Conference report: Tourism futures convention 2024: tourism innovation and learning – are we ready for the future?

Conference: Tourism Futures Convention 2024Date: 13th November 2024Location: Heilbronn, GermanyWebsite: https://www.hs-heilbronn.de/tfc2024Following 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.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.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.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.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.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.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.