When Collaboration Becomes Gold

Last Thursday, I wrote about the choice we all face once a decision has been made: Should I be a contributor or an obstructionist? The same choice applies not only to individuals, but also to villages, businesses, and entire industries. When people and organizations choose to support one another instead of pulling in different directions, the results can become greater than anything they could have achieved alone.

How Collaboration Turned Flåm into One of Norway’s Top Tourist Destinations

Flåm was once a small village by the fjord. Today, it is one of Norway’s most visited tourist destinations, attracting well over a million visitors each year. Its most famous attraction is the Flåm Railway, a journey that regularly appears on lists of the world’s most beautiful train rides. But Flåm’s success is not about the railway alone. It is about how local businesses chose to work together.

Rather than competing, they built a broad range of complementary experiences. The railway brings visitors to the village, fjord cruises and kayak rentals provide activities, the zipline attracts adventure seekers, hotels fill rooms, and cafés serve food and drinks. The businesses recommend one another and create a complete experience that encourages visitors to stay longer, spend more money, and leave with far more memories than they otherwise would have.

The same principle can be seen in The Golden Road (Den Gyldne Omvei) in Inderøy, where farm shops, artists, accommodation providers, and food producers chose collaboration over competition. Instead of fighting over the same visitors, they created a shared route, a shared identity, and a shared promise: come here and find everything in one place.

The Røros region is another example, where local food producers, tourism businesses, and its UNESCO World Heritage status work together to build a brand that attracts visitors from around the world.

What Happens When Businesses Compete Instead of Collaborate?

Collaboration does not happen automatically. While some communities and regions succeed by supporting one another, others end up weakening themselves.

I saw this firsthand in Finnsnes in 2023. During the Finnsnes Festival, local bars and venues competed for the same guests, even though there were enough visitors for everyone. Instead of building on the festival and letting it act as a driver of activity, several venues launched their own after-parties before the concerts at the festival grounds had even finished.

The result was that the festival lost visitors, the venues enjoyed a short-term boost, and the overall experience became weaker. This stands in contrast to cities such as Bergen and Tromsø, where festivals like Bergenfest and Buktafestivalen work closely with restaurants, bars, and nightlife operators. When the festival experience continues seamlessly between stages, restaurants, bars, and nightlife venues, the entire city benefits.

Why Good Partnerships Often Fail

I am currently in Drama, Greece, a region that is a goldmine for tourism, with mountains, wine, culture, history, and activities of every kind. Yet I see the same pattern found in many places: businesses often operate in silos, each focusing on its own products and strategy.

If two companies offer kayak rentals and each owns ten kayaks, they can only handle small groups individually. By collaborating, they can accommodate twice as many guests and become attractive to larger tour operators.

This is often where problems begin. I recently heard about a partnership that included a transportation provider. The collaboration worked well and the concept started growing, but once the transportation company saw the earning potential, it tried to take over the entire value chain. The problem was that the other partners controlled the experiences, content, and marketing. The transportation company was eventually replaced, while the collaboration continued. The value did not lie in any one company alone, but in the interaction between them.

How Collaboration Creates Better Travel Experiences

Imagine starting your day with a local cycling tour. The route takes you through the countryside to a farm where you learn how feta cheese is made and get to taste it along the way. Next, you visit an olive oil producer before continuing to a winery, where you learn about the production process and sample the products. When lunch is served, it is prepared using the very ingredients you have just learned about. The day can then end with a few relaxing hours at a spa.

Each activity would be enjoyable on its own. The cycling tour would be pleasant, the farm visit educational, the winery interesting, and the spa relaxing. But when these businesses collaborate and build on one another’s offerings, a common thread emerges, making the experience far more valuable than the sum of its individual parts.

You are not just selling a product or a service. You are selling the feeling and experience customers take home with them. I have written about this previously in the article The Advantage Behind the Advantage.

The Benefits of Collaboration in Tourism and Business Development

Tourism is not built around a single attraction. It is created by the combination of everything a destination has to offer, from accommodation and activities to food, culture, and service. When one piece is missing, the overall experience becomes weaker. When businesses collaborate, the result becomes greater than the sum of its parts.

The same mechanisms apply in workplaces, volunteer organizations, and even groups of friends. When we withdraw or try to keep all the rewards for ourselves, the outcome is usually worse for everyone, including ourselves.

You can say, “No, we don’t have that item,” or “I can order it for you.” But you can also say, “Try the store across the street, they usually have it.” You may lose a sale in the moment, but you build trust. The same principle applies in meetings. You can present an idea as your own, or you can give credit to the colleague who suggested it. Doing so strengthens both relationships and collaboration.

Building Trust and Collaboration in Practice

Collaboration is not always about grand strategies or formal agreements. Often, it is the small things that determine whether a guest has a good experience and decides to return.

• If your hotel is fully booked, do not say, “Come back tomorrow.” Recommend a partner hotel, or even better, pick up the phone and make the reservation for the guest. Chances are the favor will be returned another time.

• If you run a kayak rental business and all your equipment is booked out, do not simply turn customers away. Instead, say, “We’re fully booked today, but you could try rafting with [xxx]. It offers just as much excitement.”

• If your restaurant is full, direct guests to another venue. You may lose a meal sale, but you gain trust and perhaps a returning customer tomorrow.

This is how you create an experience that encourages visitors to tell others about the destination.

How Collaboration Turned Norwegian Salmon into a Global Success

During the 1980s and early 1990s, Norwegian salmon farmers competed fiercely against one another in international markets. Each producer marketed its own products, prices were driven down, and in important markets such as Japan, Norwegian companies undercut one another so aggressively that both profitability and confidence in Norwegian salmon began to decline.

Eventually, the industry realized that its biggest competitor was not the neighboring producer along the coast, but the rest of the world.

Through what is now the Norwegian Seafood Council, companies began marketing Norwegian salmon as a single unified brand. Instead of spending their energy competing with each other, they invested in joint marketing, quality systems, and international promotion.

As a result, Norwegian salmon evolved from being one product among many into a recognized mark of quality. Customers were no longer simply buying salmon from an individual producer; they were buying Norwegian salmon. Markets opened around the world, and what had once been an industry struggling with low margins became a global premium product known for quality, food safety, and sustainability.

Today, seafood is Norway’s second-largest export industry after oil and gas.

This development illustrates how a clear premium strategy can create long-term value. I have written more about this in the article Premium Strategy: How to Position Products and Services for Exclusivity and Quality.

Why Successful Collaborations Need Shared Rules

It is easy to think collaboration is simply about good intentions and strong relationships. In reality, many partnerships fail because benefits, responsibilities, or influence are not perceived as fairly distributed. Perfect fairness may never exist, but without a sense of balance, trust disappears, and collaboration quickly falls apart.

That is why many partnerships need an independent party to ensure that the bigger picture takes priority over individual interests. This was one of the factors that helped transform Norwegian salmon exports. Through the Norwegian Seafood Council, the industry gained a shared organization working on behalf of everyone. No single company could take the entire pie, but everyone benefited because the pie itself became larger.

Tourism is often more challenging. Destination companies and public organizations can contribute, but most initiatives begin with entrepreneurs, farmers, and local businesses taking the first steps. Only after something proves successful do larger organizations typically become involved.

When your own money, products, or employees are at stake, most people will eventually prioritize their own interests. The problem arises when everyone does so at the same time. That is when the foundation begins to crumble and short-term gains replace long-term value creation.

Contributor or Obstructionist?

So let us return to the question from last Thursday’s article: Will you spend your energy proving that you were right, or helping the group succeed?

In working life, this is an individual choice. In a village, a community, or an industry, it becomes a collective one. When people withdraw or try to take the whole pie for themselves, everyone loses a little.

The person who catches the fish today gets one meal. The person who builds a sustainable fish stock can harvest from it for generations.

Flåm did not become a success because one business was better than all the others. Norwegian salmon did not become a global quality brand because producers competed harder against one another. They succeeded because someone lifted their gaze and realized that the greatest reward came from building something together.

Will you be part of the solution and help strengthen the whole, or part of the problem and focus only on your own interests? That question applies in every industry, whether you run a hotel, a farm, a restaurant, a festival, or simply sit behind a desk.