BACK TO CONTENTS
WTM LONDON 2016 ®
RESPONSIBLE TOURISM
Responsible Tourism Day 3 The day opened with a session on Captivity, Wildlife and Tourism. Dylan Walker, CEO of the World Cetacean Alliance, said that thanks to the growing demand for wild whale watching tourism, the commercial advantages of keeping these animals alive far outweighs their economic value as meat. Looking further at a wide range of animals from tigers to dolphins and great apes, he added: “Tourism has a huge responsibility of saving species from extinction. We might not be ready, but we have the opportunity.” David Nash from Campaign Against Canned Hunting explained how tourism directly subsidised this industry, whether volunteering at lion farms, petting lion cubs or walking with cubs. “Tourism is critical to South Africa’s economy,” he explained. “So image matters. We have to challenge the marketing that says these practices are good for conservation, that the cubs are orphans, or that they are well treated or released.”
Opening a session on Destination and Place Management, WTM’s Responsible Tourism Advisor Harold Goodwin said that: “Overtourism is very much the issue of the moment”, asking for a show of hands to see who was there from destinations. When just a handful of hands went up, he added:
“the challenge is that people from destinations are downstairs selling, while those upstairs discussing the issues are from other parts of the industry.” Joan Torrella, Tourism Director in
Barcelona City Council showed how the city has developed strategies to decentralise tourists away from key hotspots into wider areas of the city. He added that the growth of accommodation such as Airbnb has created new challenges, with less than half of tourists to the city now staying in hotels.
An example of successful destination management was then presented – Bonito, a region of Brazil – where tourism is responsible for 50% of jobs, with 205,000 visitors in 2015, bringing in $US100 million. “In Bonito each natural attraction has a daily limit on the number of visitors,” explained Marcos Dias Soares, president of Bonito’s tourism board. “And that is part of the environmental license that all attractions in the region must have to operate.” “It’s not just cities that are suffering
from overtourism,” added Caroline Warburton, National Tourism Strategy Coordinator, Scottish Tourism Alliance, explaining that the common perception is that, with
the exception of Edinburgh, overtourism would not be an issue in Scotland. She gave the example of the Fairy Pools on the Isle of Skye, which have been used in recent marketing promotions. The number of visitors has gone from 10,000 to 80,000 in a year, impacting on everything from the quality of the road to residents’ quality of life. “The question is, whose responsibility is it to address this issue?” she asked. Michael Horton, Chairman and Founder, ConCERT Cambodia, opened a discussion on communicating responsible tourism, talking about the paradoxes of raising awareness about the problems with ‘voluntourism’. He said that efforts to raise awareness have had such impact in recent years that in some cases an oversimplified message has been presented and there is now a danger that good quality community based projects are suffering by association and won’t receive the support they need to continue. “One of the common messages people hear is that short term volunteering is bad and long term volunteering is the solution,” he said. “Yet this ignores the fact that if a volunteer placement is of itself bad, then being long term only makes it worse. Or that there are forms of volunteering that are perfectly suited to being done on a short term basis.”
74 WTM Review 2016
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64 |
Page 65 |
Page 66 |
Page 67 |
Page 68 |
Page 69 |
Page 70 |
Page 71 |
Page 72 |
Page 73 |
Page 74 |
Page 75 |
Page 76 |
Page 77 |
Page 78 |
Page 79 |
Page 80 |
Page 81 |
Page 82 |
Page 83 |
Page 84 |
Page 85 |
Page 86 |
Page 87 |
Page 88 |
Page 89
