- 3 years ago
In this insightful talk from the RT Summit 2018, Dr Harold Goodwin, the Director of International center for Responsible Tourism, Managing Director of Responsible Tourism Partnership, Responsible Tourism Advisor of Travel Market London and chair of the eminent jury highlights the major challenges we face today and the call for action in the present times.
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#Outlook #ResponsibleTourism #Tourism #RTSummit2018 #Travel
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00:00 Well, you know, the more, you know, as the day is progressing, I'm beginning to realize
00:07 there is so much more to learn.
00:10 And we're really beginning to explore, you know, that part of the world, things that
00:15 we don't know, we don't know.
00:18 And so today's been and it's already begun is a very, very interesting day.
00:23 And it continues to do so.
00:24 And like I said, lots to learn and who better to learn from than Dr. Harold Goodwin.
00:30 He's the Director, International Center for Responsible Tourism.
00:34 He's the Managing Director, Responsible Tourism Partnership.
00:38 He's the Responsible Tourism Advisor, World Travel Market London.
00:42 And he's also the chair of the eminent jury that decides the Indian Responsible Tourism
00:48 Awards.
00:50 He's an expert who has worked to spread the word about sustainability and responsibility
00:55 on practically every continent on the map.
00:59 Dr. Goodwin has been really sounding the clarion call to action and he will be highlighting
01:05 the major challenges we face today and that we might continue to face if we don't act
01:11 now.
01:12 So ladies and gentlemen, without further ado, please welcome Dr. Harold Goodwin.
01:20 Dr. Harold Goodwin Thank you very much.
01:29 I think it's quite difficult to follow that introduction.
01:32 It's also difficult because I'm holding you from lunch.
01:35 And it's difficult again because I want to perhaps pour some cold water.
01:42 We've heard this morning some fantastic examples of responsible tourism in action and I don't
01:48 doubt that they're for real.
01:50 But I think what Raj said about Namaste is very much to the point.
01:56 It is an appeal to the good in everyone.
01:58 The difficulty I think is that some people are using the language now of responsible
02:03 tourism without there actually being much substance behind it.
02:08 So what I want to talk about today is what the problem is of the development of tourism.
02:16 Is tourism really always good?
02:18 And some of these images now which come from my work which is increasing all over tourism
02:23 I think demonstrate what the problem is.
02:27 Not everybody enjoys this kind of experience.
02:29 Some do.
02:30 The hotels of course in Barcelona are booming.
02:35 What of the sacred and the profound?
02:36 This is actually shot in Myanmar.
02:38 I was there.
02:39 Lots of people were taking their elderly parents perhaps for their last time to the shrine.
02:45 And there are the tourists taking photographs of it.
02:47 I'm not sure tourists should be taking photographs of those moments in people's lives.
02:52 They're not in the public domain in that sense.
02:57 I think the truth is that over tourism and the rise of that in the last two years has
03:03 really seen the fig leaf fall off tourism.
03:07 We're bumping up against the limits to growth.
03:09 We're seeing social and economic conflict now being created by the very success of tourism
03:15 in more and more places around the world.
03:18 Cricketer Holidays is not a bad company.
03:20 I don't show that image to disrespect Cricketer Holidays at all.
03:26 They just made the mistake of very briefly advertising what every tour operator does
03:32 which is to move on after the place has been spoiled.
03:35 They were merely being honest and I applaud them for that.
03:41 Sustainable development's got a very long history.
03:43 I was at the University of York in 1972 studying politics.
03:47 It was a good university.
03:50 The World Commission on Environment and Development met in '72.
03:54 It didn't come up in my university course at all.
03:57 I don't know if it did in Harvard, Megan, but it certainly didn't come up in York.
04:03 Forty years later, it's 2012, I'm at Manchester Metropolitan University still trying to get
04:09 students interested in sustainability.
04:12 Forty years is an entire working lifetime, my working lifetime, and in that period we've
04:19 gone backwards.
04:21 The scale of the problems we now confront as a species are much larger than they were
04:25 in 1972.
04:27 So whilst we've made lots of progress and there have been good examples of that in the
04:30 room today, the reality is that we're not keeping up.
04:35 Now Raj reminded us of the concept of Namaste which is a very powerful concept in this culture,
04:41 that looking for the good in everyone.
04:44 But I think we need to look very hard to see the good in some of the practice in tourism.
04:50 And I look very hard and I can't find it.
04:54 Why did we pick up on the concept of responsible tourism?
04:58 We didn't.
04:59 We originally planned to mount a campaign with VSO, Voluntary Service Overseas, in the
05:04 middle of the 1990s around ethical tourism.
05:08 We abandoned it for two reasons.
05:10 The first was that for many tour operators to claim to be ethical is too big an ask.
05:17 Whatever you do, somebody will say that one part of your practice, maybe it's just offering
05:22 meat on the menu, is unethical.
05:24 So it's too big an ask to do that.
05:26 And we realised that there needed to be a focus.
05:30 A focus on particular things which any tour operator would say it was doing.
05:35 We often hear people now talking about there needs to be some kind of global standard for
05:40 responsibility or sustainability.
05:43 That let me tell you I think is nonsense on stilts.
05:47 It's completely wrong.
05:49 Because the issues change dramatically from one place to another.
05:55 The problems over water supply are not a problem everywhere.
05:59 In other places, at the moment particularly in Cape Town as it heads towards turning the
06:03 taps off, the issues of water supply are critical.
06:08 There's no point in Cape Town in focusing on nice vernacular architecture if the city
06:12 is going to run out of water.
06:14 It's very clear what the major issue is in Cape Town right now.
06:19 That's around infrastructure and critically, Megan, I think it's about equality.
06:24 It's not just about an infrastructure gap.
06:26 It's about saying that there is a fundamental problem about inequality which is at the very
06:32 heart of tourism.
06:33 Most people in the world have never been in an aircraft.
06:36 Most people in the world never take a holiday.
06:39 The reality is that tourism is a representation of global inequality.
06:43 And from that inevitably will come conflict.
06:46 And we need to get a lot better at reducing those levels of inequality and also of managing
06:52 the conflict when it results.
06:55 Parts of the problems of the over-tourism, particularly when it spills onto the streets
07:00 it has in Barcelona, is a consequence of that inequality being manifest through tourism.
07:07 So we decided to campaign for people to actually do something rather than just talk about being
07:13 sustainable.
07:14 Hence the idea of responsibility.
07:17 People have to talk about what they're doing to make the difference.
07:21 Now this fits very well, as several of the speakers this morning have pointed out, with
07:26 the notion of the experience economy.
07:28 That what tourism is really about now is selling experiences.
07:33 It's about creating memories and those memories are what produces the viral marketing.
07:39 Now inevitably nearly all the tourism companies in the world are jumping on the back of the
07:45 experiential.
07:47 We're not selling.
07:48 In most markets now the simple sun, sand and sea, flop in the sun for two weeks and do
07:53 nothing is not selling.
07:55 It is still selling in some places but it's going out of fashion.
07:58 The problem for responsible tourism is to make sure that that development also links
08:03 with the principle of sustainability.
08:06 And that's a bigger chancel.
08:09 It's Justin Francis who made the point about responsible tourism that you should be able
08:14 to taste the difference.
08:16 It's not just about the thing being better.
08:20 You have to know it's better and you have to convince the tourist that it's better.
08:25 Now over tourism which has grown dramatically around Europe in particular as a problem,
08:30 but it is a global issue, is the exact opposite of responsible tourism.
08:36 It's the antithesis of it.
08:38 If responsible tourism is about making better places to live in and therefore better places
08:43 to visit, over tourism is where it's been got wrong.
08:48 And it's been got wrong because people have constantly mouthed that they're doing sustainability
08:54 when they're doing nothing.
08:55 It's the inactivity by the industry which has resulted in these over tourism problems
09:02 and the recognition that we're bumping up against the limits to growth.
09:07 I think that the moments and times we treasure as travellers, and certainly this is true
09:10 for me, is when we're treated as temporary residents, when we get to explore those back
09:15 streets and the back areas.
09:17 That conversation that so many of the inspiring speakers this morning have talked about, that
09:23 encounter with the other, that's what's fundamental.
09:26 And it's that notion of hosts and guests meeting on some kind of level playing field based
09:32 upon respect, which is at the very heart of that kind of experience.
09:39 Tourism is not a natural phenomenon.
09:41 I don't think there's any particular right either that we should think we can jet around
09:45 the world experiencing other people's places.
09:48 It's not a natural phenomenon.
09:50 It's what we, the producers and the consumers, make it.
09:54 We can change it very quickly.
09:56 It is a social construct.
09:58 It's the way we behave, whether we're producers or consumers.
10:03 We also need to remember that if you speed up access, you speed up the exit as well.
10:09 And Raj, I think you and I would agree that Nepal has suffered particularly badly from
10:13 that with the treks into Everest.
10:15 They've got shorter and shorter.
10:17 They're now only really constrained by the physical limits of people's capacity to make
10:21 that altitude change in a given time frame.
10:26 Having said all that, the metrics do matter.
10:29 We need to be sure that people measure the impact of tourism, not in the traditional
10:35 way, not by looking at the number of international arrivals.
10:38 Who cares?
10:39 The number of international arrivals may mean that you're still losing economic value, because
10:44 as in Nepal going into Everest, people are staying longer.
10:48 Sorry, staying a shorter period of time.
10:50 You're losing bed nights by speeding up the walk into Everest.
10:56 We can talk a bit about spend and retained yield, but we get very little of that.
11:00 And when it's at the national level, it's nearly always done on output tables.
11:05 It's not done business by business.
11:08 So the key question is, can we begin to measure at the local level what the impact of particular
11:14 businesses is?
11:15 And Jen Bobbin will be talking about a thing called Yardstick later this afternoon, which
11:20 I think is an example of how that can be done.
11:23 The key question then, as we move forward, is does a destination use tourism or does
11:29 tourism use the destination?
11:31 And the reality is that tourism basically free rides, as Megan was saying, on the common
11:36 pool and common property resources.
11:38 Lord Marshall pointed this out in 1994.
11:42 The travel and tourism industry is essentially the renting out for short-term lets of other
11:46 people's environments.
11:47 The problem is that the value, as Megan demonstrated this morning, accrues mainly to the tour operators
11:54 and the transport providers.
11:56 Not enough is going to the local community and almost nothing to the conservation of
12:01 the areas that people choose to visit.
12:05 So why this concept of responsibility?
12:07 I think it's because now is the time to act, because we've reached the end of the road
12:12 of not doing anything.
12:14 We have to make change much more rapidly.
12:17 And that means acknowledging and owning up to the problems and remembering that responsibility
12:22 is free.
12:23 We can all of us take as much of it as we can handle.
12:28 The agenda has broadened in recent years to cover things like child protection, orphanages
12:33 and animal welfare.
12:35 Not traditionally the kind of thing that environmentalists have been concerned about, but some of the
12:39 biggest negative impacts of tourism are in those social and ethical areas.
12:46 We're beginning to see progress on that in some source markets.
12:51 The evidence matters then.
12:53 The awards set a standard, the India awards this year.
12:56 You'll see that there's some really significant progress being made in India.
13:01 Too much of responsible tourism is greenwashing.
13:07 We're seeing a lot of eco-tourism businesses, which have not changed at all from the days
13:11 when it was just marketing hype, beginning to rebrand themselves as responsible tourism.
13:17 We need to be really, really careful at the number of people who are now just climbing
13:21 on the bandwagon and claiming to be responsible tourism, when really it's just business as
13:26 usual.
13:27 We've got some great examples in India where there is transparent reporting.
13:31 I'd pick out Village Ways, CGH Earth and Kumarakoram in Kerala.
13:37 This hotel has remarkable environmental credentials.
13:41 Of course, TUI and Thomas Cook are also beginning to report in much more transparent ways.
13:48 The point is the label's not enough.
13:51 Consumers need to be more critical.
13:53 One of the things I'm optimistic about at the moment is that work TUI is doing with
13:57 its millions of visitors, millions of tourists, raising their awareness of the importance
14:03 of sustainability, will cause all of those tourists to ask more critical questions.
14:09 We need to work hard at making tourists much more critical of what they receive.
14:15 Responsible tourism is becoming mainstream.
14:17 I was talking with Justin just this week from ResponsibleTravel.com.
14:21 He's been out of the business for nine months.
14:23 He's saying the biggest change in that nine months is now other corporates are phoning
14:27 up Responsible Travel to come and talk to them about the experiential travel trend and
14:33 the strong link with sustainability that so many people attach to it.
14:39 Let me not hold you any longer from lunch.
14:41 Thank you for listening.
14:41 [APPLAUSE]