How did travel become the beast?
Travel is a luxury limited to those who can afford it. And in the western world that is an increasing number of people. We pack our bags with excitement and look forward to the adventures coming our way. But many travellers don’t think of the people on the other side of this equation – those who rely on our travel dollars to live – or just survive.
A 2019 booking.com sustainable travel report found more than half of jet setters worldwide were determined to make sustainable travel choices than they were a year ago. But when it came to putting them into action, a number of barriers arose, including lack of knowledge, poor accessibility to local communities and locally-based tourism activities.
Aussies love to travel overseas and a Kathmandu survey in 2018 found a third of all Australians thought they were the best travellers in the world, yet only one in five were mindful about where they spent their money. While there is a lot of talk about sustainable tourism, many travellers do not understand the true meaning of the concept.
The difference between sustainability and resilience
The concept of sustainable tourism has been around since the late 1980s and while it has meshed into the public and policy language of tourism, we are no closer to becoming sustainable tourists than when the term was coined thirty years ago.
The groundbreaking 1987 UN Our Common Future report – also known as the Brundtland Report - defined sustainable development as “development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs”.
Dr Gary Lacey, Monash University researcher and lecturer in the graduate tourism program said sustainability and resilience needed to be managed simultaneously.
“You cannot expect something to stay as it is forever and you should never manage something to stay as it is — you need to manage it for resilience — understand that things have to be allowed to change,” he said.
Dr Lacey said snow mountains were a good example of how thinking needed to change.
“With global warming, which is likely to reduce the amount of snowfall and the length of the snow season, you look at adaptability methods for that. Artificial snowmaking is stupid in my mind because it creates more carbon in the atmosphere, exacerbating the very problem you are trying to solve. Increase the use of the mountains say for mountain biking — that’s resilience thinking, and sustainability thinking,” he said.
Dr Lacy has researched philanthropic tourism, where philanthropists use their holidays to visit the projects they’re supporting. For example, philanthropists are able to connect with smaller communities directly to observe them making local handicrafts that are unique to the region.
He said the aim of tourism that involved impoverished people ultimately should be to alleviate that poverty.
“If you take a sustainability viewpoint, to sustain that poverty-based tourism — you have to have a poverty base — so you must sustain poverty,” he said.
“My suggestion is that poverty-based tourism should never be considered a long-term tourism type, it should be a transitional phase.”
Destroying poverty-based tourism and replacing it with cultural-community-based tourism, applied the idea of resilience. “It really was out of desperation that I came up to the resilience thing because I couldn’t convince people that sustainable poverty tourism was a failure.”
The issues with tourism
Elizabeth Becker, a seasoned traveller, journalist and author from Overbooked said travel and tourism had become a behemoth, capable of doing great good and great damage. She said people thought they were doing the right thing by travelling, yet seldom realised the concentrated spending in tourist hotspots was actually helping those who needed it most — the poor.
In many places around the world, tourist dollars are spent in concentrated pockets called enclaves. Dr Lacey said when money poured into these enclaves, the poorest people in the surrounding areas did not benefit.
Another growing problem is over-tourism, where too many people flock to one place. Barcelona, Venice and Mount Everest have always been chock-a-block with tourists, but they have made headlines recently because they have reached numbers beyond the capacity of what the local infrastructure is able to handle. This, in turns, drives out local people because of exorbitant rent prices, an increase in public disorder, and – particularly in the case of Mt Everest - human traffic jams on the side of the mountain.
Cesar D'Mello a former economist and tourism development consultant said it was important to be aware of the effect tourists could have on a place, even after they left. “Places like Phuket, are chock-a-block full of mostly western tourists, they come and spend their four days there and don't give a damn about what happens after they leave. Alcoholism, drugs, prostitution, anything goes, they leave the place in a mess.”
He said rampant tourism and an industry that refused to put the firm regulation into place was to blame.
One solution to managing some of the problems was investing in community-based tourism — where tourism was placed directly in the hands of local people. In places such as Thailand, travelling outside of the hotspots could engage tourists with communities, while at the same time delivering direct benefits to the communities.
Mr D'Mello said he was able to help small groups in different countries to take on issues in their own communities. When people had the resources to develop community-based tourism, it could be transformative for the host and the guest.
“When you have a tourist coming, (and) you have a reasonable place for someone to stay in your home, they pay a certain amount of money, it provides an income for the family — but they're also taking part in the life of the community — they come back enriched,” he said.
Mr D’Mello said more attention needed to be given to community-based tourism because it “enshrines human, community and environmental values”.
PHOTOGRAPH: Milada Vigerova (Unsplash)
