Tourism: who owns the destination?

For political leaders at all levels of government, the key question is this: “Will the destination use tourism for the sustainable development of the people who live there, or will tourism use the destination?”

Tourism businesses and government-funded tourist boards or NTOs market “the destination” to attract tourists, most often without much thought about how the tourist will impact “the place” where people are born, grow up, work, raise children and grow old. The social anthropologist Valene Smith famously used the aspirational language of “hosts and guests”. Responsible Tourism encourages governments to manage tourism to make better places for people to live in and for people to visit. In that order. As Tourism Concern’s campaign sought to remind us “We take our holidays in their homes.”

The activities of tourists and local people often conflict in destinations where they interact, particularly as volumes increase and crowding results. Tourists have wealth and leisure to travel and generally spend more each day than they would at home, causing the price of locally produced goods and services to rise and changing the retail landscape as tourist shops displace bakers and greengrocers. This year’s demonstrations in Europe resulted from overtourism, the local communities’ resentment at how tourists change their place and their home, and the consequences of housing being sold on short-term lets to tourists, resulting in dramatically rising housing costs and homelessness for the local community. Tourism displaces the community whose home the destination is.

Responsible Tourism emerged in an effort to challenge the persistence of “business as usual” which is cloaked and obscured in the rhetoric of a vague aspiration to attain sustainability. Responsible Tourism arose from discussions with the United Kingdom tour operators about how they could make tourism better and in South Africa, the post-apartheid government’s effort to harness tourism to improve livelihoods. The 2002 Cape Town Declaration called on governments “businesses, tourists and local communities – to take responsibility for achieving sustainable tourism, and to create better places for people to live in and for people to visit.” When businesses and destination governments clearly state the sustainability issues they are addressing, and take action to address them, the positive impacts can be reported to the local community, regulators and to guests.

Responsible Tourism is achieved when we take responsibility as producers or consumers – it is about what we do and how we make tourism better. Responsible Tourism drives sustainable tourism. Responsible Tourism is not a niche product, all forms of tourism can be more responsible. Critically the claim to be responsible must be evidenced, transparency about what the business is taking responsibility for, what has been done and achieved, is at the heart of Responsible Tourism. The phrase “sustainable and responsible tourism” reveals that the point has been missed. Responsibility is the driver and sustainability the objective, it needs to be defined and progress towards the goal reported. Businesses and governments need to address those issues which benefit the place and residents. Priorities vary from destination to destination; the supply of potable water is an issue in many destinations but not everywhere. The two issues that matter everywhere are greenhouse gas emissions and plastic waste which ends in gyros in the ocean and through the food chain in our bodies.

Responsible Travel launched the Responsible Tourism Awards in 2004 and over the last two decades we have recognised hundreds of businesses, destinations and community groups who have demonstrably taken action to make tourism better from TUI and Eurostar to Keralan and SMME tour operators in the Rann of Kutch. We launched the awards to find examples of proven best practice, tried and rested by application in order to demonstrates what businesses and communities, large and small, can do to make tourism better. We now have five regional awards programmes with the gold winners in each category going forward to the Global Responsible Tourism Awards. We look for proven examples of positive tourism, for innovative approaches which deliver and through the awards encourage replication. Drawing on the examples discovered through the awards and the experience of our International Centre for Responsible Tourism (ICRT) networks we published the 2022 Responsible Tourism Charter, signed on Magna Carta Island by practitioners and policymakers from many Commonwealth countries.

The range of issues which can and need to be addressed through tourism extends across economic, social and environmental agenda from greenhouse gas emissions, markets access for SMMEs, to child protection and the creation of employment opportunities for the differently abled. Destinations can best be understood as clusters of formal and informal sector businesses providing services and goods for tourists. Michael Porter, the Harvard Business School professor famous for cluster theory, has pointed to the importance of “creating shared value” to develop a thriving local economy and destination and create value for businesses, the local community through employment and government through tax. There is now a great deal of experience of how to grow local economies and benefit the poor through sustainable tourism development. That experience needs to be shared and implementation supported in many more communities.

Overtourism has hit the headlines again this year. Overtourism is a consequence of growth in a finite world, destinations are finite, demand is not. Individual rational self-interest, the desire to see Venice or Everest, and take a selfie, is at add odds with the collective rational interest in conserving what is special about the destination. The housing crisis caused by converting accommodation to short-term lets for tourists is not only an issue in the developed world and often the revenues earned are remitted to bank accounts in the developed world, lost to the destination and untaxed.

The ICRT global launched in November 2024 to provide a hub for the ICRT networks of practitioners in Southern and West Africa, Latin America, Southeast Asia, and the Indian sub-continent. These regional ICRT networks share experience and good practice, encouraging replication. in 2008 , when Kerala hosted an international conference on Responsible Tourism in Destinations, the first since Cape Town in 2002, the purpose was to hear from practitioners elsewhere in the world about what worked and what didn’t.  Experience from developing producer groups of SMME farmers in The Gambia to supply fruit and vegetables to hotels and resorts was adopted and adapted, with great success, in Kerala and expanded to provide restaurants and cafes and craft and soft furnishings. The innovative and vey popular Village Life Experiences, guided tours of villages with five or six encounters with local households, drew on township tours practice in South Africa. Each visited household is paid for the visit and experiences are commissionable when sold by accommodation providers and tour operators.

The ICRT global will share experience providing lifelong learning opportunities through an open-source library, a range of short courses and recorded interviews and panel discussions and encourage research and curriculum development in universities. We will also provide tailormade course for businesses or destinations if requested.  We have seen the power of South South exchange when practitioners from The Gambia and South Africa have been invited to Kerala and Madhya Pradesh to meet and share knowledge and skills with practitioners in India. We hope to raise funds to support South-South Exchange and support and accelerate change.

Professor Emeritus, Dr Harold Goodwin, Founder ICRT global