Greening as a Tourism Mega-trend - Out of the Box 16

by Renton de Alwis

Buzz words are used in abundance today, in describing most human activity. Tourism is no exception. Branding is not merely about having promotional slogans, tag lines and catchy phrases. It’s about substance, integrity, quality and consistency in delivery on what is promised. Promotion of destinations is no different. Sri Lanka is a green country. By green we mean the natural endowment in its entirety and it is a promise no one with a rational mind can take issue with about Sri Lanka. i.e. Unless we ourselves ruin what nature has endowed us with.

This column published in April 2010, in the ‘Financial Times, Sri Lanka’ was an attempt to place this thought in the context of the Global megatrends I have enumerating. I repost it today, for your critical thought.

 

This column earlier dealt with two key mega-trends impacting on tourism. First was the discussion on ageing of the world’s population and the challenges and opportunities it offered tourism strategists and the second, change in consumer demand for products and services designed to be experiential than being offers for passive holiday travel. In today’s column, which is part one of two; the discussion focuses on greening of tourism, going beyond the approaches that have prompted destinations and service providers to adopt environment friendly ways of doing business.  

Tourism and organized travel had its formal beginnings with Baptist preacher Thomas Cook’s Rail voyages from England to France and the ‘Round the World Tour’ of 1872.  Interestingly, it got its modern face in the decades of the 50s and 60s with the rest and recreation (R&R) phenomenon linked with war and off shore Navel forces of dominant nations. Development of Hawaii as a resort in the post-second world war era, Pattaya in Thailand and various resorts in The Philippines during the Korean and Vietnam Wars are examples. With the advent of trans-Atlantic and trans-Pacific jet airline travel, cruising and formation of international hotel companies, destination regions such as those in the Caribbean, Europe and several others in Asia and Europe grew with time. There was very little awareness or concern for the damage tourism was causing to the natural and cultural environment at these destinations in their early stages of development. They were simply ‘playgrounds’ were sun, sea, sand and sex, were the key ingredients on offer.

With the emergence of a growing middle class and access to paid holidays for workers; tourism and its core activities began to move away from these R&R type resorts, to other newer finds of destinations with much more to offer than the four Ss’. It is with that exploration that more and more valuable natural and cultural areas began to develop for tourism. The impact of the energy crisis of the mid 1970s and the growing environmental movement; began to point to the negative impacts on nature and the cultural milieu at destinations and a potent debate began on the need to take affirmative action to mitigate these. The changing demand at the upper and mid-ends of the market and the entry of the ‘traveller’ in place of the ‘tourist’ within these consumer segments saw the emergence of the fresh tourism niche of ‘ecotourism’.

Professor Harold Goodwin of the International Centre for Responsible Tourism, in the UK in a paper on “Holding the travel industry to account – the role of the law” presented at a forum on ‘Greening of Tourism’ had this to say of ecotourism. “Ecotourism represented an aspiration to green tourism but it focused attention on a fragment of the industry and the claims made for it were rarely either demonstrable or enforceable. Eco-labels do not enable a purchaser to hold a supplier to account. The growth of Responsible Tourism has encouraged operators and hoteliers to be explicit in their claims; claims for which they can be held accountable by purchasers, whether consumers or companies.

He further added that “The greening of tourism is an oxymoron in the traditional sense: the conjunction of contradictory terms gives point to the question. As with other forms of human activity, tourism is either inherently green or not. The issue is how we engage in the activity and how it is managed”.

“The high profile of ecotourism has been generated by concerned individuals who have perceived and articulated it as a superior form of travel; and by companies who have seen the commercial opportunity to sell a premium priced product. The market for ecotourism has been generated by consumers, encouraged by conservationists, and facilitated by companies who have seen a market niche and occupied it” he said.

Within tourism circles in Sri Lanka too, ecotourism is waved as a panacea for taking care of environmental and other negatives. The truth is that our tourism still is rooted predominantly in the conventional ‘Triple S’, with a few exceptions. What we need to understand is that the both the consumer and the tourism fraternity has now come a long way in understanding that greening of tourism, as a mega-trend has come to stay.  No matter how good the intent or the levels of integrity of ecotourism operators may be, it will remain a niche activity that will be of some support to meet the challenges of greening of tourism.

In a world, where travel guilt and accountability for global warming is gaining in importance, Sri Lanka’s tourism should be doing better than taking on patch work solutions and hiding behind the ecotourism niche, in taking on this challenge.

 

 

Pix credit: Self