Toilet Tourism: the cheeky little awards we created that revealed travel's most universal truth
- Bronwyn White
- 5 hours ago
- 8 min read
Quick summary
In 2017, I co-created the International Toilet Tourism Awards with my then-business partner, Carolyn Childs, at MyTravelResearch.
The premise was simple.
After two decades of researching what travellers actually want, we kept hitting the same finding from every market segment we studied: a clean, safe, well-designed toilet matters more than almost anyone in travel and tourism wants to admit.
The awards were our way of saying what everyone thinks out loud.
Yesterday I bumped into the 2018 winner of the Toilet Tourism awards at a Tourism Switzerland lunch in Sydney, and we laughed all over again.
A small story, before the proper one starts.
I rocked up to a Tourism Switzerland roadshow lunch.
At these travel industry eventsI expected a nice plate of food, a few slides about the Jungfrau region, and the usual catch-up with industry friends.
It is a great place to gather information straight from the source of wonderful destinations without getting there.
What I did not expect was Alan Ramsay.
Alan was sitting across the table.
The same Alan Ramsay from the Schilthornbahn cableway in Switzerland.
The same Alan whose team won the 2018 Overall Toilet Tourism Award for the James Bond loos at Piz Gloria, the rotating restaurant perched at 2,970m on top of Mt Schilthorn.
He looked at me. I looked at him.
And before either of us could say "how have you been," he said the same thing he said back in 2018:
"Bron, that toilet award is still the best award we've ever won."
He wasn't joking.
Eight years on. Shelves full of European tourism trophies and the one he still talks about is the one for a loo.
So I figured it was time to tell the proper story.
How the Toilet Tourism Awards came to be
The travel industry loves to talk about a lot of things.
Unmatched, unparalleled everything. Beachfront views. Five-course tastings. Boutique boltholes with curated experiences.
What it almost never talks about, because heaven forbid, is the toilet.
Yet for two decades, as a travel researcher, I sat in focus groups, ran national surveys, interviewed solo travellers, business travellers, high-net-worth travellers, retirees and families.
And the same theme bubbled up every single time. Particularly when we asked about what made travellers and road trippers stop at a town.
Or in the case of Qantas - what is the most important part of a longhaul international flight.
Clean toilets.
Safe toilets.
Findable toilets.
When I worked in the market research department at Qantas back in the day, running focus groups with high-net-worth travellers and corporate flyers, this came up over and over.
People who could buy almost anything would still rate "clean bathroom" as a top-three priority for hotels, lounges and airports.
It is the great leveller of travel.
Even for Kings and Queens.
Doesn't matter if you're flying first class or sleeping in a hostel dorm.
Doesn't matter if you're 25 or 75.
The toilet stops being trivial the moment it stops being available. Or often in the case of travel, when you need it, like, right now.
So in 2017, my then-business partner Carolyn Childs and I had a thought at TravelResearch
What if we put a giant spotlight on the issue?
Not in a worthy, hand-wringing way. In a fun way.
An award. An actual international award where tourism destinations could nominate their loos and we'd judge them on design, accessibility, location, quirkiness and the economic contribution they made to their town.
We called them the International Toilet Tourism Awards.
And then we waited to see if anyone would actually enter.
They did. By the dozen.
From across North America, Europe, Asia and Australia.
The mainstream press picked it up. The story ran in newspapers and trade press in multiple countries.
Because of course it did. It was funny, it was true, and absolutely no one else was saying it.
The 2018 winners (who I still smile about)
Here are the six 2018 winners. I'll keep it brief because their stories are good enough on their own.
Best Design — Saskatchewan Science Centre, Regina, Canada.
A bathroom inside the Science Centre with floor-to-ceiling visuals of the Canadian boreal forest and audio of birdsong piped through the room. Going for a wee while listening to woodland sounds. Genius.
Best Economic Contributor — The Cummins Mosaic Loo, Eyre Peninsula, South Australia.
A small town in regional South Australia took an old red-brick public toilet block from the disused railway station and turned it into a mosaic-covered, statue-dotted, bygone-era artwork.
Tourists now drive into Cummins for the loo.
They stay for a coffee, a pie, a poke around the local shops.
The town's businesses benefit. That is what a good public toilet can do for a community.
Best Location — Hotel La Jolla, California, USA.
An 11th-floor restroom looking over the Pacific Ocean off San Diego. Big windows. Coastal light. The kind of view people pay $400 a night for, except you can also wash your hands.
Best Accessible Toilet — Brisbane Airport, Queensland, Australia.
This one I want to dwell on for a moment. Brisbane Airport built a Changing Places facility with an adult change table, ceiling hoist and removable handrails.
They even put in an indoor loo for guide dogs. Travellers with severe disabilities, and their carers, told us this single facility had made flying possible again for them. Not nicer. Possible.
Quirkiest Toilet Experience — Bowl Plaza, Lucas, Kansas, USA.
A toilet block shaped like a toilet tank. The entry is a giant raised toilet lid. Walls covered in shards of porcelain, kids' action figures, toy cars and effigies, contributed by local artists and residents over four years. It now has its own guest register.
Overall Winner — The James Bond Loos at Piz Gloria, Mt Schilthorn, Switzerland.
Bond girl Diana Rigg appears in the mirror when men wash their hands.
A sign at the urinals reads "Shake, don't stir."
A bullet hole and a shot ringing out beside a Bond cameo in the ladies. It's all in.
And the location is the rotating restaurant from On Her Majesty's Secret Service, at almost 3,000 metres up an Alp.
That's the toilet that Alan and his team built.
That's the award he reckons is still the best one they've ever won.
I get it. Because every other award says you did something well. The toilet award says you understood your traveller.
The bit the industry still doesn't talk about
Here is the thing my research keeps showing me, and it isn't going away.
Travel marketing leads with the dream.
The Aperol on the terrace. The duvet white as snow. The infinity pool at sunset.
Travellers, when you actually sit them down, lead with the basics.
Will I be safe.
Will I be comfortable.
Will there be a clean toilet when I need one.
For midlife women, this last one isn't a punchline. It's a planning constraint.
Bladders weaken with age. Hormonal changes do interesting things. A long bus tour with no scheduled stops, or a day in a city with no findable public loo, can flip a great trip into a bad one in twenty minutes flat.
I get this question, or a version of it, almost every time I run a Q&A with solo women travellers in midlife:
"Bron, what do I do about the toilet situation in [insert country]?"
Nobody asks me about the latest Michelin star. They ask me about hygiene, accessibility, queues and whether the public loo arrangement in southern Italy is going to be acceptable.
The travel industry assumes the topic is too unglamorous to mention.
The travellers, who are paying the bill, think it's the most important thing on the list.
There's a gap there. The Toilet Tourism Awards were our cheerful way of pointing at it.
What clean toilets actually mean to travellers
Strip the loo back to what it really is for a traveller and you get this.
Dignity. Especially for travellers with disability and the people who travel with them.
Independence. The ability to go out for a full day and not have to plan your route around access.
Trust. If a destination cares enough to invest in good public toilets, what else are they getting right?
Confidence. A first-time solo traveller who knows where the next clean stop is keeps walking, keeps saying yes, keeps making the trip her own.
Memory. You remember a James Bond loo at the top of an Alp. You remember a forest-themed bathroom in Saskatchewan. You don't remember the seventeenth lobby of the seventeenth four-star hotel.
A great toilet stops being a utility and becomes part of the story you tell your friends when you get home.
That is, by the way, the whole point of travel marketing. Give people a story worth retelling.
World Toilet Day is a real thing
Yes, it really exists. World Toilet Day falls on 19 November every year.
It's run by the United Nations to focus attention on the 3.5 billion people in the world who still don't have access to safely managed sanitation.
That is the proper, serious heart of why public toilets matter.
The Toilet Tourism Awards were a cheekier conversation. But they sat alongside the real one. Good loos are a sign of a society that values dignity. Bad loos, or no loos, are a sign of one that doesn't.
In tourism, that signal is doing more work than most operators realise.
What I want you to take away
If you're a traveller, particularly a midlife woman planning her first or fifteenth solo trip, I want you to know that your "ridiculous" question about toilets is not ridiculous.
It's the same question every other traveller is wanting to ask, including the high-net-worth ones up the front of the plane. Ask it loudly. Plan around it. It's not a weakness. It's a logistics decision.
If you're in tourism, please stop assuming the loo is too small to talk about.
A great toilet is not a side issue.
It is, very often, the difference between a town with a tourist economy and a town without one.
Just ask Cummins. Or Brisbane Airport. Or Alan up the top of Mt Schilthorn.
Now I'd love to hear from you.
Do you have a favourite toilet from your travels?
A loo with a view, a loo with a story, a loo that saved your day on a long bus ride through somewhere you didn't speak the language?
Reply and tell me. I collect these like other people collect fridge magnets.
Happy travels,
Bron
P.S. If you're wondering whether running a serious travel research business and giving out awards for international toilets at the same time is a contradiction, I'd argue the opposite. The bigger the question, the more useful it is to ask it without taking yourself too seriously. Eight years on, the toilet awards are still the project people remember. That tells me something.
FAQs
What is toilet tourism?
Toilet tourism is the idea that public toilets in tourism destinations matter more than the industry usually admits. Travellers actively rate, remember and recommend places based on the quality of their loos. Smart destinations are using clever, well-designed public toilets as part of their visitor experience and as a draw for foot traffic into local businesses.
Who created the International Toilet Tourism Awards?
I co-created them with Carolyn Childs at MyTravelResearch in 2017, off the back of more than 20 years of qualitative and quantitative research showing that "clean, safe toilet" was a consistent top priority for travellers across every demographic we studied.
Who won the 2018 Overall Toilet Tourism Award?
The James Bond-themed loos at Piz Gloria, the rotating restaurant on top of Mt Schilthorn in Switzerland, run by the Schilthornbahn cable car company. Eight years on, Alan Ramsay from Schilthornbahn told me at a Tourism Switzerland event in Sydney that it's still the best award his team has ever won.
What were the categories in the 2018 awards?
Best Design, Best Economic Contributor, Best Location, Best Accessible Toilet, Quirkiest Experience, and Overall Contribution to Toilet Tourism.
When is World Toilet Day?
19 November. World Toilet Day is a UN day focused on the 3.5 billion people who don't yet have access to safely managed sanitation, and the role of toilets in public health, dignity and gender equality.
Why do toilets matter so much for women over 50 specifically?
Bladder strength changes with age, particularly post-menopause. Long touring days, sparse public toilet infrastructure or accessibility issues can have a real impact on whether a trip feels enjoyable or stressful. It is a regular topic in my research with midlife women travellers, and a perfectly reasonable question to ask of any tour operator before you book.
Where can I read more about the winners?
The full list and judges' comments were published widely in the trade press at the time. There a few Aussie favouritess on Escape Travel website
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