WTM 2015 Responsible Tourism Day: Shock & Awe

While 99% of the participants at the World Travel Market were blithely conducting “business as usual” in their brightly lit booths, the intellectual equivalent of shock and awe was being unleashed by the climate change equivalent to Greek rebel and former Deputy Prime Minister, Yanis Varoufakis.

November 4^th 2015 may, with hindsight (and, probably, some wishful thinking), turn out to be an historic and symbolic moment in the history of mass tourism. That morning we witnessed a clash of two mindsets and two styles of power.  Kevin Anderson was the gladiator brought into the ring by a very brave Harold Goodwin to stimulate debate and discussion on what apparently has become a rather boring topic in tourism industry circles.

Undeterred, Anderson, one of Britain’s top climate change scientists, delivered a brilliantly succinct speech that seemed to impress even the “I’ve seen it all” Stephen Sackur. The professor come mountain climber provided just the right mix of data and acerbic insight in 17 minutes to prove to even the sleepiest in the audience that apathy, resistance and denial of the need to change course might be suicidal. His key points summarized:

• Based on science, the international community agrees that 2 degrees warming is the limit of acceptable warming – if the planet’s average temperature rises beyond that then humanity is in serious trouble.
• But we’re not to deceive ourselves by averages as staying within that boundary will still produce incredible hardship and pain to the planet’s poorest, most vulnerable and innocent of inhabitants. Anderson pressed home the point thus: “At a two degrees rise many millions of poor people, mostly in the southern hemisphere, will die. it means we are prepared to sacrifice the lives of many poor, low emitting people.”
• The only way we can have a 66% chance of staying within that boundary is if we act now by reducing our generation of CO₂ emission by 10% per annum and stop pumping any carbon into the atmosphere at all by 2050!
• Unfortunately, our track record for changing our life and business-styles thus far has not been encouraging. Since we first became globally aware of the problem in the 1990s, humanity has pumped 60% more carbon into a stressed atmosphere.
• This graph below shows the gap between carrying on as normal (the purple line) and meeting the reduction’s target that society at large has identified as tolerable (the trajectory depicted in orange). It gives a whole new meaning to the phrase most delegate heard on their tube journey; “Mind the Gap!”
  
• If we don’t alter course, we’re headed towards a rise of between 4 and 6 degrees in average global temperature which even the most conservative of organizations, such as the International Energy Authority and the IMF, now believe to be disastrous for humanity. Again, Anderson made sure we understood the implications: “Four degrees centigrade warming is incompatible with an organised global community. We will reach for a kalashnikov and start killing each other.”
• To make the reductions necessary and deliver some equity (i.e., take care of those who have not caused the problem in the first place), the wealthy nations, who produce the lion’s share of emissions, need to take drastic action now and start reducing carbon missions annually by 10% and produce 90% less carbon in 2030 than we did in 1990.
• To do that we need to consume less and produce less. In the tourism sector, and particularly within wealthy western economies, that means flying less often to far away places and making sure all the infrastructure that supports tourism around the world produces virtually no greenhouse gases at all. That will radically affect lifestyles and incur costs. The pain is unavoidable.
• Unfortunately because the tourism sector is growing at such a rate (doubling in traffic in less than 20 years and moving towards more carbon intensive forms of tourism), it will, despite all efforts to become more efficient, generate 1.3 times more CO₂ by 2030 and 2.64 times more CO₂ by 2050 than it does now. That’s our contribution to the gap.

In order to send his dumbstruck audience away with a positive message, Anderson ended with this quote, clearly having delivered on its first pre-requisite:

So it was with bated breath, we all awaited for signs of the second requisite, imagination, from the panel of industry leaders representing Boeing, Hyatt, UNWTO and a Tourism Minister from South Africa.This is when the real essence of the problem became apparent. What we witnessed in the next half hour was the clash of mindsets that Anderson identified as the crux of the problem and a subject I have been banging on about for the past 20 years. Anderson framed the challenge at its core as:

There’s absolutely no point in getting angry and blaming – we’re all slaves to our dominant paradigms and I can see why the industry leaders took the position they did – their immediate personal survival and prosperity depend on taking the prevailing corporate view – business as usual with some greening where necessary. Mr. Boeing talked about the fuel efficiencies they had achieved, stated that governments should invest more and then suggested, somewhat incredibly, that he didn’t know what profit his company made; Miss Hyatt took the same route – the hotel company is  investing heavily in becoming more sustainable but its spokesperson claimed to have no knowledge of Hyatt’s expansion plans; and Mr. UNWTO asserted that to not grow tourism was to be defeatist; that no one should be afraid of growth and, in fact should embrace growth – even though growth was never defined and, if it meant more people taking trips more often,   would certainly be at odds with the carbon reduction requirements Anderson had so eloquently and passionately just described. Interestingly, the only panelist who agreed that painful changes to our lifestyles might be necessary was a politician who also confessed he wouldn’t be running for office again!

There is nothing defeatist about facing the truth head on.  Continuing to do what we’ve always done will simply worsen our situation. Imagination and creativity are vital. We simply can’t afford stubborn resistance or intellectual laziness. Kevin Anderson is completely right to suggest that a complete systems change is needed along with leadership, courage, innovative thinking, engaged teams and difficult choices – little of which were evident from the panel but were evident in the subsequent Responsible Tourism Awards session that followed. The next 45 minutes provided a veritable cornucopia of imagination, creativity, joy and even playfulness all rising up from the messy but fertile soil of “grassroot communities” and small businesses experimenting and imagining a better future. If you don’t believe me, have a look: it’s all on video here…(Kevin Anderson’s presentations starts at 9:31 minutes in)

 

The whole motivation underpinning Conscious Travel is to create a space for both clarity and imagination to flourish. If the same amount of energy and money were to be spent exploring alternatives to the current model as are spent defending and justifying the old one, we would have found several ways to close the gap. As has been demonstrated year after year at the numerous award ceremonies held by all major tourism associations, there’s no shortage of imagination, leadership, courage, innovative thinking and a willingness to make difficult choices in the face of seeming intractable problems.

In two subsequent post to this, I’ll identify where we need clarity and some approaches to imagining a tourism that is better and better for more.

The ideas presented under the banner Conscious Travel are not original. What is perhaps new to tourism, is a fresh way of seeing, being and doing that enables us to shift into different patterns of behavior with less fear and more confidence. Once you get that this planet is not only our only home but a living organism of which we are a vital part; that we’re each and all connected participants in an amazing web of life; that each of our personal decisions matter; and that we can create conditions for our collective wisdom to guide us, much will become possible. It also helps to see that we’re playing our part in a vast, epic drama – an evolutionary shift from ego to eco consciousness and that such shifts are a natural part of life’s grand journey towards more complex and beautiful ways of being.

More Reading:
Jeremy Smith,  publisher of the amazingly content rich TravIndy wrote a concise and less critical summary of the debate here:

Previous Posts on this Blog Relevant to the subject:

1. My response to the notion that growth is not to be questioned was summarised in this post: Walking the Halls of Hope and Despair, WTM 2014
2. The notion of carbon budgets and the need to divest from fossil fuels was discussed here:
   The Burning Issue of Carbon
3. A Licence to Grow or Get better – Which Do You Choose? 
4. Climate Change: Implications for Business as Usual Tourism
5. My first attempt to assess the impact of climate change on tourism was published by the Icarus Foundation in 2007  – The Climate Change Challenge: Implications for Tourism

Walking the halls of hope and despair, WTM 2014

 

I confess I have never been wild about the World Travel Market – its central hall was the site of my personal “Road to Damascus” several years ago when I experienced the full extent to which tourism has become an industrial production and consumption machine.

I admit to being overwhelmed by the sheer scale, busyness and sterility of the event where products are pushed and deals done; brochures and media stuffed into plastic bags then discarded; and sustainable clichés fall like feathers from the upper galleries onto the hard selling activity in cubicles on the shop floor.

Walking the central hall this year I felt a visceral inner and outer tussle between despair and hope.

The number of “responsibility” seminars was, encouragingly, greater than ever before but still totally outnumbered and out attended by sessions devoted to trends, technology, social media, and market segments. Within the responsible tourism stream, the same pattern applied. Subjects like “Increasing the local economic impact” and ‘Using responsible travel to drive sales” attracted far more participants than subjects like reducing energy and water. (Note: I learned much from these sessions; applaud and thank organisers, speakers and Jeremy Smith for his excellent distillation: 10 things I learned from WTM 2014 with great links to speaker interviews)

There’s a simple explanation for the topic and attendance bias I suppose – the vast majority of people paid to attend WTM are engaged in marketing and sales. It is a market after all. But that explanation points to an issue that was hardly mentioned– and that’s the G-word: Growth. Tourism succeeds when it grows because we have defined success as more. Because growth is the goal, we allocate resources to the people, technology and processes that produce growth and measure our progress towards sustaining it.

And that leads me back to despair – because until we describe our predicament accurately and delve deeply into the root cause of the challenges we face, as an industry and as humanity, we’ll waste time and scarce resources tinkering at the edges. Our well intended “busyness” will keep thousands employed, produce endless conference fodder, and generate hundreds of checklists, certification bodies, “new” green initiatives, declarations and reports but won’t actually move us off the road to catastrophe.

The deeper problem is that more has become the end and not the means.

Somewhere in the last 60 years, while we’ve been so busy expanding, we’ve made it the responsibility of commerce to grow but not necessarily improve the lives of the community in which it takes place. GDP is used to measure growth in activity not welfare. We’ve become so used to growing and to the benefits that we believe it brings, that we’re literally hooked. We certainly behave like addicts. We seem to need more of it to feel its benefits. We complain and suffer when growth slows or stops. We associate a life without it as being uncomfortable at best and possibly life threatening at worse and we can also be blind to the hurt we cause ourselves and others.

(c) polyp@polyp.org.uk

As is also the case with addiction, the object of our craving is now causing more harm than good and producing a number of side effects that threaten our collective welfare. Many of these side effects – the pressure on biodiversity, the mistreatment of animals held captive; growth in human trafficking, and social inequity — were rightly included as responsible tourism topics at WTM. But climate change, universally recognized as one the biggest threats to human life and prosperity, was not officially assigned any airtime  this year despite the urgency now communicated by 97%+ of scientists (see Guardian summary). Climate change was not named as a topic in any of the seminar sessions. Yet climate change is surely a major and critically important symptom of an organ (in this case, our life supporting ecosphere), adjusting to the effects of an addiction afflicting its dominant species.

Addicts, we know, spend increasing amounts of time as their disease progresses, denying and concealing their dependence. The absence of sessions at WTM in which neither climate change nor the negative impacts of growth were officially discussed, and the complete absence of their mention in the brochure used to launch the “New” 10YFP Programme on Sustainable Tourism all signal avoidance behaviours classically used by addicts not yet ready for rehabilitation.

Finally, this statement from the Director of Sustainable Development of the UNWTO in the only article labeled “Responsible Tourism” in WTM Business,  shows what really matters:

“The tourism sector is embracing responsible tourism not as an option, but as a condition for its continuous growth”

Forgive me if the thought of sterilized needles and methadone replacement comes to mind.

So What’s Wrong with Growth?

The problem is fundamentally a semantic one. The verb “to grow” has three meanings:

Over the course of time, we in tourism have assumed that more of an entity or state is better than equal or less over time. Look at any tourism strategy from the smallest of Convention and Visitor Bureaus, National Tourist Boards or even the UNWTO and you will see that the goal is to grow tourism by a percentage increase over its performance the previous year. Performance is measured in the trips, people, and their spending at the host destination. In short, size matters and the shared meaning of growth is MORE.

So what’s wrong with that?

Well, there wasn’t much wrong with that at all when we started out some 60 years ago deploying mass transport to enable working men and women and their families have a holiday, visit parts of their country or venture to foreign lands. The tourism “industry” sensibly applied what had proved to be a very proficient method of making and selling things – an industrial system of production and consumption and, as a consequence, during the span of one human lifetime, tourism became a global economic sector of enormous importance contributing 10% of GDP and keeping over 250 million people in a job.

Since World War 2, tourism has brought benefits to virtually every country; lifted people out of poverty through accessible employment; created an untold number of entrepreneurial opportunities; enabled millions to enjoy face-to-face encounters with people of very different cultures; help fill public treasuries with useful tax dollars that were applied to education, health care and other social services; supported the development of important infrastructure and provided billions of dollars in foreign exchange and investment capital.

Phew!  Surely that’s an accomplishment to be proud of?

Yes, it is. But it’s not the complete or honest story. It ignores the inefficiencies and inequities built into the industrial system that only become apparent over time. So duplicating that rate of growth going forward may not bring more “good” with it. There are reasons why continuing to grow bigger is neither desirable nor at all likely. Let’s tackle the issue of likelihood first.

It will be difficult to sustain such growth forever because the operating model on which it was based was designed in and for a different world. The conditions that ensured its success are fast disappearing.

The model flourished when energy was cheaply available from abundant, accessible sources of fossil fuel; when there were literally hundreds of new, virtually empty and exotic places to explore and cultures to get to know; when host communities needed cash and investment to play in a global cash economy; when there were vast quantities of resources, capital and know-how to deploy with limited debt to be paid; and when huge numbers of people were determined to put two decades of war behind them and improve their material well-being.

Continuing to grow in size is not desirable now simply because the world is full (1), and because the industrial model of production and consumption contains within it certain characteristics and flaws that worsen with time. For the purpose of this post, I’ll concentrate on just four of the biggest:

1. Tourism generates wastes and uses resources at a rate that can be accommodated in its early stage of development but not sustained after it has reached a certain scale and pace of growth. Mitigating the negative effects of climate change (most of which will hurt tourism) now requires that all economies drastically reduce their production of CO2 to zero by 2050. That is because the atmosphere can only absorb a finite amount of CO2 IF we wish to keep average temperatures at a level in which human society can flourish (see previous posts on subject here and here).
2. Tourism is on a course that would increase its carbon contribution by 150% at precisely the time when it needs to focus on decreasing its absolute contribution to zero! Even if all ground operations became carbon-negative, the airline sector – vital to international tourism and responsible for 40% of tourism emissions now – will be a major contributor to the global total by 2050 if current forecast/ growth rates are achieved. Despite all the talk about being responsible, not a single nation has a carbon mitigation strategy for the tourism sector (2)
3. With a human population expected to increase by a further 2.5 billion between now and 2050, tourism will also face increasing competition for land, water and food in areas where – thanks to the effects of climate change – public funds may be unable to cope with the basic needs of resident populations. According to UNEP (3), mass tourism leaves an average of 5 cents in the host country for every $1 spent by visitors.  As the costs of mitigation and adaptation to climate change and the demands of a burgeoning visitor population rise, where will these hosts find the resources to supply adequate waste management, security, health and transportation services in addition to meeting the needs of their own growing population?
4. Mass tourism has a tendency to produce diminishing returns to investors and host communities over time. Tourism demand is highly volatile, seasonal and beyond the control of host destinations. When demand ebbs there is a tendency to discount and that response, combined with a lack of control over capacity, leads to a general fall in income per transaction. Price discounting necessitates either rigorous cost cutting or vertical and horizontal integration which can exacerbate a tendency for service levels and customer satisfaction to also decline.

 

What can we do?  There are two answers and the clue lies in the second and third definition of the verb “to grow.”

First, we re-define “growth” as better and second, we grow up!

Re-defining Growth As “Better and better for more”
Let’s shift our focus to a more inspiring end goal – enabling all stakeholders and especially the communities that welcome guests to flourish; in other words express and exude health and vitality; be resilient; open to change and qualitative development. In short thrive and prosper and become all they can be.

Let’s make sure the growth we get is:

• honest (acknowledges and deals with costs and harm as enthusiastically as it promotes the benefits);
• fair (ensures the benefits accrue to all stakeholders equitably); and
• natural (is life enhancing and in harmony with the natural rhythms of life).

Let’s make sure that what host communities deliver and what guests experience constitute an antidote to the types of uneconomic growth that prevail today in many parts of the world:

• jobless growth, where the economy grows but produces few jobs or ones that are poorly paid and erode the dignity and health of the worker;
• ruthless growth, where the proceeds only benefit speculators,  and the rich or powerful:
• voiceless growth, where economic growth is not accompanied by extensions of democracy or empowerment and where residents are deprived as say in who and how many guests they welcome; and
• futureless growth, where the present generation squanders resources needed by future generations.

Note though: The challenge when discussing tourism from a global perspective is that it ignores the enormous variability in circumstances between destinations. Volume growth may be needed in many destinations where there is over capacity brought about by a “build it and they will come” approach. Conscious Travel is not only about generating higher yields but empowering hosts communities to make informed decisions about how much, what kind, where and when. In some instances, more visitors are needed to ensure vitality and resilience.

We Grow Up!
Growing from an adolescent to an adult requires understanding that the world doesn’t revolve around you personally; that you are a member of a community on which you depend and to which you are obliged. It’s a reciprocal relationship of respect and caring. It also recognizes that there are limits. You neither can nor wish to keep growing bigger. You expect to change as you pass into adulthood – both physically and emotionally. You look forward to exploring how you can express your uniqueness within the constraints set by your culture and environment. While sometimes you’ll kick against those constraints and may even succeed in redefining them; other times, you’ll see that they are useful and stimulate more creativity and innovation.

You stop growing bigger when you grow into adulthood – you mature; you start to want to express yourself; to become more, to stretch – but qualitatively not quantitatively. You want to contribute to a larger whole. You want to be the best you can be. You strive to go where no man has gone before. That yearning diminishes much more slowly than your body ages – take that from me!!

And this process is totally natural!

In nature, nothing grows forever except perhaps the universe itself,  (it’s been expanding outwards at a phenomenal rate for 13.7 billion years).

There are no straight lines in nature. What looks like a straight line in nature is simply a part of a fractal curve that appears throughout life itself. It has what sounds like a mysterious name – it’s called a Sigmoid curve. But Sigmoid is just Greek for the letter S and the curve describes the letter lying on its back and illustrates a natural cycle that pervades all life.

Thanks to Dr. Butler, the tourism community is familiar with the Sigmoid Curve even though they aren’t recognized as such. Dr Butler introduced the most enduring model of tourism destination development but, while he correctly named it as the Tourism Area Life Cycle Model (TALC), he based it on a concept derived from the industrial model of production and consumption – the life cycle of products. It’s an indication of the author’s modesty, that Dr. Butler is surprised by its popularity, potency and durability (4).

The TALC model is applicable not just to individual resorts – each of which sits at its own unique point on the curve – but to mass industrial tourism as a whole. If you define success as volume – as opposed to net benefit – you’ll place mass tourism between stages 3 and 4 on the TALC curve. But if measured in terms of its net benefit then we’re most definitely at or approaching stage 4.

 

Evidence for Hope

We don’t need to tear down the old model. The alternative model is emerging all around us. Both need to co-exist while the alternative grows in strength and complexity. Several pioneers of a new, less harmful, more beneficial model were acknowledged and applauded by receiving Responsible Tourism Awards at WTM and many others attended and contributed to the sessions that accompanied the trading on the exhibit floor. At the WTM, the UNWTO and Adventure Travel Trade Association (ATTA) launched their jointly produced Global Report on Adventure Tourism  in which ATTA revealed from its Industry Snapshot 2014 that an estimated  65.6% of the total trip cost of an adventure package remains in the destination(s) visited – a vast improvement on the 5% estimated by UNEP for mass tourism. Proof that there is huge potential to improve the net benefit to host destinations.

We don’t need any more divisions; no more “them” and “us”. Those of us who have been working in all aspects of the new, whether it be in sustainable, responsible, geo, fairtrade, or social tourism; whether our focus is on environment or social issues; or whether we’ve been involved for years or minutes, need now to join hands. Some can focus on building inspiring working prototypes of the new. Others can build bridges with the keepers of the old until it makes sense for them to move.

What we do need is coherent thinking as a “we” tied together by a common vision for humanity that can thrive and flourish on a living planet.

What we do need is to understand nature’s timeless principles to recognise when it’s time for transformation, maturation, evolution (5).

We also need courage to undertake a fearless inventory and speak the truth. It was Chris Doyle’s article for the WTM that persuaded me to attend and I was honoured to join him in the two lively and provocative sessions organized by the Adventure Travel Trade Association (ATTA).

This is the most exciting time to be alive. It’s the very first time in human history when individual humans have the capacity to be aware that their personal choices do matter in the evolutionary trajectory of a species, no less!

No wonder we’re being called to stop growing in size but in wisdom, insight, maturity and compassion. Because tourism plays such a direct role in connecting people to each other in places where they can experience the power and beauty of nature  and discover their true identity, we must step up into a much grander sense of purpose.

More of us must engage in the task of building a better model – shifting from one S curve to another.

It all makes that brightly lit central hallway in a box called Excel seem rather unappealing, don’t you think? There’s a mysterious and amazingly beautiful world of living beings out there in the sunshine by the river – let’s join them there and flourish.

References and Reading
(1) Economics in a Full World, Herman Daly, Scintific American September 2005. Download here 

(2) Climate Change Implications for Tourism University of Cambridge Download pdf here

(3) UNEP, Negative Economic Impacts of Tourism – available online here

(4) Tourism Area Life Cycle R.W. Butler,  in Contemporary Tourism Reviews, Goodfellow Publishers, Oxford, 2011

(5) See Giles Hutchins: Transformational Times Call For Transformational Minds.

Personal Note: This post is the first in a series of reflections about how tourism can flourish in a post carbon, post growth society. The “book,” which so many of my dear supporters have said I must write, is finally in the making. It will be so much better if you add your comments to these blogs, share and encourage others. No individual, no enterprise, no community can go it alone. The stakes are too high.

RELATED POSTS 

When will tourism industry start talking sensibly about tourism growth? Author Jeremy Smith, founder Travindy. Another call for this discussion to take place.

WTM 2015 Responsible Tourism Day – Shock and Awe
One year later in 2015, resistance to contemplating another model i.e. one that does not deed on volume growth acme very evident.

DO UNWTO Figues mislead?

Tourism What’s the Point ? (just in case we have forgotten)

 

Tourism: a Time of Leadership or a Time For Leadership?

For as long as I have been working in tourism, I have heard its “leaders” (presumed by society to be the heads of global agencies or multinationals) complain of a lack of media attention and the failure of governments to take it seriously or to give its tourism ministers political clout.

Based on the spate of headlines since mid April, it looks as if that situation is changing – but whether that is for the better or for the worse depends very much on your point of view.

The first event to grab the headlines was WTTC’s 13^th Annual Global Summit under an ironic theme “A Time For Leadership”. Ironic because that title implies leadership has been absent the past.  Ironic because WTTC’s claim to be “The Authority of World Travel and Tourism” suggests that it’s the group that must take responsibility for any previous leadership vacuums.

The BBC’s 6 minute, Fastrack program sensed as much and viewing it is worth the investment of your time. I can’t embed the video but click on this link and the image to view.

The tone of Rajan Datar’s report cast doubt on the ambitious claims made by the leaders at the event that:

a.) “travel and tourism can be a catalyst for change – alleviating global poverty, inequality and even environmental damage” and

b.) that tourism’s continued “growth”  and sustainability are not mutually exclusive.

……..

About five days later Tourism made headlines again with Simon and Schuster’s  release of Elisabeth Becker’s opus, Overbooked in which this eminent journalist and editor “discovers” that tourism isn’t quite the frivolous, fun preoccupation that only gets mention in the travel pages of most media but, instead,  a giant business sector, an industrial phenomenon and now the world’s largest employer.

While nowhere near as hard hitting as Leon Hickmans’s earlier analysis outlined in the The Last Call published in 2007, Ms. Becker’s account doesn’t shirk from identifying the environmental and socially destructive impacts of this industrial contributor to globalization. She makes the following conclusion which, as you can imagine, gave me some comfort and encouragement:

For the emerging middle class around the world, travel is a right of passage. Travel is the reward for hard work and proof that one has arrived. Yet with every right comes responsibility, and protecting the world’s beauties would seem obvious by demanding that the industry respect local culture, heritage and the environment.

Sadly, Ms. Becker’s  account of tourism’s dark side isn’t news to any of us – the members of the Facebook Group Irresponsible Tourism  and RTNetworking are doing a great job of highlighting our internal challenges that cannot be ignored. What I did find interesting was her perplexity around the fact that tourism as an industry is subject to so little scrutiny. She could see that governments like the revenue, the investment and support for infrastructure and its provision of jobs etc. but there seems either some collective shame associated with this source of benefit or some form of innate snobbery – as if the glitteratti see no need to know what goes on below decks or behind the swing doors to the kitchen.

Having read the book, I don’t feel Ms Becker ever gets to the bottom of that paradox. Is tourism the prodigal son that leaves home to make some remittance money for a family that would prefer not to delve into how that wealth was derived as they simply don’t want to stop the flow?

There’s no doubt now that tourism is associated with huge wealth creation – you don’t sneeze at $6.3 trillion – but,  as volume demand continues on a finite planet, and evidence mounts that this wealth doesn’t evenly benefit the 10% of the world’s labour force engaged in it, you’ll see more headlines like “Is Tourism the Most Destructive Enterprise?” or “Tourists Today: Trample Distrust and Destroy.”

………………….

So – Is it a Time of Leadership or a Time For Leadership?

Answering this question addresses Becker’s initial query – why doesn’t tourism get the same attention as other sectors?

I believe tourism will get the attention it deserves when it wakes up, grows up and steps up. Right now its dominant form – the “mass industrial model” is operating like an adolescent resisting any need to take responsibility for the whole. There is a paucity of Leadership and vision from the top – a situation not peculiar to tourism. All you seem to hear is a request for more favours, more concessions while at the same time expounding how well tourism is bouncing back and – now – potentially capable of saving the global economy no less!

It is, on the other hand, a time FOR leadership – a time for hosts and host communities to ensure they attract the kind of tourism they want and that generates net benefit.  It will be a different kind of leadership – emerging from ordinary citizens, community by community as is being shown by all those individuals pushing the responsible, sustainable, fair agenda forward.

I most certainly am not anti tourism – conducted properly it can create a far greater value than has been realized to date. In fact, as has been shown throughout this web site; the issue is one of value and “wellth” generation. But I am disappointed with the self serving complacency, denial, arrogance and self-satisfaction of those who, despite all the resources at their disposal, continue to repeat hollow sounding platitudes and ignore the truth.

Every other aspect of human endeavour – healthcare, education, retailing, food and energy production, capitalism, economics and politics is going through a radical re-think. It’s time tourism recognized the time for partying is over and it must come to the family table with constructive ideas as to how to face the issues affecting the community as a whole. I think that might have been what Taleb Rifai, Secretary General of the UNWTO was alluding to when he said in the BBC clip “ the more they (countries) become conscious of their responsibility, the more they can perfect their investment in what is right and good”.

The real task then is to shift consciousness as in awareness, purpose and priorities. Without such a shift in mindset that determines what we value, then “tourism as usual” will grow in size and impact with diminishing to negative returns. That value shift will only take place community by community. It requires re-learning and that learning can best be done in community.

Our aim with Conscious Travel is to accelerate that process of helping tourism hosts become the conscious change agents needed to envision and create a better, higher value form of tourism that enriches host communities, delights guests and provides a decent, sustainable yield to hosts. That’s what we need to grow but it will take a very different approach to that extolled in Abu Dhabi.  Work is proceeding now on seeking allies and partners to develop and test the collaborative learning platform.

Footnote:
There are now over 75 posts on this website – seemingly hidden from view! Here are some titles that relate to today’s discussion:

Why Tourism’s Impact is Hardly Noticed

Why Mindsets Really Matter

Conscious Travel in Three Words

Why Tourism Will and Must Change its Operating Model

A licence to grow or get better – which do you choose?

I am grateful to the folks at Coast – One Planet Tourist Network for pointing me to the Dec 11th article in Travel Mole that was published two days before UNWTO launched its campaign celebrating the recording of 1 Billion international trips – see previous post.

My curiosity was piqued and my optimism encouraged by this statement from the Secretary General: “We have an opportunity right now to move away from business as usual policies and to put the right strategies in place to significantly reduce  our emissions.”

But after continuing to read the UNWTO press releases officially launching the publication Tourism in the Green Economy, my concerns returned.

The publication builds on the tourism chapter of the 2011 UNWTO/UN Environment Programme (UNEP) Green Economy Report, which finds that an investment of just 0.2% of global GDP per year between now and 2050 would allow the tourism sector to grow steadily over the coming decades, contributing to much-needed economic growth, employment and development while ensuring significant environmental benefits such as reductions in water consumption (18%), energy use (44%) and CO2 emissions (52%), as compared to a business as usual scenario. (Source: UNWTO press release, Dec11th, 2012)

So I took the time to read – well try to read – the tourism chapter which comprises 40+ pages of a 613 report titled Towards a Green Economy published in 2011 but found it impossible to follow the logic or identify a rationale for allowing the tourism sector to grow steadily.

The authors of the chapter do acknowledge that tourism produces waste and uses resources and the text includes all kinds of empirical evidence from various regions that show how variable the intensity of this resource use can be. While the report appears to be well referenced, it contains a number of major statements whose source is unclear including:

In a BAU scenario up to 2050, tourism growth will imply increases in:

• energy consumption up 111%
• greenhouse gas emissions up 105%
• water consumption up 150% and
• solid waste disposal up 252%

Unfortunately, there’s no way to compare these figures for increased resource use and waste production with forecast increases in arrivals as there is no explanation of what the BAU (business as usual) scaenrio is and whose figures are being applied nor is there a time frame stated for which these percentage increases apply. We know the end date is 2050 but we don’t know the start date.

But what the report does do is fantasise what would happen if a $248 billion annual investment  in energy & water effiiciency, carbon mitigation and solid waste management were made (again start date unclear and the implication is that this investment would apply every year until 2050). On page 442, the report states that a green tourism economy would undercut the corresponding BAU scenario by:

• 18% for water consumption
• 44% for water supply
• 52% for carbon emissions
• No figure was provided for solid waste!

I wasn’t sure how to interpret and apply the term undercut – was it to be applied to the rate of overall increase or could it possibly have been applied to intensity of use/production? I took the obvious route (one also applied by the UNWTO in their press release) and assumed it mean a reduction in the rate of increase  so that, thanks to this annual investment of a quarter-trillion dollars (yes, really!),  a green tourism economy would result in:

• water consumption only increasing by 138% (150%-18%)
• energy consumption only increasing by 67% (111%-44%)
• Co2 emissions rising by only 53% (105%-52%)
• again, no figure is provided for solid waste but there will clearly be lots to deal with.

What Typhoon Bopha left behind – will increasing frequency & intensity of winter hurricanes affect seasonal demand?

You’ll have noted that I used the word “fantasise” regarding the green investment because this number appears to have been picked out of thin air and is based on an investment of some $248 billion equivalent to 0.2% of “total GDP”. There is no discussion, however, of:

• where this money would be raised
• where and how it would be spent (although it is somewhat arbitrarily allocated between energy, water, emissions, solid waste, employee training and biodiversity)
• how we would be sure it resulted in efficiencies necessary to guarantee the “undercut”
• who would oversee and report on the actual results of such an investment.
• whether any funds would be made available to tourism facilities damaged by the effects of climate change or to help adapt to future damage. Note; as I write this Fiji and Samoa are just assessing the damage of Cyclone Evan which local meteorologists describe as unusual in behaviour and severity; the Philippines is reeling from the severity of a first ever  “super typhoon” whose Cat-5 ferocity claimed some 1000 lives; not to mention Hurricane Sandy on America’s northeast coast.

Nor is any mention made of recent reports from the World Bank, NOAA, the International Energy Authority and Price Waterhouse Coopers, and the Global carbon Project all replete with evidence that global warming is accelerating in pace and scope. (Watch this space for a link to those updates here within a couple of days)

I can’t help but conclude that macro reports such as the one UNWTO is using simply build a false sense of security that the right and sufficient action is being taken. As a consequence, this approach serves to disempower the people whose lives and livelihoods are most likely to be affected by these environmental forces.

A fundamental principle and assumption underpinning conscious travel is that it’s time for the global tourism economy to shift from its obsession with growth – as in more arrivals, more facilities, more consumption –  to prosperity in the fullest sense of the word – as in better, higher value, deeper levels of satisfaction, stability, vitality and resilience.

If we – the global tourism economy –  sought a licence to improve and to contribute as opposed to seeking a licence simply to grow in size we might find we’d be taken more seriously.

Can 1 billion tourists create one billion opportunities or 1 billion headaches?

As I am an optimist by necessity and an altruist by choice, I’ve no desire to criticize the sentiment behind UNWTO’s campaign  http://1billiontourists.unwto.org/. Hopefully it will also get the millions of hosts – many of whom are struggling right now – thinking more deeply about their future.

Source: UNWTO

The campaign serves two objectives: first to remind the world just how big international tourism has become – transporting a billion people across international borders every year, and second to suggest that this literal mass movement could be a huge force for good. Implicit in the UNWTO’s visionary statement is the notion that if one billion tourists do so much good then more is better.

 “Imagine if every one of these tourists made a conscious decision to protect the people and environments they visited. Imagine how much water and energy we could save if one billion tourists simply used their towels for more than a day. Imagine how many people would benefit if one billion tourists bought locally.”Source: UNWTO web site

The altruist in me shares the view that one billion people on the move connecting with hosts from other cultures, sensing the world through a different perspective and experiencing their interdependence has the potential to be a “good thing.” But – and it’s a very big BUT – realizing that lofty vision will take an awful lot more than a trendy campaign and marketing spin. Unless there is a robust and well thought out vision as to how to convert one billion wanderers from being what some perceive as a plague of greedy locusts into positive agents for change, this campaign will attract either ridicule or slip quickly into obscurity.

Given that we live in an age of transparency in which citizens are better educated and informed than ever before, it behooves global bodies as well as corporations to be very careful about what they say and how they say it.  In the corporate world, reputation for integrity, authenticity and responsibility now accounts for much of a company’s market value. And this celebration might just be premature as I am believe that when the tinsel and pine cones are finally swept up in January we’ll be reminded just how fragile we are environmentally, financially and socially.

In today’s Age of Transparency, a most important first step towards building trust with any constituency is to be truthful (as in honest); the second is to be inclusive /interactive (i.e, involve other parties in your ecosystem) the third is to be practical (by complimenting the aspiration with practical steps for its realization) and the fourth is to be logical (ensure that the aspiration makes sense and is internally consistent).

Proponents of international tourism such as UNWTO and WTTC have had years of practice promoting tourism’s ability to generate investment, create jobs, enable money to be exchanged between rich and poor nations, and support the preservation of some precious spaces, places and artefacts. But it has been left to NGOs such as Tourism Concern in the UK; journalists such as the Guardian’s Leo Hickman, author of The Last Call and a growing number of bloggers and writers in the responsible, sustainable, fair trade movement to draw our attention to the costs and transgressions associated with this global juggernaut.

There can be no denying the evidence that mass tourism also produces vast amounts of waste (garbage and carbon); uses disproportionate amounts of scarce resources of water and land; displaces local and established populations; creates congestion and often does not leave much wealth behind for local populations to enjoy.

Until the UNWTO and its member governments start publicly acknowledging tourism’s dark underbelly, and take steps to account for the costs in order to measure “net benefit,” then campaigns such as these may generate skepticism at best and, worse, disdain.

Having said that, One Billion Tourists; One Billion Opportunities is a great vision so don’t let’s dismiss it out of hand. It’s crazily ambitious and noble but an aspiration worthy of serious, creative attention. If tourism realizes the UNWTO’s own growth forecasts, then there’ll be an additional 400 million more international tourists every year by 2020 (a mere 7 years away) and, given that we cannot expand a finite earth by 40% at any point in time, then the negative aspects of tourism – as it is currently practiced in many places – will soon become impossible to ignore and much harder to manage.

So here’s my take on the action necessary to attain this aspiration:

The opportunities that UNWTO describe will only be realized if there is a mammoth waking up to the realities of growing tourism on a finite planet. We need tourism leaders, policy makers, hosts and travellers who are conscious in the sense of being awake – capable of mindful, informed decisions; aware of the impact of their actions and alert both to the options open to them and the business environment in which they operate. This requires the same degree of ruthless self-honesty asked of addicts prior to commencing a recovery program. It also requires more humility and curiosity and engagement than many central bodies have been famous for in the past.

In short, the billion opportunities will only materialize if those same tourists know how to make conscious, informed choices and can be persuaded and enabled to select places and hosts who can prove that they care and are responsible.

That will require a lot more than wishful thinking  – nothing less than a huge social transformation – so I earnestly hope that UNWTO won’t treat this as just another smooth campaign but as a huge invitation to all its member governments, private sector partners and NGOs to come together to plan just how 1.6 billion tourists in 2020 will have become 1.6 billion opportunities for good. The alternative is a headache too big to contemplate and the challenge is simply too good to waste!

Note: as far as I can see, the UNWTO revised its forecasts down from 1.6 billion in 2020 to 1.4 billion and their forecast for the number of international arrivals in 2030 still stands at 1.8 billion. 

Postscript
Ethan Gelber has written a quality post on this subject here: 

http://travelllll.com/2012/12/12/unwto-one-billion-tourists-campaign/      and 

http://travelllll.com/2012/04/11/bloggers-retained-by-un-gstc/

 

Galapagos – a place or a parable for our time?

Charles Darwin as a Young Man

Ironically, the very individual who put the islands of the Galapagos on the humanity’s mental map was an unconscious traveler, whose arrival in 1835 did so much to enhance mankind’s awareness & understanding of Nature while starting a potentially destructive trend on the islands themselves. At the moment when Charles Darwin first stepped ashore, he was probably unaware that he and his human companions were not the only life forms to invade this exotic yet very fragile ecosystem.  But inevitably a few claustrophobic rats from the ship, along with fleas, microbes, plant seeds and spores made it to land, chose to stay and, in so doing, accelerated the change in ecological balance that has been developing ever since.

Were we able to reach back in time and persuade Mr. Darwin to join us on a modern day visit, he would be in for a shock. Of the 450 species currently identified, there are now 106 that are considered critically endangered and a further 90 are classified as highly vulnerable. Some species of giant tortoise and the Galapagos mouse have disappeared completely. There could be many other species that became extinct before we were able to identify them. The BBC’s excellent documentary on the Galapagos Islands is available on You Tube here.

While experts and opinion makers both within and outside Galapagos disagree on solutions, there is consensus on one key point. Galapagos is both a place and a metaphor/parable.

 Tourism is a mixed blessing for the Galapagos but the fact is, if there was not tourism to the islands and the local people did not get any income from it, there would be nothing left there now. It would be all gone. It is the lesson of conservation around the world that unless the people who live in such places, whose land they feel belongs to them, are on the side of conservation, you’re doomed. Source: Galapagos Islands Need Tourism To Survive

Andrew Marr, the well known journalist and TV presenter, who is also President of the Galapagos Conservation Trust, argues here for significant reduction in visitation and has vowed to “walk his talk” and never return so that he is not part of the problem of rising demand.  In this article, Galapagos Needs Tourism to Survive, Marr’s media colleague and acclaimed naturalist, David Attenborough, on the other hand, describes tourism as a “necessary evil” which provides income to islanders and conservation but which must be controlled.

I was exceptionally privileged to have been invited by Freddie Ehlers, Ecuador’s Minister of Tourism, to accompany him and several other fortunate participants of the recent combined event (UNWTO’s Tourism & Ethics Conference and the OAG Annual Tourism Ministers Summit) and spend three days exploring the eastern islands of this precious archipelago.

To be frank, I departed Galapagos with very mixed emotions – the human history of this place makes for very depressing reading (it’s as if the very rocks keep trying to kick off the most invasive species of all time) yet the wild and natural landscape  – despite its brooding clouds and undeniably strange and exotic character – also evoked a profound sense of peace and trust in Nature’s ability to adapt, endure and evolve.

Given that the theme of the UNWTO/OAG event was “Turismo Consciente” I can’t think of a better location to jolt delegates into a wakeful awareness of the profound challenges facing tourism growth on a finite planet.

Galapagos may well prove to be the “canary in the mine” with its fate a sign of things to come. Or, as David Attenborough observed, “we can screw up the Galapagos in a way that we can easily screw up the whole planet”. Its future depends on all of us – as visitors, hosts, residents, investors, other members of the tourism value chain and, given its uniqueness, all of humanity – becoming conscious of our responsibilities and finding effective, durable  solutions to the following issues:

• Population pressure – the number of residents has increased ten fold from under 3000 to 30,000 plus in 50 years.
• Popularity – the number of visitors has exploded from 40,000 in the 1990s to 180,000 in 2011 and is growing at well over 5% per year.
• A vast increase in invasive species – such that a mere 177 years after Darwin’s arrival there are now four invasive species competing for light, water and food for every one endemic species
• Growing residues of waste – human garbage, effluent, abandoned detritus of modern “civilization”, oil slicks, and carbon
• A widening gap in mindset and aspiration between residents, understandably desirous of a decent life, and visitors/conservationists who fear for its ecological destruction.
• The as yet unknown impacts of climate change and an increase in extreme weather events on the existing ecosystem.

It isn’t as if people don’t care or are not concerned, committed and active.

In July 2011, the Ecuadorian Government organized an interactive workshop attended by representatives of the Embassy of Ecuador, Galapagos National Park, the Charles Darwin Foundation, Galapagos Conservation Trust, the World Wildlife Fund, and tourism stakeholders to look at Ecuador’s tourism strategy in general and its approach to the Galapagos in particular. The results of that workshop are documented in a report published by Galapagos Conservation trust here.  This document provides a helpful summation in its Appendix of the 1st Sustainable Tourism Ecotourism Summit in Galapagos held in September 2010 when a revised ecotourism model addressing governance; destination re-engineering; market positioning and development of a Galapagos Tourism Observatory (management tracking system) was proposed following extensive consultation with over 400 stakeholders. Another key resource is a 2007 publication by the Charles Darwin Foundation titled Tourism, the Economy, Population Growth and Conservation in the Galapagos (accessible here)

A recent creative initiative undertaken by the Galapagos Conservation Trust and the Gulbenkian Foundation is a roving exhibition featuring the works of eleven highly diverse artists who spent time on the island capturing impressions of life. For more information, visit: Artists Visit Galapagos

But while these efforts are digested, the number of visitors and residents continue to increase and investments are made which are difficult to undo.

Source: Galapagos Conservation Trust

I have enormous admiration for Ecuador and their introduction of Turismo Consciente as a concept (the original concept paper presented to the OAG in April 2012 is available here)   – but now the hard work of making it a reality must start. Even though the future of Galapagos must be considered within a broader national context (Ecuador has so much else to offer the discerning traveler), all eyes in both the tourism and ecological community will now be on Ecuador’s performance as custodian of the unique jewel in Ecuador’s crown.   Unless, a tangible shift in the present development trajectory of the Galapagos can be made that does indeed provide value to all stakeholders, the term Turismo Consciente will be just another bright star that proves to be piece of galactic debris burning up as it enters a resistant atmosphere of greed and self interest. But based on my experiences in Ecuador earlier this month, I have every confidence in my new Ecuadorian friends to tackle this challenge with dedication, insight and imagination. Let’s do all we can to give them encouragement and assistance!

In the meantime, I am pleased to share some of the images I was fortunate enough to bring back with me. The first slide deck is of landscapes and the second animals.

Muchos Gracias Freddie Ehlers and team for such an inspiring and likely life changing experience and for letting me participate in such an historic event.

Galapagos Landscapes

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– taken with iPhone September, 2012

Galapagos Wildlife  – available here

Do UNWTO Figures Mislead?

The UNWTO recently published its latest set of forecasts for the future of tourism between 2010 to 2030.  On the surface, there is plenty of reason for satisfaction provided that you are charged with producing the appearance of growth. The reality underneath the superficial glee that tourism will be growing again is very different.

According to the UNWTO, international arrivals increased by 412 million trips per year between 1995 and 2010 such that in 2010 940 million overnight trips across international borders were made. Even though the rate of growth is projected to slow to a mere 3.3% per annum over the next 20 years, the effect in terms of people on the move is staggering. By 2030, the present volume will have doubled to 1.8 billion – that’s an extra 1.8 billion feet walking over and through precious attractions in 2030 than now.

Despite having spent an entire career serving the travel and tourism sector, I find the numbers and the way they are presented just prove the need for the tourism community to wake up.

If tourism wants to be taken seriously and,  by that,  I mean if people who work in the tourism sector want to be taken seriously by people working outside of it, it has to demand more of its leadership and engage one another in a more honest, reflective debate.

We have to give thought to what these numbers actually mean in terms of impact on the quality of people’s lives in either the receiving or the generating countries where an expansion in terms of supportive infrastructure (hotels, airports, parking lots, rail-lines, shopping malls, cruise ship terminals) will be essential if the quality of a visitor experience is not to plummet. How many local people will be displaced by the development of more tourism ghettos or priced out of their own housing market due to the influx of second home buyers from wealthier urban centres?

Has anyone calculated the net benefit of this growth and the cost of providing and maintaining the supportive infrastructure or estimated the opportunity cost of investing funds into this activity versus other forms of economic development?

I have to wonder whether words have finally lost all meaning when the Secretary General of the UNWTO can look at these figures and say “This growth offers enormous possibilities as these can be years of leadership with tourism leading economic growth, social progress, and environmental sustainability.”

Tourism does not lead tourism growth – it depends on surplus wealth being created in the country of origin. At best it distributes that wealth but not as effectively as it might. A significant portion of the growth forecast for the next 20 years will originate from the emerging economies of Asia where tourists will travel on packaged vacations delivered by vertically integrated companies able to achieve economies of scale. Based on current patterns, less than $5 out of every $ 100 spent by vacationers on packaged holidays stays  in the receiving nation.

Why should it be assumed that more visitors to a place leads to “social progress.” when the opposite effect is normally the result – locals are displaced to make room in pristine locations for visitor-related facilities; visitor spending has an inflationary effect on housing, transportation and food costs; residents are encouraged to move from rural to urban centres in search of cash employment; and many of the social-cultural customs that evolved over thousands of years to produce social cohesion are eroded.  The UK-based NGO, Tourism Concern, offers many examples of displacement and social cost It’s not that tourism can’t be a force for good – it’s just that it most certainly is not inevitable and care needs to be taken.

And finally to describe a doubling of tourism volume as providing “opportunities for tourism to lead environmental sustainability” confirms to me that our leaders are walking their long corridors in some form of trance. Every year the UNWTO spins its econometric model and spews out more numbers offering no sign that they have any idea as to their impact or desirability. As recently as two weeks ago, the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) and the Organisation of Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), warned that emissions from the global tourism industry will double in the next 25 years unless new sustainable policies are developed.  What kind of “leadership” is that? If Titanic-style corporations like Walmart can turn themselves on a relative dime and commit to a sustainable path, couldn’t our leaders even acknowledge that a debate might be necessary when they issue these forecasts? Shouldn’t they exercise leadership by stimulating that debate – not resisting it or pretending that the problem might simply go away?

What is also worrying is that no mention was made of the other feature of tourism growth that can cause so much personal havoc and hardship and that is the volatility of demand. The gently rising slope of the demand curves as shown in this slide provides a false sense of security and comfort – there’s an aura of stability and certainty conveyed that bears no relation to reality.

When we tell it like it is and provide data on what has happened in the past, we get a different picture. The headline to the next  chart is moderately reassuring “growth in tourism will continue but at a more moderate pace” but distracts from the reality of wild gyrations in tourism demand experienced over the past 40 years.

As tourism is the tail on the end of many economic dogs, it is subject to huge whip saw effects from specific events – be they natural hazards, terrorist acts, epidemics, or financial meltdowns and they are impossible to predict.  It is this volatility that undermines any benefit that could accrue from the growth in demand and causes the greatest hardship in so many destinations.  Given the convergence of such forces as climate change, resource depletion, population growth, water shortages, national and personal debt levels we can expect that demand will continue to oscillate with increasing frequency and intensity. Given that 95-99% of businesses engaged in tourism are small and independently owned, the real issue of the next decade for them won’t be growth but survival.

“In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a
revolutionary act.”
George Orwell

I am not anti tourism; only anti thoughtless, careless tourism whose proponents avoid counting and minimizing its costs. That’s what Conscious Travel is all about – not the end of tourism but the shift to the kind of tourism we can all be proud of; the kind of tourism that sustains decent livelihoods year after year while enriching and enlivening local cultures and restoring local ecosystems.

It’s the kind of tourism that is driven by a Higher Purpose than simply making money. So what is the point of tourism? Here are some thoughts a deeper purpose of tourism that give it meaning and that attract people to do extraordinary things:

This kind of tourism can only be created  if we develop a degree of honesty and self-criticism that George Orwell would have recognized as being revolutionary.

I don’t pretend to have all the answers. If I did, I’d be rich and famous. But I am prepared to ask some of the right questions simply because I KNOW the answers lie within our own community (not industry). If you CARE at all – and I believe THE issue is all about caring (see here) then you’ll comment, subscribe and encourage others to join the discussion…

See also:

Good Morning Tourism: Time for Your Wake Up Call – Part One

Good Morning Tourism: Time fr Your Wake Up Call – Part Two

Conscious Host @ Work

Good Morning Tourism: Time for Your Wake Up Call – Part One

During my 40 year career in travel and tourism, the number of people crossing international borders has grown from 100 million a year to just under a billion. At the same time, I have watched distinctly different, magical and remote communities with cultures whose unique worldview had so much to teach us, be engulfed, usurped, diluted, and become endangered. As lamented in a previous post called On Homecoming and Wayfinding – Re-thinking Sustainable Tourism, present generations simply don’t know what they have been deprived of experiencing.

According to the UNWTO, the current volume of international trips is confidentially forecast to double over an 8 year period – in other words at rate 5 times that of the past growth I have witnessed. What alarms me is the lack of serious, considered debate as to whether such growth is possible or even desirable and what the costs of trying to meet those forecasts might be let alone the probability that they could be achieved or sustained.  What does the doubling of tourism really mean? Who will benefit and who will suffer?

There is no doubt that tourism has become a powerful economic and social force with both positive and negative effects. It has provided entry jobs that have enabled hundreds of thousands of people to lift themselves out of poverty and helped spread wealth from what were once called “have nots” to the “haves”. Tourism has preserved some cultures and provided an economic justification for protecting some natural landscapes but at an enormous cultural, social and environmental cost that has never really been systematically inventoried or assessed.

The Tidal Flow of Tourism
The returns from each incremental visitor are now diminishing year by year due the very nature of how the industrialized model works. In the same way that the ocean tide is controlled by the phases of the moon, the tide of tourism is driven by forces outside the control of the receiving community.  Changes in exchange rates and the economic vitality of source countries account for over 90% of tourism traffic.  So when the tide comes in and volume surges more capacity is increased (more hotels are built, roads are widened, and runways extended or increased.)   When the tide flows out due to external factors that can range from terrorist attacks, epidemics, natural hazards to the collapse of stock markets, then prices are discounted and suppliers attempt to fill their time-based perishable products of rooms, airline seats and restaurant covers at whatever price consider necessary to meet an internal revenue target. Tourism demand is a roller coaster and its frequent and often unpredictable boom and bust cycles can cause untold hardship experienced mostly by vulnerable workers located at the bottom of its wage pyramid.

With each passing year the vitality of the sector is sapped. Consumers’ ability to make instant price comparisons increases the downward pressure on prices and converts what were once scarce, magical, mysterious retreats into commodities. Cost cutting follows. Processes and procurement are standardized and unique places lose their distinctiveness as services and places start to look the same. Automation strips the cost out of many services but deprives the traveler of human and humane care.

Tourism as Time Bomb 
Tourism has become a time bomb, according to Accenture’s Paul Newman and Mark Spelman in this Havard Business Review Paper of the same name.

They suggest that a doubling of demand will have serious impact on the cost of living in key attractive cities where local businesses will have to compete with tourists for many services and, presumably, taxpayers in the host city will have to pay extra infrastructure costs (water, waste management, transportation, policing etc)

While vulnerable places like England’s Stonehenge, Ecuador’s Galapagos and Peru’s Machu Pichuu are having to limit visitation, it’s Venice that is probably the most obvious  “canary in the mine”. We publicly may mourn “the death in and of Venice”  – see previous post on this blog but fail to address the real problem: there is only one Venice and its capacity to absorb more and more visitors every year is limited.

USA today recently published an article on the tourism hotspot, observing:

Venice is “under siege” by tourists and faces “irreversible” catastrophe if limits aren’t imposed on visitor numbers, warns a report released Monday by Italy’s leading heritage group.

Italia Nostra (Our Italy) accused the Italian government of ” underestimating the devastating effects of past and future development projects and tourism policy,” Reuters reports.

The group will ask UNESCO, the United Nation’s cultural organization to place the city on its endangered list and consider removing it from its list of World Heritage Sites. The lagoon city is besieged by 60,000 tourists a day, including many from an increasing number of cruise ships that come to call, says Reuter

How can we as a tourism community be proud to say “we destroyed Venice?” Furthermore,  if sustainability is all about acting now to provide subsequent generations with the same choices and opportunities we enjoy, then how could our actions of the past 50 years be considered even remotely sustainable.

Disappointment with Leadership From Above who avoid “The Elephant in the Room”
I am disappointed with the leadership shown from both governments and the private sector. The UN-related organisations send out mixed signals. They talk a good talk about sustainability – even issuing Green Passports- but get positively gleeful when volume projections bounce back to “near normal” and growth gets back on track.

They talk about tourism being resilient and a force for good but continue to demand more recognition and influence. Despite the fact that their demands for recognition have been made year after year on every Tourism Day with boring monotony, they have to admit that their approach is not working. In March 2011, Taleb Rifai, Secretaru General of the UNWTO was reported saying that tourism ministers around the world lack authority.

Even the WTTC, an exclusive club comprised mostly of the large vertically integrated corporations that have benefited most from the industrialization of tourism, continues to put out a begging hand and, every World Tourism Day, plead for more marketing support, less taxes, less red tape etc. None of these so called leader organizations puts serious pressure on the airline sector to raise prices necessary to cover the “externality” cost associated with spewing carbon into the upper atmosphere. In this Linked In Discussion Valere Tolle is right in part – the “big fat elephant in the room” is carbon but Valere is right only in part though. The real elephant is bigger. Until all the costs – social, cultural, economic and environmental – associated with international travel and tourism are completely and accurately measured and paid for, the elephant we’re trying to avoid is the one with the banner –

Can we Afford the Cost of More Cheap Travel?

We know that polarized arguments between environmentalists and industrialists doesn’t work; we know that finger wagging and making people feel guilty for their sins doesn’t work. We also know that dictats from global and national agencies don’t work.  Until recently there were no market mechanisms in place to provide the sticks and carrots that might change behaviour and when they were introduced (as in the Carbon Trading Scheme), they meet fierce opposition from vested interests…

In short, we think it’s time we all woke up – which is why we are talking up Conscious Travel.

To be “conscious” is the be awake, aware and alert. It means taking a fearless inventory of where we’re at, where we’re going, our strengths and our weaknesses. It means facing reality and speaking the truth.

“In times of universal deceit, speaking the truth is a revolutionary act” George Orwell.

So in an Orwellian sense is is a revolutionary act. But it’s not about blaming or shaming. It is  about coming together and supporting one another in envisioning and then creating a viable alternative that doesn’t cost the earth.

In addition to waking up,  we think it’s time we grew up.

Conscious Travel is about responding to the general question that JFK posed half a century ago.

“Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country”

Until members of the tourism community – be they operators of small businesses or leaders of global associations – address that question with sincerity; unless we start to engage in the same level of debate and soul searching that virtually every other economic sector is now embracing; unless the tourism community is willing to step forward and say this is what we can do to change and how we can help make the  transition, we’ll continue to be considered superfluous and trivial. Our ministers – even if we can keep them – will continue to be considered lightweight and lacking authority; and our corporate leaders will continue to whine and complain.

We’ve not started this to compete with all the other good people and projects that have been trying to minimise the negative effects of tourism.  We are trying to integrate and support.  Our only point of difference is a firm belief that tourism is about people and places and that change must start in the hearts and minds of the individual tourism operator.  It is this the operator of the small, unique, boutique style operations that make up 99% of enterprises associated with travel and hospitality that can collectively make the transition. For more on how, who and why, read

Good Morning Tourism: Time for Your Wake Up Call, Part Two (coming shortly)

So if any of these thoughts resonate with you – either positively or negatively – please join the conversation and make a comment.