Skift Q&A: Why the business of global travel is under reported

Journalist Elizabeth Becker's new title Overbooked: The Global Business of Travel and Tourism is the book that Skift wished it wrote (if travel information brands wrote books, that is). Unlike few others, Becker's title approaches travel as the business behemoth it is, and dives into the nuts and bolts of tourism while simultaneously stripping away the pretenses. The publication date of Becker's book nicely coincided with our decision to begin a series of conversations with people we think are leading the way in travel, or who have something to say that the industry needs to hear. In the months ahead, we'll be speaking to experts and entrepreneurs and leaders and critics who have particular insight into the current state of travel as well as where it's headed. And we're happy to start with someone from the outside whose insight is much more knowledgeable than the majority of people on the inside. Skift: Why did you do this book now? What was the kick-in-the-pants to get it started? Elizabeth Becker: As you know from my bio, I've been the foreign correspondent and an editor at National Public Radio, and reported around the world for The Washington Post and New York Times. I've watched the evolution of tourism, but it was sort of out of the side of my eyes. You sort of noticed it, and then you did your real work. Then my last stretch at the New York Times, I was the Times' international economics correspondent. That's what opened my eyes. I mention in the French chapter, that I was doing a big piece on the Doha trade talks for the World Trade Organization. Agriculture was the big stumbling block. I'm interviewing the Deputy Minister of Agriculture in Paris. We end up with him telling me how important tourism was. That kept happening, where I was reporting on an international economics story and some official in some foreign country would say how this was important for their tourism sector. When I tried to write about this for the Times, they said, "We have a travel section." That's when I saw this ghettoization of the tourism industry. There's a travel section where people talk about how nice it is to travel. The airline industry will get something, the airplane industry will get something, hotels will be written about, but no one looked about tourism as the industrial giant that it is. That's it. Once you get that kind of an idea in your head, you can't get rid of it. Skift: It's an enormous industry, the largest global indus