10 Reasons to Cooperate

After the appearance of Airbnb and new P2P apps economy, the hotel industry has become less collaborative. But this is only a mirage of the existing fear of the new. Tourism businesses are called to cooperate because, in his human nature, are social enterprises.

• 1.- Internet, social networks, geolocation, smartphones, tablets, eBooks, digital ink, LEDs… ¿Have you considered what technological gadgets will be used by your hotel customers in five years? Or even better, are youpreparing yourself to know how to use them?
• 2.- The 10 most foreseeably sought-after jobs in 2014 did not exist in 2008. Only a six years difference between everything and nothing… Are we preparing youth for jobs that will no longer exist when they finish studying? Are you convinced that you are educating your children correctly? Are you confident that the professional formation that you request from your employees is what your hotel will really need in 10 years? Reflect on what is currently taught in tourism schools.

• 3.- One out of four workers changes jobs each year. This is even more apparent in the hotel industry, where seasons mark a rhythm that makes employee loyalty impossible. In consequence, how do you expect to earn customer loyalty? If you assume that customer loyalty is not related to fidelity in the workplace, then you are capable of implying that in a company human resources lacks value. But ultimately you are aware that your employees are valuable.
• 4.- It’s estimated that reading the New York Times for a week provides as much information as someone in the XVIII century could obtain throughout their lifetime. That said, during the current year humanity will generate 1.400 exabytes of information. Shall I explain it more clearly? If a written document contains 10 kbytes, the thinking mind of the internet users will produce in 2015 a whooping… (Let me move to a new line, ahem!) 1.400.000.000.000.000.000 or 000 billion pages. This is an amount of information larger than that created by the human species in its whole 8.000 years of history. And that amount of data doubles every two years… Can you imagine what hotels around the world could generate using the knowledge they have nowadays of their customers? Can you imagine knowing 7.000 million human beings? Something along the lines of 1.500 million journeys from the Earth to the moon in sheets of paper. Pure thought.

• 5.- What else awaits us in the field of communication and data exchange? Numbers so chilling as they are hopeful. Japan has already tested a fiber optic cable capable of transmitting 14 trillion bits per second, which is equivalent to 210 million phone calls a second… in a single cable! It’s expected that within 30 years a simple laptop, as the one I’m using to type this, will have a processing capacity superior to that of the whole human species put together. A warning to companies managing artistic or intellectual copyrights: if around the world every minute 175.000 songs are downloaded illegally and with the future prospective of the neurotransmission capacity, how the hell do you stop the exchange of information, the inter pares cooperation?

• 6.- The infiltration of new technologies has an exponential growth rate. It took the radio 50 years of existence to reach the amount of 50 million users. For the television 13 years was enough. The internet shortened that time into 4 years. The iPod became popular in only 3 years. Then Facebook only took 2 years, and Instagram only a year and a half! What shall be next and only take a year to become popular? Let’s think…
• 7.- A dose of encouragement for the followers of Twitter culture: the number of messages sent from cell phones has already exceeded several years ago the total number of world population.

• 8.- Do you really believe that you will get a good positioning of your website on Google? Before that you should know that each month 620 billion searches are made through this site and that in three years that number will probably exceed 1.000 trillion… So that there is no confusion, no less than 1.000.000.000.000.000 search results obtained from the Google search bar. Are you capable of being more than just a needle in the hay stack?
• 9.- Facebook is currently the most populous country on the planet: 1.441 million users, versus China (1.394 million inhabitants) and India (1.268 million inhabitants). I don’t want to say it out loud, but perhaps our conception of nations and states has transformed almost without us realizing it into a cloud of overlapping networks in which each citizen can choose to be part of a virtual nation more important than their territorial birthplace. Or maybe we’ll be able to choose to belong to several nations at the same time, just as we currently divide our activities into various networks simultaneously: Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, etc. The head butting will then begin when that chauvinism caused by the wanting to belong to the largest nation. Bets are accepted.

• 10.- Despite everything we’ve gone over, it only takes one bit to move the world. That of the click of a mouse. The omega. That loop that joins us together and throws us into infinity: an idea. Our talent.