special report
Yet it seems that at least some holidaymakers
do feel that they’re seizing the moment when singling out places such as the Great Barrier Reef. A survey published last year suggested that a staggering 69% of the tourists at the reef who were questioned had opted to make their visit “before it’s gone”. The authors of the report, from the University
of Queensland, wrote: “In the long term, the increased tourism might exacerbate the pressure on this already vulnerable region — potentially even hastening the collapse of this ecosystem and the tourism industry that relies on its health. This paradox is deepened further when we consider that many of the tourists in our survey, who said they were visiting the reef to ‘see it before it’s gone’, nevertheless had low levels of concern about their own impact on the region.” On the other hand, what this research threw
up about tourist motives does seem to fly in the face of a lot of anecdotal evidence. For example, Frontier Travel organises trips to the Canadian Arctic to view polar bears. Marketing manager Julie Thompson puts it this way: “It doesn’t seem that our clients are worried that they might not get to see the polar bears if they don’t do it soon enough, rather that it’s a holiday they want to cross off their own list and therefore view it as a so-called ‘bucket-list trip’.”
Footfall concerns, highlighted in the Australian
research, can obviously be a problem — but many of the more popular tourist locations at risk are now carefully controlling numbers and, at the same time, using the income from tourism to further protect the environment. As Naturetrek’s Andy Tucker explains: “There’s
actually been no beter time to visit the Galapagos — at least over the past 25 years — as the Galapagos National Park has been very effective at dealing with the management of visitor sites and the number of boats able to anchor at each site on any given day.” To put things into context, he added: “Any
negative impact caused by the footfall of eco- tourists is dwarfed by the destruction caused by population growth, road building, deforestation, palm oil cultivation, the extraction of oil sands and other fossil fuels, the collection of wild animals for the pet trade, overfishing, etc.” Perhaps the most poignant type of last-chance
tourism is when you don’t know that you’re seeing something that’s about to disappear: such as the Buddhas of Bamiyan or Palmyra. And let’s not forget the joys of first-chance tourism: the privilege of being the first to visit previously closed countries; the indulgent pleasure of staying in a newly-built luxury hotel; or the excitement of visiting a just-opened art gallery.
“WE PREFER TO FOCUS ON MESSAGING THAT PROMOTES THE POSITIVE IMPACT TRAVEL CAN HAVE”
28
ABTA Magazine | August 2017
IMAGE: GETTY
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