Explaining Tourism — How can it be a good thing?

Tourism is a source of controversy in many places, it is a source of hope in even more places and it is highly underrated in most of the business world. Considering this, I think it might be useful to explain tourism, it’s impact and potential for impact.

Defining tourism sounds easy, and probably have you already made up some thoughts about what tourism is. Let me guess: “Are you thinking about relaxation and having fun in an exciting destination?” Maybe you are thinking about herds of people walking around in a city, or lined up on their way to an “unspoiled nature attraction”.

People tend to define tourism from their own perspective. I have one way of defining it, and you have your way. Luckily we also have international organizations like the UN that like to define all kinds of stuff:

“The activities of people traveling to and staying in places outside their natural environment for not more than one consecutive year for leisure, business or other purposes”

— UNITED NATIONS

To me it sounds they define tourism to be more than holidays in exotic destinations. From this we also can say that all kinds of tourism involve travel, but not all forms of travel involves tourism.

I guess to really understand the tourism we also need to know who the tourists are. We can start with dividing travelers into two halves:

1. Visitors
2. Other travelers like workers, commuters, diplomats, refugees, medical patients, and so on

Let’s focus on the visitors. It is kind of clear that tourists are visitors to a place. But are all visitors tourists? The World tourism organization say that a tourist is:

“A visitor who spends at least one night away from home.”

— WORLD TOURISM ORGANIZATION

Visitors that spend less that one night in a destination is often called excursionists or day trippers by people that need to put a label to everyone. (I am one of those who need to label people btw.)

I think we have sorted out the main concept of tourism with this. It is also usual to divide tourists into segments. I will not go deep into that in this post, but we can do some basics.

You have International tourists that travel outside their own country and you have domestic tourists that do the traveling within their own country. In many destinations domestic tourists actually are more important than international. More than 4 out of 5 travel within their own region which includes neigbouring countries.

Why is tourism important. What benefits has it?

I am actually not thinking about the fact that everybody needs a time off from the stressful daily life to recharge the batteries and so on. I bet you can find hundreds of personal reasons to travel. I want more focus on social benefits.

Traveling as a tourist and visiting new places influence how we see the world, how we think, how we work and how we amuse ourselves. It also influence how we meet other people, and it learn us about new cultures.

Tourism is most likely the worlds largest industry, creating one out of eleven jobs in the world. Thats right. Every 11th employee in the world is working in the tourism sector one way or another. Since 1950 tourism have grown every consecutive year and economically it stands for 10% of the global gross domestic product (GDP). That means that about 10% of the money flowing in the world is within tourism. That is kind of huge. Do you agree? And in many developing countries this impact is even higher. In more than 30 of the 40 poorest countries in the world tourism stands for 60–90% of the GDP. The tourism sector represent 7% of the global export of goods and services. Tourism have grown faster than world trade for the last five years.

It is predicted that in 2030 we’ll have 1,8 billion international trips (!) and on top of that between 5–6 billion domestic trips (!!!). Those are too high numbers to really imagine. Incredibly many people will visit a place and spend their money in that place.

Below I have listed some positive impacts from tourism.

POSITIVE IMPACTS FROM TOURISM

• Tourism helps people across cultures understand each other, this nurtures peace and tolerance
• Because tourism exposes the travelers to new places, new cultures and other peoples issues and benefits. The jobs within tourism can promote equality and equity. It can also be a great tool for integration
• When a destination is providing for tourism it is also improving the facilities for the good of the host communities, as example transport, restaurants. local shops and services.
• The income provided from tourism help raising the living standards in the host community and help fighting poverty
• An increasing number of destinations that have opened up and invested in tourism, experience that tourism is a key driver of its socio-economic progress with creation of jobs, enterprises and other revenue infrastructure development influence.
• Inbound tourism to a country is an important source of foreign currency earnings that can be used on employment and create possibility for further development.
• With funds from tourism you can protect, maintain and restore sites of both historic and of cultural significance.
• Tourism can be a reason to protect fragile natural environments from other and more extractive industries that leave an nonreversable footprint on the natural resources.
• This also mean tourism can save endangered species and their habitats.

NEGATIVE IMPACTS FROM TOURISM

• Many tourist destinations see that local prices rise as a result of tourism and it can become to expensive to live there for the locals. They can be forced out of their own areas.
• Investments can be made on developing tourist facilities on behalf on much needed community facilities like schools, hospitals etc.
• Overcrowding, noise and anti social behavior from tourists can be a problem and in some cases create tension between locals and tourists.
• The jobs created by tourism are often low-paid and seasonal.
• Some tourist industries like cruise lines are pushing, underpaying and exploiting workers and creates social dumping.
• Tourism has negative impact on the climate. This is beyond doubt. Specially long distance travel.
• Tourism use a lot of energy
• Tourism can harm the environment by contribution to air and water pollution, littering and and overuse of natural resources.
• Tourism can make unrepairable “footprints” in the nature.
• Concepts like all inclusive resorts and cruiseships often contribute little to local communities meanwhile it use a lot of energy and produce a lot of waste among other negative effects.
• Animals can be harmed for pleasing tourists. As example elephant riding and photo shoots with drugged tigers.
• Tourism can invade habitats and disturb animals.
• Some kind of tourism exploit children. Be aware if visiting orphanages among others.
• Tourism can be a big support for criminals and give them more power, as example in prosititution, gambling, drug dealing among others.

The value chain of tourism.

Let’s take a little turn from the text, and use a story to explain the value chain.

Peter and Amy are a couple. Boyfriend and girlfriend. They have been seeing each other for a while and have lately been talking about traveling together. They have not been 100% sure where to go, but they both find pleasure in doing some research. Amy buys a couple of magazines to get inspired. She just loves looking into these and she calls her friends that have been traveling and ask for ideas. Sometimes they even meet over a meal in a cafe to discuss this. Eventually she visit a travel agent.

Peter like to do his research on the internet, and together they find a perfect place. Aka “The Dream destination”. To get there they book flights, they book hotels and they book a couple of activities to join when their vacation starts.

The day they leave, they take a cab to the airport where they enjoy a meal and buy some things to bring on the plane.

Then Peter and Amy arrives in The Dream Destination. What do they do?

They spend money! They rent a car, they leave money in the hotel, they go to a museum, they take cooking class and go river rafting, one night they see a movie, and they dine out every day, followed by a couple of drinks out. And the go shopping, for themselves and for gifts to bring home.

Who is happy because Peter and Amy come visiting?

Obviously the hotel owner, the people working at the hotel, the people supplying the hotel with uniforms, papers and computers. The cleaning company cleaning the towels are also happy. So are the farmers that sells food to the restaurants and the local wine yard, the local stores are happy, the banks are happy, the drivers that bring all the goods around, the local activity guiding companies and and the local community that receive taxes meaning they have to pay less tax.

What do we learn from this?

There are a lot of positive impact of tourism, as well as major issues. The solution can be in learning how to find the right balance between managing the negative impacts and making sure that all the positive benefits are created.

There are many ways to attack these challenges and it raises new questions.

• How can technology be used to improve tourism benefits?
• How can people in a destination, that have stake in tourism, work together for creating a healthy while competitive destination?
• How can we encourage responsible tourism with local benefits?

There are far too many questions to write here, or in fact to write at all. I really believe that travel and tourism instead of being a problem, can be a part of the solution.

HOW CAN SUSTAINABLE TOURISM BE IMPLEMENTED? WHO IS RESPONSIBLE TO DO THIS?

Sustainability in tourism is not something that suddenly happens. To create sustainable products, services, practices and facilities requires systematic and strategic planning, management, execution and evaluation. This is not an easy game, and will require dedication and commitment from the industry, or more correctly, dedicated parts of the industry.

To succeed it is important that the generated income benefit the local host communities. If tourism facilities is owned by foreign companies the value created will leak out of the local economy.

The different kinds of impact are interrelated. What happen with economic impact often influence the people and the planet. When we can have a positive environmental impact we often also see positive economic figures also. And so it goes on.

Who is responsible to make things happen? Everyone!

If we start with the community perspective we all need to make sure that the development consider the needs of both our community and the tourists. From a tourist perspective we must make informed sustainable choices and also act in a responsible manner. The industry need to find better solutions when designing products, concepts, services and facilities.

The tourism industry have in fact a lot of possibilities to increase the positive impacts and to reduce the negative, but none of these are going to work if we don´t get the tourists on board and choose the good initiatives. And this is really interesting.

A popular belief is that if we can raise enough awareness we also can change tourist behavior. Many studies show that this unfortunately is an utopia, it is a nice dream, but the reality is totally different.

The fact is that even tourists that are members of environmental protecting organizations, like Greenpeace and WWF, do not necessarily make environmentally friendly choices when it comes to travel

Studies that have interviewed these tourist reveal that so called environmentally friendly people have a lot of excuses. These can be:

1. Denial of the negative impact on their vacation
2. They will often compare and say that other trips are much worse
3. They will point at the governments and industry and say that it is not a travelers responsibility to change the situation
4. They say they have not enough information and money to choose otherwise
5. They say they don’t want to think ablout this on their holiday
6. They also believe that since they support a local community by traveling there, this outweight their other responsibilities.

What we can read out of this is that a big share of the tourists are resisting efforts regarding sustainability and environment. Even the informed ones. We can also believe that sustainable tourism initiatives is not going to work unless the tourists is engaged and involved.

Can we engage the tourists?

Of course we can. One positive thing is that tourists actually want to care, and they say they care. They just don’t do it. They care if the trip seems better. We need to make it easier for the tourist to make responsible choices. We need to create more value, better stories and better quality.

We must make sustainability convenient and sexy. To get there the tourism sector must be an agent for positive change and make a consistent contribution to sustainable development. When we combine this with great convenience and good incentives sustainability will rule the tourism

Triple Bottom Line

A great starting point is the concept of triple bottom line, which is a common way to understand sustainability in the tourism context. And a good way for travel stakeholders to address their responsibility.

The triple bottom line approach is a way of measuring tourism impact on people, profit and planet, or in other words the impact on people and societies, on the economics and on the environment.

As mentioned, the impacts from tourism can be negative and it can be positive, and it also can have long term effect or for short term

There are great challenges with mass tourism, and we do need to reduce the emissions. The answer might be in technology, it might be in shorter trips. I am looking forward to explore this issue in medium, and learn more.

Bon Voyage

This story was first published on Travelopment.com