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special report


last-chance tourism Hitting back at


Roger Anderson looks for the truth behind the ‘last chance’ trend and finds out how tourism is protecting experiences at risk of disappearing


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arlier this year, Forbes magazine carried an article highlighting last-chance tourism as a ‘top travel trend for 2017’. The story emanated


from travel website thepointsguy.com which put last- chance tourism in third place on a list of things to look out for in 2017 — behind changes in seat designs on passenger planes and the rise of Airbnb. In fact, the concept of last-chance tourism is hardly new.


The term has its roots in the 1989 BBC radio documentary Last Chance to See, jointly presented by zoologist Mark Carwardine and writer Douglas Adams (of Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy fame). The series, and follow-up book, told of the authors’ trips around the world in the hope of encountering species on the brink of extinction. The last-chance concept ultimately led to a flood


of books and newspaper articles jumping on to the bucket-list bandwagon. But, instead of listing places to visit before the reader died, they listed places to visit before the places themselves died. One of the first was Frommer’s 500 Places to See Before They Disappear, published in 2008. Around the same time, academics started publishing


articles on the subject and in a 2010 paper entitled Last- chance tourism: the boom, doom, and gloom of visiting vanishing destinations, Raynald Harvey Lemelin and colleagues defined it as when ‘tourists explicitly seek vanishing landscapes or seascapes, and/or disappearing natural and/or social heritage’. So, don’t be fooled, last-


chance tourism as a concept has been around for a fair amount of time. So, how much of the last-chance tourism story is simply


media hype? Certainly the travel industry has very strong views about the appropriate use of such terms. But the articles are still coming thick and fast. In


April, The Independent newspaper came up with a list of ‘25 places you should visit before they vanish from the face of the Earth’. This list included Egypt’s pyramids, as ‘pollution may lead to their complete collapse’; the Great Wall of China, because ‘the wall could be reduced to ruins by erosion in as litle as 20 years’; and the Dead Sea (‘could be completely gone in 50 years’). How does the industry react to such a gloomy


prognosis for holiday hotspots? Although journalists love the term, tour operators don’t really promote ‘last-chance tourism’ per se. Search for the words ‘last chance’ and it’s far more likely to throw up a last-minute, cheap-rate, special deal. Lisa Warner, marketing director of Abercrombie &


Kent, admits the company has, in the past, used “last- chance tourism terminology” but has now moved away from it. “While we want to encourage travellers to explore


our planet, we want to do so in a way that promotes greater understanding of how low-impact travel is the key to sustaining our world for future generations,” says Warner. “So while ‘last-chance’ messaging may


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