially when the purchase is made in thousands of kilometers from the seller. Further on, significant impact on marketing of touristic product comes from generally high price and low frequency of purchase. Of course, the reason for this is that people typically go on vacation 1–2 times per year. Consequently, average frequency of a client staying at the same hotel is 1.8 times. It is obvious that loyalty strategy in other industries would differ a lot from the area of tourism. There are many more differences of online marketing in tourism and hospitality from the classic marketing. For this reason, demand for specialists in travel marketing will keep growing in the nearest future.

Marketer of touristic destinations

This job is harder than the previous one. The challenge here is that specialist needs to sell the idea of attractiveness of a region rather than just some product or service, not forgetting that he is typically dealing with potential clients far away. Such travel business consists of many places of accommodation, attractions, restaurants, museums, taxis, etc. From one hand, this makes job of travel marketer complicated and makes it interesting from the other hand.

In addition, global transformation of marketing of destinations into management of destinations makes the position of the marketer powerful and meaningful. Such specialist does not just sell destination, but could also be impacting development of landscape design, planning touristic spaces, optimizing touristic activities, etc.

Further on, marketer of destinations should have good soft and communication skills. Marketing of a destination could not be performed successfully without collaboration with many local touristic businesses, which actually produce touristic products.

Growing competition between destinations, fighting for special categories of tourists and evolvement of technologies make profession of marketer of destinations very demanded on the market of tourism.

Travel digital designers

Considering the fact that digital communications and advertising force classic ones out of the market, digital designers are in very high demand. So far, travel industry suffers from lack of creativity and modernization. The reason for this is that designers only feel comfortable to make advertising of the same type, using templates like “Palms, sea and swimming suit covered in sand” or “Plane, flags – I am here!”. As a result, all advertisings in tourism look alike and no one stands out. This is not just our vision; one could find tones of similar advertising just by searching for touristic agencies and firms on Instagram. Fresh ideas in graphical travel design would open new page of creativity and would allow quality, freshness and creativity to beat competitors with their old-fashioned templates.

Travel videographer

Nowadays, video content is used almost everywhere and this trend will keep growing as video format engages people and affects their emotions more than just pictures or some text. Since tourism is all about translating emotional experiences, demand for video from potential customers keeps growing from year to year. Hence, profession of travel videographer should integrate well in almost any travel business out there.

Similar to the case of graphical travel design, similarity of videos of mountain roads, hills, beaches, palms and sky makes everyone bored. For this reason, creative specialist could easily make a successful career of travel videographer.

Digital travel photographer

This profession already exists in some sense. Example of this type of specialists is hotel photographer. However, there are very few places where this profession is currently available. For this reason, we still see the same boring pictures of pillows and rooms “decorated by sunlight” on the majority of hotels’ websites. Exactly the same situation one could observe with other touristic companies that demonstrate lack of creativeness and uniqueness. Typically, touristic businesses use the same templates, which makes competition on the market boring and potential customers either choosing a product almost randomly or flowing to the few competitors, who would do something interesting and fresh.

Certainly, situation is going to start changing at some point, as tourists become more critical and legible. They are more demanding and pickier for good quality of photos of the places and hotels of their destination. If nothing gets them interested or engaged, they are not likely to buy or book anything. This is why profession of digital travel photographer is a perspective profession of the nearest future.

Travel blogger

Travel blogging is already somewhat popular profession, especially for destinations where destinations collaborate with travel bloggers. Competition on this market grows rapidly, which is nice to see as all bloggers have their own audience and know their habits and psychology. This is why bloggers of different topics could count on attention from destinations and industry of tourism in general. It is often the case that bloggers get advertising proposals from different kind of businesses that are interested in different audiences. For instance, some travel blogger could make advertising for fishing in a certain country, some blogger could make advertising for house on wheels, etc. It is likely that profession will be in high demand in outsourcing format from the side of destinations. The advantage here is that there are still many destinations that are available and loyal for collaboration with bloggers.

Travel copywriters

Even more than previously professions, travel copywriters require creativity and uniqueness. Everyone is tired from description of gentle sea, white sand and hospitality of local people. One could say that travel copywriters should rather be travel writers and publicist. It is also possible that due to the trend that people read about travelling less than they watch something about or listen in the audio format, copywriters working in different formats of storytelling would be in high demand in the nearest future. This includes writing scenarios for short videos or podcasts. We strongly believe that majority of touristic businesses will soon realize that for the growth and presence on the internet it is required to have unique, creative and authored content for their websites and social networks.

Travel translators for 6 or more languages

This profession is somewhat similar to that of copywriters with the major difference that travel translators write texts and speeches in different languages. As this requires some knowledge of several languages, this profession is always in high demand. A lot of museums, hotels and touristic objects do not have content in different languages. This makes it difficult to gain touristic experience of good quality for many people. This is one of the aims that touristic segment should have – make everything for tourism available in at least 6 UN languages. Ideally, the list of languages should then be expanded in the future. Of course, there are some technologies that allow to translate texts to different languages. Sometimes machine services is a good choice even for the area of tourism. However, when one describes local art or something very specific, the format of storytelling with native description is necessary for as many languages as possible.

Buyers of digital travel advertising

To some extent, this type of profession already exists on the market, but under different names. For instance, contextologists specialize on context advertising, while targetologists specialize in targeted advertising. They are specialists in placing and correctly setting up paid advertising on different advertising systems, including search engines and social online services. They differ from classic advertising managers in the sense that they should be able to buy and correctly place advertising not just on the market of their region, but also for the world outside the region. This includes placements of advertising in foreign languages, taking specifics of different markets into account. Typically, these markets are physically far away from their destination, so this brings a lot of challenges to their work. In addition, one should not forget that touristic products and services have their specifics as well. This impacts what kind of promotion and advertising should be bought and controlled. This is why travel businesses require specialists for paid advertising on the internet. In fact, majority of advertising systems like Meta or Google spend a lot of effort on optimization and standardization of their advertising accounts. This makes the process of buying advertising easier in some sense. This also brings some similarities in buying advertising on different platforms. In terms of the type of specialists required for this, we would name this profession as buyer of online advertising. Growing competition between touristic businesses and destinations makes this profession absolutely necessary, as businesses often have to buy additional traffic on the internet to keep aimed level of profitability and approaching their business goals. The efficiency and value of paid online promotion will depend on the quality of these specialists.

Online analyst

So far, this profession is quite rare and currently faces low demand, although one of the advantages of online promotion is the ability to track statistics like coverage, interaction of advertising and communication with customers, conversion on each stage of the funnel, costs, etc. Unfortunately, vast majority of small travel businesses do not fully use all available data. Typically, they limit themselves to counting visits and sometimes coverage or likes in some particular social network. However, with the growth of competition on digital arena it is likely that trend of business decisions based on data and analysis will dominate in the nearest future. For these tasks the profession of online analyst would fit really well and should be in high demand. Once again, small businesses that cannot afford such specialist could deal with the tasks by putting their own effort. The skills and knowledge required for these tasks are quite quick to learn, so owners, directors or managers of small businesses with limited budget could learn how to do it properly themselves.

Internet director of touristic organization

This profession is really new and there are almost no specialists in this essence. It is not taught in universities or colleges and, hence, such specialists learn all required skills on their own. Sometimes this position is created and employee is hired to become such specialist learning along the way.

The challenge of this profession is that many tasks on the internet are not related to each other within a given organization. It is often the case that pieces of information are disconnected and lead to absence of a systematic approach. As a result, work of different channels of internet marketing suffers from inefficiency and inconsistency. This is why specialist is required here. Such specialist should know and understand all processes happening in the internet promotion of the organization. The job is then to control all processes and optimize them in the most efficient way. One could compare this job with the captain of the ship in the ocean of competitive internet. Moreover, services for online promotion keep developing and it is necessary to have at least one person in the organization, who would understand tendencies of the modern internet marketing and how their organization meets the standards of the modern reality. Clearly, large brands already have such specialist among their employees and all processes are optimized at a good level. They can afford to efficiently control all their work, while small businesses can never afford an army of specialists. This is why small business needs a person that would be in charge of all internet activities of the company. This person should be aware what happens on the website of the company, in social networks, geo-services, messengers, e-mails and so on. Such specialist needs a wide horizon of knowledge and skills on web design, sources of internet traffic, marketing and other fundamentals of working on the internet. Apart from that, specialist should know where and how to buy additional internet services and how to control work from the hired third parties. With the evolvement of technologies and online services, a lot of tasks on internet marketing become more user-friendly. Hence, it is possible that owners and managers of touristic businesses would be able to do all required tasks themselves without needing to hire internet director. There are already some processes that could be automized within the services of online promotion. For example, auto-targeting shows reasonable results. Another example is Smart company in Google, which only requires 10-15 minutes to setup.

The main condition for a successful online work is for the person in charge to have basic fundamental skills of internet marketing. These fundamentals are made easy to learn in our new studybook, which could be found here.

In this article we have considered a short list of professions of the future. However, we strongly believe that rapid development of technologies would keep creating new professions. With these changes coming into play, we will be updating this initiative with the expanded list of new professions.