How do aspiring talents from the tourism industry picture their future of work?

Having established close contact with the team of the International Tourism Convention in Berlin (ITB), I felt deeply honored when I was invited to discuss this and more intriguing questions with moderator Laura Köcher and co-speaker Stephan in a new episode of the famous Travel Hero Podcast.

From my perspective as a tourism management student about to finish the bachelor’s degree and thus actively engaging with the pressing issues of recruiting of young and motivated staff and re-thinking employment and working in the tourism industry first-hand, I had the opportunity to share my thoughts on a plethora of interesting topics.

Given that the travel industry was shaken more than any other by the covid pandemic, discussing topics like employability, new work models, staff benefits, and criteria for successful employer branding with the my generation as the next workforce to come felt like a meaningful contribution to building resilience of an element I would never wish to miss in my life.

Contempia = Contemplative + Content + Pia

And that’s exactly what the channel is about.

I am interested in improving my own lifestyle and work habits. So, this channel is a think tank, guidebook and source of inspiration and motivation for me and everybody who also want to make self-management their personal project. 

The channel therefore bundles my interest in personal growth with the opportunity to learn from other people in the online community. Now that the journey has started I am curious to see where it will take me and how it will influence my perceptions and skills regarding social media marketing and brand promotion. 

During my semester abroad, I took the opportunity to gain some firsthand experiences as a social media ambassador when I took over the official LTM Instagram Account.

For one week I provided behind-the-scenes insights into the student life in Barcelona for my fellow students, shared my experiences and answered questions.

I really enjoyed creating a varied content calendar, designing posts, experimenting with the different interactive features, and engaging with my audience.

Through this experience, I developed a better understanding for how to manage an online presence on social media effectively. I enjoyed the work and am motivated to apply my learnings for my next social media project.

In a collaboration of the University of Stralsund with the local zoo I developed my first revalorization concept and promotional plan for areal rebranding for a real client in the leisure industry. 

Since 2002 the zoo of Stralsund has been member of a collective promotional alliance with its four neighbor institutions in the territory of the “Grünhufer Bogen”.

• The public swimming pool and 4 star hotel “Hansedom”
• the city’s biggest commercial center “Strelapark”
• a McDonald’s franchise restaurant
• the “Wohlfahrtsgemeinschaft” (a city-wide association of health- and wellbeing-related leisure, hospitality and care facilities for seniors to disabled people)

By partnering, the territory should be to positioned and collectively promoted as an attractive alternative destination for local residents and tourists, apart from Stralsund’s old town center. 

Within the three months of the project, I worked together with two fellow LTM students and

• conducted interviews with the different project stakeholders
• applied competition analysis tools and creativity techniques to identify a common ground among our very diverse customers
• crystalized three potentials for a common brand positioning
• created the respective slogans and draft logos and
• pitched those proposals to the company representatives.

Our strategic proposal also included in-depth reflections on the potentials and risks related to the project that were translated into specific suggestions for first action steps.

Our team was proud to see the first actions currently being put into practice by the clients to strategically establish a new appealing image of the territory. 

The Leisure and Tourism Management studies in Stralsund encourage entrepreneurial thinking. Therefore, I have trained in several projects across different subjects how to transform a customer problem into a brand and a profitable business. 

The ideas that I have developed in this context include, example

Culture Bowl

A secret restaurant that uses local flavors and ingredients to break the homogeneity of international fast food chains undermining authentic culinary cultural experiences while traveling.

The Overton Hotel

A smart sustainable luxury hotel that uses an IoT system among its smart rooms and hotel facilities  to provide guest with personalized health and wellbeing recommendations for their stay based on their metabolism parameters.

(Re)Create@Montjüic

A proposal to proactively address the reuse of the abandoned venues after the Olympic Games in Barcelona in 1992 through territorial transformation and rebranded promotion of the area.

Although the projects have been theoretical in nature, they nonetheless always involved real market and ecosystem analysis and the formulation of concrete marketing strategies, taking into account the local specialties and consumer requirements.

The projects therefore helped me to gain experience and practice in flexibly taking in new customer perspectives and creating tailor-made, realistic product and brand solutions. 

In this creative project our team of four university students from Stralsund self-responsibly conducted a full Design Thinking process to create the “University of the Future”.

Throughout a whole semester, we developed a concept that would improve student satisfaction with regards to study contents, provide new online and offline opportunities to facilitate student life, introduce new technology solutions that facilitate the studies and enhance process efficiency in internal administrative processes, and build and leverage existing location factors and networks effectively.

The results from our research and analysis were made accessible to other student representative bodies and taken to further panel discussions with the university board to establish a continuous and sound dialogue about the potentials that such a model would bring: More space for creative experimentation, systems that accelerate rather than stifle progress, and cross-disciplinary exchange at and beyond the university.