Business Advice Memoir

The Attraction Game

The Attraction Game

Today I got an unexpected call from my friend Travis. Travis is a wonderful guy I met about seven years ago. He is a guy who always has a bright smile and easy laugh. He is a guy who I would always choose to have a meal with because he is simply an interesting guy. He lives in Croton-on-Hudson with his Kiwi wife Fiona and his two boys, Connor and Jack. They all live in an old Victorian house on a little hill with a stone pathway with a short little metal wonky handrail up from the gravel driveway. The path looks like it belongs in The Shire and it should lead up to a round Hobbit door, which is interesting, given that Travis is somewhat whimsical and the influence of the land down-under that Fiona brings (she and the boys tend to spend several months a year on the South Island of New Zealand with Fiona’s family) makes this family very Middle Earth friendly. But Travis looks like he is a somewhat grown-up and yet boyish example of Americana and with Connor’s love of baseball and Jack’s penchant for fostering kittens, the family exudes the best of American culture. They are an attractive family that you want to spend time around and rather than talk of the market or world affairs, you are more likely to be in for a discussion of the Vermont or Oregon woods and hikes they still have to take.

I met Travis in 2013 when I was building a head of steam on building the New York Wheel project. He was recommended to me by the folks at NYC & Co., which is the tourism agency for New York City. It had been run by George Fertitta, an accomplished advertising and promotions executive who was part of the Bloomberg Administration that had led a twelve-year surge in urban tourism to take advantage of New York City’s natural attractiveness to global tourists and the follow-on economic benefits that come with tourism levels that were beginning to exceed 60 million visitors per year. That made NYC the biggest urban tourist destination in the world and one of America’s top three tourism locales along with Orlando and Las Vegas. It was a purposeful strategy that had worked with perfection under the Bloomberg team tutelage. And these top-notch professionals, all of whom were very bullish on The New York Wheel project as a logical bolt-on to the tourism array of the City, and its new focus on downtown and New York Harbor, told me quite bluntly that Travis was the best tourism marketing professional in the City, bar none. In the seven years I have know Travis, I have never met one relevant tourism participant or purveyor who did not feel the same way about his capabilities. Even when my masters at the Wheel brought in the pros from Anaheim (five years after I had hired Travis), who considered themselves the best attractions operators in the world, even they bowed to his in-depth knowledge of the City’s tourism infrastructure and his connections in tapping the various pools of tourists coming to the City.

I spent six years trying to build the biggest and best new attraction in the urban tourism capital of the world. Under any circumstances that is a daunting task on many levels, not the least of which is the issue of estimating and realizing on the necessary high flow of tourists to come to and dwell at the attraction in almost unthinkably high numbers….three to four million visitors. Most attractions people I have met are people who enjoy going to attractions. I don’t particularly enjoy attractions. Most of these people like sightseeing and doing touristy things. I don’t really like that sort of thing even though as a family head I have been forced to join in and do so willingly in my role as family head, but not because I crave that buzz the way others like my kids and wife do. Travis is one of those people not like me in that he seems to truly enjoy attractions and seems to understand what compels people of all walks to want to come. More importantly, he understands the network and infrastructure that drives tourists to attractions by understanding all the network motivations whether they are driven by attendance tickets, food & beverage sales, merchandising and retail or transportation fees. He understands which attractions combine well and which cannibalize one another or turn visitors off. All the things he gets, I have to be convinced of and have explained.

Travis is generally in big demand by anyone needing to draw visitor traffic. Tourism bus systems and boat/ferry operators know and respect Travis. The existing big attraction players all know Travis and wish they had him in their line-up. New and innovative attractions quickly learn that Travis is someone they need to cultivate and convince even if he isn’t working for them. Kind words from Travis can make the difference with a new attraction. I loved working with Travis because one rarely finds a world-class person that is also a likable person who is not full of himself about the fact that he is world-class. That may be the secret to Travis’ success. If someone else is as smart as Travis, his personality gives him the win in a head-on contest. While Travis worked for me I had to decide several times if I would agree to share Travis. Many leaders are very greedy with their resources and they take a narrow view about sharing, thinking that they maximize their value capture by holding on tight to their best and brightest. I always allowed a degree of freedom and sharing because I believed that part of the attraction of our offering to Travis was to allow him a degree of flexibility while keeping ourselves as the first among equals in his portfolio of activities. I also always believed that making the pie bigger for everyone was a much more productive path to growth that trying to keep the biggest slice of the pie to ourselves. It always surprised me how many people don’t think that way. I suspected that Travis would see the value in that and that we would be better served with him by it, remembering that as Mother Superior said in The Sound of Music, “how do you hold a moonbeam in your hand?”

And here we are in COVID reality with over 130,000 new infections today and hospitalizations rising to dangerously high levels in some 43 states. The reimposition of social distancing protocols like mandatory masks and limited gatherings just reinforces that for the time being, attractions are unattractive. Travis told me that many of his consulting arrangements with various attractions looking to tap his expertise have been terminated since the attractions are forced to admit that they cannot operate for the foreseeable future in a business that mostly relies of the gregarious nature of people wanting to gather to enjoy an attraction. Despite my lack of personal interest in attractions for my own use, I do have a respect for attractions as a business and especially attractions marketing as deployed by Travis, so I am very sorry to see all that expertise go unused. It makes me sad for Travis, but the same personal qualities that make him so good at his business lead him to laugh it all off and find the silver lining in one of his projects which is not shutting down. In the Attractions Game, few exceed Travis in their commitment and capability, and that will be so long after COVID has done its worst and gone.