Good news in tourism February 9 – 15, 2020

It’s time to choose your own adven­ture! Pos­ted on Sunday to be ready on Monday, “Good news in tour­ism” is the per­fect pick-me-up for the start of a work week. And go!

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This week’s good news in tour­ism, in no par­tic­u­lar order:

Not good as such, but import­ant: Prob­ably the most cred­ible source of inform­a­tion about the coronavir­us COVID-19 is the World Health Organ­iz­a­tion (WHO).

Chen Xian­ch­un, dir­ect­or of the Depart­ment of Cul­ture and Tour­ism of Hun­an province, China, in a thank you let­ter to for­eign friends dated Feb­ru­ary 9: “Accord­ing to the Chinese lun­ar cal­en­dar, it is now the begin­ning of spring. I believe that the severe winter has passed […] Once the epi­dem­ic has dis­ap­peared, we are look­ing for­ward to meet­ing you in our beau­ti­ful Hun­an province.” Hun­an province is to the south of Hubei province whose cap­it­al Wuhan is the epi­centre of the COVID-19 epidemic.

Mean­while, Pres­id­ent Don­ald Trump wants the USA to rejoin the UNWTO, but a con­ser­vat­ive think tank dis­agrees. What’s the good news here? Is it the desire to rejoin the UNWTO? Is it the oppos­i­tion to rejoin­ing? Or does a low-res­ol­u­tion “orange man bad” atti­tude make noth­ing about this good? It’s up to you. It’s a choose-your-own-adven­ture here at “Good news”!

Less con­tro­ver­sially, travel & tour­ism is the primary reas­on for a sig­ni­fic­ant decline in poverty from more than half (50.2%) of Bohol’s pop­u­la­tion in 2000 to 15.2% in 2020. That’s accord­ing to Kathyrin D Piquinto, the Admin­is­trat­or of Bohol province in the Phil­ip­pines, who acknow­ledges that Bohol must avoid the pit­falls of overtourism.

The planet vs people & their profit

Wil­der­ness con­ser­va­tion and rewild­ing pro­grams for their own sake may be mor­al imper­at­ives in the hearts and minds of some, but that might not sit well with loc­als who want or need to improve their liv­ing stand­ards. People and their profit — where “profit” may include pas­sion or some oth­er human incent­ive — can­not be ignored. 

In Romania more than 100 loc­al fam­il­ies are bene­fit­ing from the eco­tour­ism oppor­tun­it­ies that have aris­en from rewild­ing the South­ern Carpath­i­ans and rein­tro­du­cing bison. Both the humans that profit from tour­ists and the bison that attract the tour­ists are ves­ted stake­hold­ers in the suc­cess of the rewild­ing program.

How­ever, as much as we might like to think oth­er­wise, eco­tour­ism alone is not enough to raise the liv­ing stand­ards of a coun­try of more than 2 mil­lion people that is 88% rain­forest. This is accord­ing to Gabon’s Envir­on­ment Min­is­ter Lee White. In order to employ people and main­tain forest cov­er­age, sus­tain­able log­ging has become an import­ant industry for the west Afric­an repub­lic. By ban­ning the export of unpro­cessed logs and retain­ing much of the value chain “[we] are mak­ing the resource more valu­able and it’s going to push us to man­age our nat­ur­al cap­it­al with much more care”.

To read­ers who like to believe that sus­tain­able tour­ism is real­ist­ic but feel that sus­tain­able log­ging is a con­tra­dic­tion in terms … check your bias. “GT” sus­pects that sus­tain­able tour­ism and sus­tain­able log­ging are both worthy ambi­tions with massive chal­lenges. The altern­at­ive is that they are both naive fantas­ies. Best we stick to the worthy ambi­tion hypo­thes­is, eh?

More forest-related coverage:

The forestry industry has poten­tial to con­serve “areas of import­ance [and] spe­cies of interest for nature-based tour­ism”, Kev­in Jones of the Soil Asso­ci­ation said. 

USD 260,000 in state grants will be dis­bursed to assist towns in Mas­sachu­setts, USA’s “most rur­al areas [to] con­serve forests and pro­mote nature-based tour­ism”.

Loco about local

Loc­al media that reports on the delib­er­a­tions of loc­al gov­ern­ment is a beau­ti­ful thing to behold! It’s what hap­pens in a demo­cracy with a free press. The more loc­al it is the bet­ter it seems. Com­munity-based journ­al­ism is good at the old-school basics of hard news report­ing — lay­ing out facts and attrib­ut­ing opin­ions — because the con­sequences of lies and bias land close to home.

Influ­enced by factors far removed from the ‘hood, polit­ic­al journ­al­ism at the nation­al and glob­al level is a mess. Who knows where the con­sequences of fals­ity and par­tis­an­ship will land? It is per­haps why many people, includ­ing some “journ­al­ists” whose job is to “inform”, have been shell-shocked to the point of PTSD by the res­ults of cer­tain elec­tions since 2016. The voters are deplor­able they con­clude … wrong-headedly.

The situ­ation is much the same with tour­ism policy mak­ing. It is non­sensic­al at the glob­al level. (Do Gabon and Romania have the same tour­ism pri­or­it­ies? Not really.) It is not much bet­ter at the nation­al level. (What does Hun­an and Hain­an have in com­mon oth­er than the PRC? Not much.) Yet people are sur­prised by cer­tain out­comes, such as over­tour­ism and its symp­toms, includ­ing overt hos­til­ity to tour­ists and a sim­mer­ing resent­ment of the tour­ism industry.

Even loc­al author­it­ies can be out of touch, of course. A per­fect example is from a sur­vey of res­id­ents and busi­nesses of San Juan Islands, Wash­ing­ton state, USA. Res­ults were pub­lished dur­ing the week. Accord­ing to one find­ing, “there was wide acknow­ledge­ment among res­id­ents that vaca­tion rent­als reduce long-term hous­ing afford­ab­il­ity”, which is reportedly counter to the County’s pri­or position.

While they may not have per­fect know­ledge, loc­als are best-placed to determ­ine the travel & tour­ism policy pri­or­it­ies for their patch. Sure, the entre­pren­eurs among them might tell estab­lished brands to go away. (Sorry poten­tial “GT” Premi­er Part­ners, but it is a pos­sib­il­ity.) If their place relies on avi­ation access, loc­als might tell flight-shamers to take a leap. (Nudge nudge wink wink poten­tial “GT” Travel Part­ners.) And they might even tell for­eign­ers that they are not wel­come. (Xeno­pho­bia? Maybe. The Sen­tine­lese cer­tainly suf­fer from it.) 

But who has the right to con­tra­dict them? Do you? Does your nation­al tour­ism office? Does the United Nations World Tour­ism Organ­iz­a­tion (UNWTO)?

Treat your host com­munity with more respect. If it is suf­fer­ing the effects of earli­er top-down, out­side-in impos­i­tions from mul­tiple lay­ers of gov­ern­ment and the tour­ism industry, the last thing a com­munity needs is more of that. 

In any case, tour­ism policies seem to make more sense when they are com­munity-based. Simply get­ting star­ted can deliv­er imme­di­ate bene­fits to the com­munity and the envir­on­ment, such as clean­ing up beaches in Mum­bai, India as repor­ted dur­ing the week. And the end res­ult has the poten­tial to be more pal­at­able for loc­als, more authen­t­ic for vis­it­ors, and more likely to be sus­tain­able, such as this Indi­gen­ous com­munity-based eco­tour­ism busi­ness in the Rupununi region of Guyana.

An expat­ri­ate in Croa­tia pondered the same basic idea in an opin­ion piece pub­lished on Fri­day: “The concept of tour­ism and com­munity is under attack from over­tour­ism in gen­er­al, but I won­der if a little more atten­tion and ini­ti­at­ives to strengthen the rela­tion­ship between tour­ism and the com­munity might yield a bet­ter tour­ism exper­i­ence for both sides …”

Any­way, what inspired all of that is an inno­cent story about a pro­pos­al to restore the peri­od home of a former may­or and turn it into a museum and “tour­ism hub” for West­wood, New Jer­sey, USA. (No-one out­side of West­wood will care about the story. It’s fine loc­al media cov­er­age … It’s real. It’s spe­cif­ic. And it’s good!)

Odds & ends

Newsy bits that don’t eas­ily fit into this week’s arbit­rary clusters:

The Sul­tan­ate of Oman is look­ing to travel & tour­ism to help shift a “stub­bornly high youth unem­ploy­ment rate”.

Sweden’s state-owned air­port oper­at­or Swe­davia wants to facil­it­ate the first fully-elec­tric com­mer­cial avi­ation route by 2025 and for all 10 of its air­ports to be ready for elec­tric avi­ation by then.

India’s Odisha state is set to expand and diver­si­fy its water-based tour­ism and eco­tour­ism products along its “482-km coast­line and eight major reser­voirs besides Asia’s largest brack­ish water lagoon Chilika and sev­er­al oth­er pristine water bod­ies”. And it is with the tech­nic­al sup­port of a Ker­alan organisation.

Ker­ala, India is look­ing to add ‘a lead­er in cul­tur­al her­it­age tour­ism’ to its repu­ta­tion as a lead­er in respons­ible tour­ism, as author­it­ies set their sites on a range of dif­fer­ent pro­jects. One of these is a Spice Route pro­ject, which pro­poses the involve­ment of 31 coun­tries that have had his­tor­ic­al trade links with Ker­ala. The Neth­er­lands is one of them …

Rather than pro­mot­ing the Neth­er­lands as a tour­ism des­tin­a­tion, the new pri­or­ity for the Neth­er­lands Board of Tour­ism & Con­ven­tions is to man­age the flow of tour­ism, espe­cially in the cap­it­al Ams­ter­dam. City offi­cials’ focus is set on attract­ing vis­it­ors who con­trib­ute — the “untour­ists”.

Maybe they can send the tour­ists to Kerala.

Have a good week!

Fea­tured image: The Chocol­ate Hills and tar­siers; two tour­ism-attract­ing reas­ons poverty rates have plummeted in Bohol province, the Phil­ip­pines. Photo by Macario Jr Decena (CC0) via Pexels.

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Dis­claim­er 1: It is “GT’s” policy to fully dis­close partner/sponsor con­tent. If an item is not dis­closed as part­ner or spon­sor-related then it will have caught “GT’s” atten­tion by some oth­er more organ­ic means. Part­ner with “GT”. You know you want to.

Dis­claim­er 2: None of the stor­ies linked from this week’s post have been fact-checked by “GT”. All ter­min­o­logy used here is as the linked sources used it accord­ing to the know­ledge and assump­tions they have about it. Please com­ment below if you know there has been buzzword-wash­ing or blatant non­sense relayed here, but be nice about it as the linked sources might get offen­ded. (“GT” won’t.) And as for “GT” bring­ing it to your atten­tion so that you might be the one to set the record straight, you are welcome! 🙂