OverTourism and UnderTourism ~ Where’s the Balance?
Really, my introduction into Sustainable Travel & Tourism (Part 1)
We read a lot about Sustainable Travel these days. At least I have.
Due to the near-zero level of travel in the last nine months of 2020, the waters are clear once again in over traveled destinations, but conversely, many restaurants and retailers are out of business. Cruise ships are becoming banned from certain ports, but tour operators become less-employed. Where’s the balance?
I made my first trip with Tourism Cares in 2016 to Ellis Island and Liberty State Park in New Jersey for some tree planting, painting and clean up. The company I was running at the time was a member of Tourism and one not to shy away from physical labor, I dragged along a colleague and we went.
Tourism Cares’ mission is to advance the travel industry’s positive social and environmental impact. We believe it is in our best interest to support the destinations we all depend on so that communities, travelers and businesses can prosper.
I understood some basics about sustainable travel and the need to do better. In five years, I made a half dozen trips planting and cleaning in Puerto Rico, Anaheim (farm planting), Jordan (learning & work effort), and Thailand (tree planting). As a 30+ year employee in the travel industry, I did not, and still do not, know enough nor do enough to support keeping travel and tourism sustainable. Confession made.
Last week I watched a great webinar hosted by TCS World Travel (great job, well run) on Mapping the Traveler’s Mind — How a Destination Becomes Iconic. One my favorite travel experts, Andrew Evans (National Geographic and BBC Travel among others) led the discussion. He talked about how destinations become iconic and then can be easily overrun with over-tourism. We’ve seen this in Venice, Cambodia, Galapagos, Alaska, on safari’s in Africa, Japan and China and when my relatives visit.
I didn’t know enough about sustainable travel, so I called the most expert Sustainable Travel person I know, Paula Vlamings, Chief Impact Officer at Tourism Cares. Paula and I met a few years ago in Jordan.. We visited several sustainable initiative sites, including a cooperative owned by women, recycled cycling businesses (A&K Philanthropy) for locals and tourists, the Al Numeira Environmental Association and several more local support projects.
So, Paula and I spoke this week, I let her know how little I felt that I knew about Sustainable Travel & Tourism and what to do. Her advice, learn. Paula send me sites to visit, initiatives in progress, people to contact, and ways to engage, all of which I include below.
BUT, the first thing I did was want to find out how much I didn’t know. I visited the sites (plus a few more), word clouded them, then combined them. Here is what I learned, in terms of how the combined Sustainable Travel & Tourism effort describes itself:
The key takeaways for me were that “Sustainable Travel” covers multiple areas, and that most of these areas are covered in one or more organizations. The United Nations World Tourism Office (UNWTO) published 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in 2015:
From Paula: “My hope is that the travel industry (and destinations) start to take a longer-term view — it’s not just heads in beds and numbers through the gates. My hope is that we start to understand that the destruction of biodiversity and the disappearing wild is really what created the conditions for this pandemic. We really do need to protect biodiversity and understand that we are responsible — in some cases the humans are the virus on this earth….We have to protect these places, these cultures, and these ecosystems or we don’t have a future in this industry.”
— Paula Vlamings, Chief Impact Officer, Tourism Cares and Co-founder of the Future of Tourism Coalition, from Episode 15 of Season 2 of the Indagare Global Conversations Podcast “Travel Experts Talk: The Potential Perils of Undertourism”
Paula is hosting Session #3 on May 6, titled Local & Sustainabile Supply Chains
For me, I have a lot to learn about Sustainable Travel. I signed up for the Sustainability Tourism course by the Global Sustainable Tourism Council.
The Global Sustainable Tourism Council (GSTC) is managing the GSTC Criteria, global standards for sustainable travel and tourism; as well as providing international accreditation for sustainable tourism Certification Bodies.
The Future of Tourism organization published their 13 Guiding Principles:
Over 500 companies have signed on. Me too.
See you on the road…
Jim
https://www.futureoftourism.org
https://www.gstcouncil.org/about/
https://tourism4sdgs.org/tourism-for-sdgs/tourism-and-sdgs/
