Florian Wupperfeld on Why Culture is its Own Vertical in the Tourism Industry
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Florian Wupperfeld vividly remembers his first flight to New York: He was 10 years old, his father dropped him off at the airport, and he had to wear a special child’s tag strapped around his neck. Today, travel is Wupperfeld’s bread and butter. He is thFlorian Wupperfeld on Why Culture is its Own Vertical in the Tourism Industry
Florian Wupperfeld vividly remembers his first flight to New York: He was 10 years old, his father dropped him off at the airport, and he had to wear a special child’s tag strapped around his neck. Today, travel is Wupperfeld’s bread and butter. He is the founder of Leading Culture Destinations, an annual award given to museums for their appeal as visitor experiences, and otherwise works as a consultant advising tourism boards, cities, and property developers on how to create cultural destinations.This year’s awards were given out on September 28 at the South Kensington Club, a private members’ club in London.Nominees included the Keith Haring exhibition at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam (in the best exhibition category), the YSL Museum in Marrakesh (for best architecture), the Otium at the Broad Museum in L.A. (for best museum restaurant) and the National Gallery in Singapore (for best museum shop).Born and raised in Munich, Wupperfeld moved to Berlin when the Wall came down, and spent his early youth gigging as a techno DJ. He then transferred to Vienna, where he worked in cable television, before moving to LA to study film and scriptwriting at the University of California in Los Angeles. After eight years in LA, he moved to London, his current base. Besides consulting and running the LCD awards, he organizes culturally themed trips for select groups of clients.Wupperfeld joined Blouin Artinfo for a conversation about his business and background.When and why did you become interested in the overlaps between travel and culture?The travel industry works in verticals. You have ski holidays, beach holidays, raft holidays, football holidays. But the cultural holidays vertical is still very much: older ladies following the tour guide’s umbrella and looking at ruins in Greece. It’s a little bit old-fashioned and 1960s. What’s happened with design hotels and boutique hotels — their ability to approach a new audience — hasn’t happened in cultural tourism, even though four out of five visitors come to London for its arts, culture, and heritage, and Art Basel Miami brings 300,000 people to Miami for Art Basel alone. It’s a huge audience that’s actually quite cash-rich and educated, and they’re not being catered to.When I speak to my friends, very often they will say: ‘We’re flying to Miami for Art Basel Miami,’ or ‘I’m going to Palermo because there’s Manifesta happening there.’ Fifty percent of the time, there’s some cultural hook. So I thought, why is nobody catering for that? That’s how my trips started.Describe your trips.I have a very small, select client base. They’re usually tech people who cashed out; culture is one element of their lifestyle. I have one client for whom we do three trips a year. Each trip is about 10 or 15 people. We might go to Paris, see private Picasso collections, and sit in the kitchen of Michelin-starred restaurants with the chefs. We did a trip to Italy in October where we visited a villa with an important art collection, then went mushroom hunting in the forest, then did a race with river boats across the lake, then saw fashion designers in their studios. We also went to the La Scala opera house in Milan and got a tour with the lady from the costume department. Then we went to nightclubs.What is the purpose of the Leading Culture Destinations awards?The idea is to give recognition to a lot of the big museums that do excellent work, but also to highlight the new museums.When there’s a new underwater hotel opening in the Maldives, you see it everywhere. When there’s a new and amazing museum opening up, you almost have to go to the specialist press. Hotels are in the tourism industry. They’re switched on when it comes to marketing, and when they open, they know they have to do a marketing campaign. Museums are led by educators who don’t communicate as well. I help them get a little bit more reach and step out of their specialized culture-, architecture- and- design world into a more mainstream media world. Because museums are a key driver of tourism: People are interested in them.How are your awards helping museums spread the word?My awards are not these events on stage where people thank their parents for the work they’ve done. That’s a little bit ’80. When you do an event or a conference, it consists of two things. One is what happens on stage, and the other is the coffee-machine moment. What I’m doing is the coffee-machine moment. I’m introducing the people from, for example, the V&A and the National Gallery to the Paracas Museum in Peru, or the Zeitz MOCAA Museum in Cape Town, to create a network among museum directors — so the big museum directors take the new ones under their wing, create a little bit of a community, and bring the culture industry together with the travel industry.We go to museums that are nominated and say, ‘Now is the time to talk to your tourism board. Ask your tourism board to give you some money and build a story around your museum to get tourism into your city to bring traffic to your museum.’ Because tourism boards are realizing that communicating their destination with a lady in a bikini holding a cocktail is not on anymore. Culture works for men, works for women, works for families and works to represent and reflect the culture of the city.Do you encounter resistance in the museum world?I see resistance in the museum world, and I see resistance in the tourism world, because people are siloed down. Even though cultural tourism is for me a very obvious thing, for a lot of people, it’s still quite new. I had a meeting with the staff of a major and very switched-on museum this year, and they said, ‘For us, it’s really important to be able to do destination marketing.’ And I said, ‘You’ve been doing destination marketing for 10 years!’ That they talk about it as something new shows you how far behind this all is.Museums have to become economically sustainable, because there are funding cuts and a lot of other museums opening — more places on offer. Getting people through the door means revenue to a certain degree. Let’s say you get 10 visitors through the door. Two will buy something in your shop, one will buy a coffee.Museums are also realizing that food and beverage are part of the experience. It’s not just culture per se, but food culture. To do food and beverage well in a museum is not discrediting your cultural DNA.You mentioned that there was also resistance on the tourism side?The tourism people are very traditional. In general, people don’t like change. Cultural tourism is something which is only just starting to happen. Some destinations have picked up on it, actually much more than the tourism sector itself, funnily enough — such as the West Kowloon District in Hong Kong, or Abu Dhabi (with the Louvre), or Dubai, where the World Expo is happening in 2020. But the tourism industry still thinks in terms of beach holidays, honeymoon holidays, cruising holidays. Culture somehow, for them, runs horizontal through all of it, which is kind of true. But it’s also its own vertical. They’re missing out on a very affluent audience.Click on the slideshow to check out images of some of the finalists of Leading Culture Destinations Award.http://www.blouinartinfo.comFounder: Louise Blouin p.p1 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 10.0px 'Times New Roman'} p.p2 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 10.0px 'Times New Roman'; min-height: 11.0px} p.p1 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 10.0px 'Times New Roman'; color: #d81e00} p.p2 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 10.0px 'Times New Roman'; color: #232323} span.s1 {text-decoration: underline ; font-kerning: none} span.s2 {font-kerning: none} Read more