Gary Bowerman: Hello and welcome to the High-Yield Tourism Podcast, I’m Gary Bowerman. On today’s show, I’ll be discussing the economic geography of tourism and why it really matters to destinations worldwide with Japan based Joao Romao. So let’s get started. This is High-Yield Tourism. Hello, and thanks for listening in today. It’s my pleasure to welcome to the show Joao Romao, associate professor at Yasuda Women’s University in Japan, to discuss his new book, Economic Geography of Tourism, which places tourism in the context of global economic, technological, societal, environmental and political challenges. Its relevance is hugely contemporary to where we are in twenty twenty five. So Joel, thank you so much for coming on to the High-Yield. Tourism podcast. How are you doing and where are you today?

Joao Romao: So I’m in Hiroshima. Thank you very much for this nice invitation. I think this podcast has a much broader audience, much more diverse audience than I normally have in my academic work. So it’s a very nice opportunity and a little bit of a challenge also to discuss this outside the academic.

Gary Bowerman: You’re back in Hiroshima, back in Japan, but you’ve been traveling over the last few weeks, right? You’ve been in Europe, I think.

Joao Romao: Yes. I tend to go to, to Europe in this season, visit family and also to attend the Congress, that I attend already for many years. So I try to keep that network alive and, and in the end of August take the opportunity to visit family and friends.

Gary Bowerman: Okay. So the focus of our conversation today mostly is going to be about your book, The Economic Geography of Tourism, which as we just said, off air is a great topic, great timing, perfect for the 2025 outlook that we have. But let’s start out with a bit of a brief introduction. Tell us a bit about your career journey and your different research roles that bring together tourism, economics, urban development and sustainable development.

Joao Romao: So I’m an economist, so I graduated in economics and I did a master’s in innovation. But I started my professional career, in fact as a journalist back in the nineties, I worked for some time as a journalist. And then I moved to a policy advisor, first in a in a city council in the south of Portugal, a very touristic place. I was advising the mayor and organizing a small office for promoting investment. And then I worked for a consultancy company supporting different levels of of public institutions, local, regional, national. So I started to work on on policy advice at that time. And at the same time, by the way, I also produced some documentaries for television as a kind of hobby. But still I did four documentaries for the Portuguese television. And later, when the first PhD in tourism opened in Portugal, I decided to to join not so much with the idea of developing some academic career, but to get a bit more theoretical background for the kind of advice and consultancy that I was doing. So that was the reason later on and a bit for personal reasons, I moved to Japan and the academic path was the most plausible. So. So that’s why I focus much more on on academic work and teaching and academic research, keeping the focus on economics and and tourism and also, of course, the relation with space. So that’s why this book would come as a kind of result of accumulated research.

Gary Bowerman: So looking back at your at your career history. Born in Portugal, did a lot of work, a lot of tourism advice, documentary work, journalism in Portugal, now based in Japan. Is your teaching global? Do you do you look at tourism from a global perspective? Do you look at it from a European, from an Asian perspective? How do you bring that together?

Joao Romao: I try to look at it in a in a global perspective, but but mostly, uh, on the, on the local conditions, on the local characteristics and how it reflects in different places and how it changes different places, uh, independently, if it’s in Asia or Portugal or, by the way, I also work a little bit in the Netherlands for almost three years. That’s where I got more this connection with the spatial economics. So I try to have this approach in the intersection of economics, tourism and place. So trying to somehow keep my focus on these triangle which is already very, very broad because because we can look at this from many different points of view. And these diversity of points of view is what at some moment led to this idea of putting everything together and organizing a book that tries to somehow summarize how economic geography can help the study of tourism, and also, on the way back, how tourism somehow can be better analyzed by using economic geography.

Gary Bowerman: So that’s a great platform for the discussion. You talk there about the intersection of economics, tourism and place. I think we’re very aligned in the way we think there. A lot of my work comes from that sort of background as well. But let’s talk about the book. The book is called The Economic Geography of Tourism, which is a great title. As I said, it’s very, very relevant to right now. I’m guessing that this is pulling together work from two or three years from beforehand, but it’s published right now. What were your objectives in putting together the book?

Joao Romao: So what I perceived is that there is a lot of theoretical contributions from economic geography, a lot of concepts, a lot of methods that can be applied to tourism. And this was not organized, let’s say, in a kind of structured way that can be easy to show to students, to show to other people making research, to show to practitioners. So that was a little bit my effort, understanding or perceiving that this a bit fragmented. Contributions of economic geography can be a bit better organized to propose some sort of compilation to students and researchers in tourism. And this can be applied to many, many different processes. For example, why economic activity is concentrated in a certain area, or how they how economic tourism, for example, connects with different sectors, how it contributes to innovation and to different specialization patterns. So there is a lot of different problems that can be analyzed through the lens of economic geography. And that was a bit my effort. And then there is the impact that tourism creates on the places and how it changes the daily life of people, how it changes the communities, how it it can have very positive impacts in the well-being of people, but also a lot of disturbances. The relation between local companies or national companies and the big multinationals that operate in the tourism sector. So there is a wide variety of problems. And then the climate, the environment and all these problems that that. Have both global and local impacts. So all these can have some contributions of economic geography, but not all. That’s also something that is claimed in the book. Economic geography can help until a certain moment, but not not everything. Then there is politics. There is culture, there is sociology. So economic geography has a contribution until a certain moment cannot solve all the problems, but can help, I think, to understand better. I think many people is using economic geography tools without perceiving very well how they come from and how they connect with, with other concepts and other theories. So that is a bit the effort of the of the book.

Gary Bowerman: Yeah. So you said that the tone quite nicely, that you talk very much about the, the challenges of tourism, the impacts on society, on communities, on environment as well as the opportunities. There was a paragraph that I really liked in your abstract that kind of brings that together, and I quoted it says the book explores the intersections between economic geography and tourism, highlighting how spatial, economic and social processes shape tourism development and how tourism in turn, reshapes economic spaces. I like that last part. That last part of the sentence. Can you sort of elaborate? How does tourism reshape economic spaces and why is that important?

Joao Romao: Well, there is an, I think, an interesting concept that comes very much from a geographer, Richard Butler, the idea of life cycle of tourism destinations and how destinations somehow have a certain pattern of evolution. Since being not well known and starting to receive people out of curiosity without being prepared for that, and how some. In response to that, some local business, a new restaurant, a new small hotel. Some local business start to to react. And somehow the population welcomes these new opportunities and these new visitors and feels proud to to be a kind of destination for for people from outside. And how if this continues. Public institutions somehow get involved. And that is a certain development of transport. And eventually companies from abroad come with hotels and restaurants and franchises and all these things. So for a long time there is a different type of impact of tourism in the, in the places and, and on the jobs, on how people live, how people move that facilities and infrastructure that are available for tourism. In fact, mostly if it continues through a relatively long period as not only an impact but an impact that is different along these this, this cycle. And so the policies and the responses and the type of relation with the community also changes a long time, and I think this is interesting to observe from an economic point of view, but not only from an economic point of view, also from the point of view of cultural exchanges and sociological composition. So there is a lot of transformations on places that that result from tourism, not only in the ecological sense, but also in cities. I think life in Kyoto today or in Lisbon today or in Venice today is very different. Maybe locals don’t enjoy so much anymore to go to places where they were that were very familiar to them. And and on the other hand, we have lots of foreign visitors that thirty years ago were not there for sure. So there is a big, a big transformation that tourism brings to to the places.

Gary Bowerman: Yeah, that’s a really interesting point. And I think very much in Asia at the moment. We’re seeing those socio economic developmental impacts in smaller locations as well as the big cities. The drive of tourism as part of economic growth for nations is is very, very strong at the moment. Governments want that to happen, but it means that in particularly in the smaller locations, we’re seeing impacts. The media tends to focus on the word overtourism, but generally we’re looking at much more diverse impacts and much more diverse challenges going forward about how societies, communities and the environment impacts with tourism in future. That takes me to the next question, Joe. Our one of the key takeaways for governments and destination strategy planners from your book is whether sustainable or regenerative tourism practices can be achieved within market regulated economies. I think that’s a really interesting point, because decision making in market regulated economies is driven by individual preferences rather than collective well-being. So does that mean that policymaking around the economic spaces and tourism has to change? How do we make planet friendly tourism approachable and realistic?

Joao Romao: Let’s say the ideas of sustainability or not, the idea of regeneration that comes is becoming a bit more common. We are not very consistent with this individual assessment. Mostly because I think we individually don’t have much tools to understand the long term impacts of both our consumption and both our possible supply of tourism services. We can somehow estimate the utility that we receive if it’s vulnerable to pay for some service. If not, but how much long term impact that sustainability is about long term impact. So what is my long term impact when I decide to stay in an Airbnb or in a hotel, On when I decide to go to a hotel from an international chain or for a local company, I cannot much estimate, or any tourist cannot much estimate, the long term impacts of the sustainability impact. And the same for an individual entrepreneur. So we can estimate, maybe the entrepreneur can estimate how much tourists will come to a certain hotel or to a certain facility, but they don’t know how many others will appear at the same time or in the next few years. And what is the overall impact of all these decisions? So the impact on communities and the impact on local economies, I think, must be addressed in a bit higher level at the policy level. Defining limits, defining what capacity we have, what infrastructures we need, how far can we go. Because what happens often is that we go from policies oriented to bring as much tourists as possible, promoting, bringing more and more people. We want to be the top something destination. We want to have some millions whatever. We have a big problem with our tourism, with nothing in between. And I think the in between is what is missing. How to change the focus from being bringing as many people as possible, or solving the problems of having too much people to the in between. How do we manage tourism? Better to make sure we have the right persons, to make sure we have the right products for these persons, to make sure that we keep the benefits in the local community as much as possible, which I think is a bit how the tourism tries to focus. That’s why I found it interesting, this conversation, because it’s exactly why I think the point that is missing. We go from attracting many people to solving the problems of too many people without working in the in between that I think.

Gary Bowerman: Yeah, absolutely. One hundred percent. And I go back to a point that you made early in your answer there is that almost these challenges are bigger than us. They’re bigger than tourists. They’re bigger than entrepreneurs. They’re bigger than the tourism industry. They’re bigger than policymakers. In many, many ways. We’re talking about long-term policies that will change the way that we live. And you referenced there that if we go back over time, particularly in Europe, but more recently here in Asia, the policies have been about capacity building, about enhancing and bringing more tourists. And still in some countries of this region, that’s what’s happening. But most of that is based on old data, data that will help us to project the future, whereas sustainability challenge community challenges going forward. They’re going to need real time data. We can’t just rely on past performance to to predict the future because it just won’t work that way. As you said, we’re looking longer term down the line. And that brings us to another point that you address in your book, which is the implications of technological advancements and societal trends on tourism. I guess S the world is at different stages of fully understanding how these factors might play out. How did you approach that in your book?

Joao Romao: I would say there is a big advantage of having more data and more capacity to analyze data. Of course, with different sources, with all these big data or AI tools, our capacity to have informed strategies and informed decisions increased substantially. But at the same time, the access to this capacity is also very unbalanced. We see that there is a certain concentration of this type of data, this type of information, and the capacity to analyze in a few global corporations. And mostly when we look at how can a small hotel, how can a small company operating in tourism in Southeast Asia or in South America take advantage of big data for planning or whatever there is a big imbalance between between the large scale companies operating in a very large scale, the investment that they can do and then distribute for all their hotels around the world is substantially different from what small players can do. So these big data and these technological developments can introduce also new forms of disadvantage. And in fact, we are I think seeing a little bit that what we can call technological innovation is not so much happening at the destination level, but it’s mostly happening at the distribution level. It’s in the digital platforms distributing tourism that we are seeing new things and not exactly at the destination. So this is, I think, is also a challenge how destinations and the network of business in small communities, how can they benefit from these technologies. It’s also something I think, as a kind of challenge for the near future.

Gary Bowerman: Yeah, one hundred percent agree the control of data flows is really, as you said, concentrated in the big tech firms. And that that that creates all sorts of challenges, not just for travel and tourism, but for for retail businesses. So you’ve spent the summer touring the book at various academic conferences and seminars. I just wonder what sort of feedback did you get? What what did conference audiences take from the book, and which parts? Which content areas did they focus most on?

Joao Romao: Well, it also depends a little bit on what I’m presenting because the book covers many topics. So I focus on normally I introduce one chapter or at most combining contents from two chapters. The book has thirteen. But one thing that I notice is that the academic conferences are very much oriented to presentation of empirical papers with a lot of quantitative work equations and a very, at least in economics. This field where I’m working normally. So the presentations are normally kind of similar, with some sophisticated mathematical apparatus and some similar patterns. And people are in general very happy to have a little break and to have a bit more conceptual discussion about what concepts we are using, what type of implications our work can have. So that was a little bit of a very positive feedback of people perceiving as a positive moment to have a little break from equations, to discuss a little bit more. What are we trying to build? And this worked well both when I was speaking about how tourism may operate processes of gentrification in cities or how the difficulties to control the CO2 emissions of transport evidence, how limited are the mechanisms to to somehow we have an international control or an international coordinated policies for example for this specific problem of reducing CO2 emissions in a voluntary basis without real enforcement, without an institution, that can really impose some rules or some guidelines. So, whatever topic I introduced up to now was, I think, welcomed in this context of ultra-mathematics conferences on economics and living.

Gary Bowerman: That’s great to hear that you’re bringing some realism and levity into the debate. I noticed that one of the reviews of the book said that it is particularly relevant in the post-2020 context. Now, you’ve been living in Japan for many, many years. We know that here in Asia Pacific, Covid had such a massive impact on travel and tourism and still does the recovery and how governments and travel businesses are rethinking The future is still ongoing. But I’m just wondering, as you were writing the book, how much did the pandemic infuse your thinking of the economics of geography?

Joao Romao: I’m not expecting a big transformation because of Covid. I would say that of course, we had a big impact. Everything stopped. But, there was for me no reason to think that things would be different after. Because the mechanisms, the power relations, the economic, everything is the same. There is nothing changed the political system. Everything is the same. So when people can travel again, they will do the same things. There was a comment, but for me, I didn’t think too much about about about that. I have to admit, that’s a.

Gary Bowerman: Fascinating comment, Joel, because I remember during the pandemic, you know, analysts, politicians, the travel industry were all saying at the time, you know, when we were locked down here for two years, three years, that travel will never be the same again. It always seems strange to me that you could predict that anyway. And as you said, given human behavior and human nature, people want to travel it. Traveler just becomes so ingrained in the way that we live. And it’s been a case, I guess, post-pandemic of just putting that jigsaw back together again.

Joao Romao: Yeah, I think the only, the only big difference is that the price has increased substantially.

Gary Bowerman: That’s true. That’s very true.

Joao Romao: And that was not so much anticipated by the analysts, both academic and outside academic. I didn’t see that prediction so much obviously it was a big impact. But the rest, I mean, the companies were eager to restart working. The travelers were eager to travel again, and they were saving money so they could travel again. I thought there was no real reason to change whatever I was thinking. So I have to admit, I didn’t think too much about this. Unfortunately, because maybe it could be a good opportunity to think not only about tourism, but about our whole economic system. Can we do things a bit different somehow? But I didn’t perceive.

Gary Bowerman: That’s fascinating. That’s where we diverge, right? Because my new book, which is coming out next year, looks very much how Covid has changed travel and tourism. So we’ll talk about that next year. But let’s set Covid aside. And I’m very interested because you live in Japan. You’ve lived there for many years, and Japan is a very, very unique tourism economy. It has very, very different spatial economics. But the turnaround has been incredible since the pandemic, particularly in terms of the numbers of travelers that are coming to Japan. How does Japan influence your thinking about the economics of geography generally?

Joao Romao: I think that is an element in Japan apart from Covid. That is the evolution of the Yen, the exchange rate of the Yen. That is the first time I came to Japan comparing with Euros. One Euro was one hundred Yen was 2012 and now one Euro is one hundred sixty Yen or something like that. So everything became sixty percent cheaper for people coming from Europe or the US. So that I think explains very much why the numbers are increasing so much. So there is an economic opportunity that people perceive coming to Japan from Europe, from America is a very it has a lot of costs, not of travel time, but also financial costs. And now the cost is much lower because the Yen has this exchange rate. So this helped a lot. I think Japan is a very fascinating country. For many people, this combination of advanced technologies and old philosophies and old knowledge is something that attracts people to the mega, mega cities. But at the same time, the temples and all these history I and then combined with the anime and all these pop cultures, I think Japan has a lot of of that strong attractions for many people around the world and the lower cost that suddenly appeared and persists. I think made much more people come. Still too much concentrated in these three main places Tokyo, Osaka, Kyoto. But I think if you look at most of the countries, there are three or four destinations that it’s not only Japan. In Japan, they are now very worried because everybody goes to Tokyo. But I think a bit all over the world there are three, four destinations that if you look at Korea, for example, it’s almost one hundred percent going to Seoul. There’s violence. Busan. So this concentration is not uncommon. But of course, efforts to diversify and to find different alternatives are, I think, becoming more and more important in Japan and other places, but also in Japan.

Gary Bowerman: Okay, yeah, I totally agree with that. So we’ve just got a few minutes left. So I just want to look a little bit forward. The book is published now. You’ve been starting to talk about it at conferences. What’s your plan over the next twelve months? Are you going to be taking this to more conferences? Are you going to be rethinking? Are you going to write a sequel? What’s next?

Joao Romao: I had to to stop a bit what we normally do in empirical work, focusing on some case, collect data, analyze some problem, trying to get an answer. So I stopped doing that to work more on the how different concepts can be organized and applied to tourism. So a bit more on the conceptual level. So what I’m planning to do now is coming back to some empirics to some equation. And normally I work in what people call spatial econometrics. So econometric models that somehow try to introduce the space. So I’m trying to do that applying to the relation between tourism and creative industries. Studies. So our tourism and creative industries can are working now in Japan and eventually how they can support some processes of decentralization. So maybe some regions that are not so central in the tourism development now can be more important in the future combining with creative industries. So this is a little bit what I expect to be entertained with in the next two or three years. In terms of main research, of course, I can participate in other projects for the book. There is at least one more conference. I’m not sure if much more. Also maybe two. I’m not sure. Immediately after writing, we think that some things could have been done a bit different, of course. But maybe I will wait one or two years, get some feedback, and then decide if it’s worth to make a new edition with some modifications or. Now, this doesn’t work as it was before. Before we would print some copies and if they are sold out, we make a second edition. Now printing on demand. And then basically, if the editor and the author consider that it’s worth to review and to make some changes, we make a different edition, but it’s not very much based on numbers of copies sold or being sold out or this kind of things. So that is something that I think needs some time to get feedbacks to perceive how people are reacting. But eventually there is some room to to change, to do things a bit different to, to add something new, to think a bit better. What happened post-Covid?

Gary Bowerman: Well, I would say one of the interesting things you mentioned, that your field of research of what you’re going to be looking at is tourism and creative industries and how they’re working together. And I know for sure that a lot of tourism boards here in Asia are really looking at that, a lot of them putting together studies right now, looking even for ten, fifteen years into the future, how this could actually, as you said, impact the way tourism operates, decentralization into different areas. So I think there’s going to be a lot of work for you to do there. So maybe, maybe that’ll be our next conversation. Maybe we’ll be talking about that in future.

Joao Romao: Okay. There is another one, another topic in Japan that I like that is the wellness tourism. Japan has a very long tradition in the onsen, the baths, the thermal baths they have in Japan, more thermal resources than any other country. And they have a very strong culture of using the baths. And I think this is not being used. It could be in terms of diversifying tourism destinations, because this is mostly outside the big cities, and the combination with the traditional hospitality of the ryokan can offer a kind of immersive cultural experience. Immersive in the water. Immersive in a culture of hospitality. The ryokan itself. Sleeping in a ryokan itself is a cultural experience. We have to learn how to do that. We have to adapt to a totally different way of organizing the stay. And I think this has a value as a unique cultural experience. And that combined with the healthy lifestyles and wellness approaches that are becoming more and more popular in many parts, this could be a very strong option for diversifying tourism in Japan. However, the first time I wrote this in a paper was kind of ten years ago.

Gary Bowerman: Everything has changed since then. I agree with you. I mean the creative industry side, the wellness side, both huge opportunities. I could I could talk to you for hours, but we’ve run out of time. It’s been a pleasure. Thank you so much for joining me on the High-Yield Tourism podcast for your fascinating insights about the overlapping of mapping of tourism, economics and geography. We’ll put a link to your book up on the show notes, and we’ll also promote it on our website as well. So thank you very much for your thought-provoking takeaways and for a very constructive discussion today. Thank you.

Joao Romao: Thank you very much for the invitation. Also. It’s a big pleasure for me. Of course.

Gary Bowerman: So please join our conversation on our LinkedIn page at High-Yield Tourism that has a hyphen in it at high hyphen yield tourism. And we’ll be back soon to talk more High-Yield Tourism. See you then.