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If you were about to give up hope of ever going on holiday again, please do keep reading.
We may have established by now that air travel is not great for the planet and that offsetting isn’t the magic cure-all we think it is – but what we haven’t looked at are the less positive consequences of curbing our sky-high habit. The tourism industry worldwide contributed a staggering $8.8 trillion to the economy in 2018, accounting for 319 million jobs worldwide.1
People often talk about the impact that reining in excesses and proper taxation would have on the aviation industry itself: the loss of jobs for airport staff, airline workers, pilots and cabin crew. What we talk about less is the other side of the equation – the destinations that at this point are almost completely economically dependent on tourism. Globalisation means that everything we do or don’t do has much further-reaching implications than we can ever realise; there’s no escaping the fact that if we all stopped flying, some of the poorest communities in the world would undoubtedly become poorer.
The pandemic has perhaps provided the perfect test case. Not only did airlines and travel companies go bust, not only were an estimated 400,000 airline workers fired, furloughed or told they could lose their jobs due to coronavirus, but countries that relied on tourism money found themselves struggling to survive.2 Hawaii saw one in every six jobs vanish by August 2020 as a result of tourism grinding to a halt, according to a report by the International Monetary Fund (IMF).3 According to the United Nations World Tourism Organization (UNWTO):
The global pandemic, the first of its scale in a new era of interconnectedness, has put 100 million jobs at risk, many in micro, small, and medium-sized enterprises that employ a high share of women, who represent 54 per cent of the tourism workforce. Tourism-dependent countries will likely feel the negative impacts of the crisis for much longer than other economies. Contact-intensive services key to the tourism and travel sectors are disproportionately affected by the pandemic and will continue to struggle until people feel safe to travel en masse again.
The report highlighted the fact that often the hardest-hit destinations – the ones that are most heavily reliant on tourists to stay afloat – are less wealthy nations for whom travellers have for years provided a much-needed economic boost. The IMF reported:
The crisis has crystallized the importance of tourism as a development pathway for many countries to decrease poverty and improve their economies. In sub-Saharan Africa, the development of tourism has been a key driver in closing the gap between poor and rich countries, with tourism-dependent countries averaging real per capita GDP growth of 2.4 per cent between 1990 and 2019 – significantly faster than non-tourism-dependent countries in the region.
One 2020 study highlighted the important role of tourism in the development of emerging economies.4 Taking Pakistan as an example, it found that just a 1 per cent increase in tourism enhanced a country’s GDP by 0.051 per cent, foreign direct investment by 2.647 per cent, energy development by 0.134 per cent and agriculture development by 0.26 per cent – plus reduced poverty by 0.51 per cent in the long run. ‘Hence, policy-makers should be informed that through public interventions, tourism can advance development by the design and implementation of integrated policies in developing economies,’ wrote the study’s authors.5
Developing countries also now rely on tourism for foreign-exchange reserves – which nations accumulate to ensure that a central government agency has backup funds if their national currency rapidly devalues or becomes altogether insolvent. For the world’s forty poorest countries, tourism is the second-most important source of foreign exchange after oil.6
Smaller, tourism-dependent countries – often island nations such as the Seychelles and Mauritius and those in the Caribbean – have very few, if any, alternative industries to prop them up in terms of jobs and revenue. People and planet are both equally important when we talk about sustainability; if something is beneficial to the environment while exploiting or having a heavily negative impact on local communities, it’s not really fitting the bill. It means that the issue of long-haul travel is a less straightforward one than it might first appear.
The irony is that, pre-pandemic, we were talking about the opposite problem. ‘Overtourism’ was the watchword, so much so that it was shortlisted for the Oxford English Dictionary’s 2018 word of the year (pipped to the post by ‘toxic’, FYI). Every other story I reported on at that time seemed to be about the phenomenon: locals were protesting in Barcelona as Airbnbs pushed up the cost of accommodation, pricing out people who had rented and lived there their entire lives; Venice and Dubrovnik were forced to confront the blight of giant cruise ships offloading thousands of passengers at a time; Machu Picchu had to introduce ticketed timeslots; and Amsterdam cracked down on tours of the Red Light District, ‘beer bikes’ and non-locals frequenting the Dutch capital’s famed coffee shops (the ones that sell a lot more than just caffeinated beverages), following countless incidents of bad behaviour from inebriated, cannabis-addled visitors.
In perhaps the perfect epitome of life imitating art, 2018 saw the beach made famous by Danny Boyle’s The Beach – a film about an exquisite, undiscovered piece of paradise being ruined by humans in all our awfulness – have to close because of the havoc caused by too many tourists. Thailand’s Maya Bay on the island of Ko Phi Phi Leh had to shut itself off indefinitely due to the damage excessive numbers of visitors were doing to the local ecosystem, including its delicate coral reefs.
We had reached a point at which the world’s most popular and feted destinations were increasingly crumbling under the strain of too much tourism – victims of their own roaring success. The pandemic saw life switch to the other extreme, stripping places bare of essential visitors for months on end. Sure, there were positives – lockdowns and lack of visitors led to temporarily improved environmental conditions and water quality at some popular beach locations, according to one study,7 while locals got to rediscover their own stomping grounds without having to compete with out-of-towners – but on the flipside was the human cost. Bars, restaurants, hotels and attractions were left barren in the wake of the harshest travel restrictions seen since the Second World War, with their proprietors struggling in vain to eke out a living as a result.
Force for good
Lack of tourists, too, has much wider implications than just the harm it does to the hospitality sector directly. Intrepid is a travel company that has long partnered with charities in its destinations, including Education For All (EFA) in Morocco. Its big focus is to provide girls in rural communities in the country with access to education. But with much of the charity’s funding coming from tourist donations, the pandemic saw cash reserves plunge by 50 per cent. ‘In 2019, EFA had a 100% pass rate at Baccalaureate [the French equivalent of a high-school diploma], while in 2020 this rate went down to 70%,’ says Intrepid’s managing director EMEA, Zina Bencheikh. ‘And this rate could have been much lower if the charity didn’t launch a specific fundraiser to raise money to buy IT equipment for some of the girls who could pursue their studies from home during lockdown.’
Meanwhile, in east Africa, there were worrying stories of game reserves being rife with poachers because the lack of tourists meant a consequent lack of funds to pay anti-poaching ranger units, Tom Barber, founder of Original Travel, tells me. ‘Likewise, some of the most pristine reef systems in the Coral Triangle in Indonesia were being trashed by illegal drag fishing when normally there would be dive boats there to report and frighten off illegal fishing boats,’ he adds.
Zina, who is from Morocco herself, has seen the tangible benefits of inbound travel first-hand:
Tourism has the power to truly change a destination, to reduce gender inequality, to reduce economic inequality, to increase education. It’s not an easy thing to do well, but when it is it has an amazing potential to help the social-economic development of destinations, to empower locals and to decrease all kinds of inequality.
She argues that we need to take a more holistic view when we’re talking about the travel industry and climate change. Some of the communities Intrepid operates trips to in Peru and Myanmar accessed education for the first time ever as a direct result of foreigners travelling there. Zina continues:
The impact is so powerful. We need to think of all the different elements that have an impact on global warming; people in these places who earn money from tourists can then afford to pay to educate their kids for the first time. And education is a key element in the fight against global warming.
Travel also plays a key role in educating the tourist, too. Think about it: how can you persuade someone they should care about the havoc that climate change is wreaking on the planet if they don’t care about the planet in the first place? ‘It’s hard to want to conserve nature if you don’t interact with it,’ says Sam Bruce, co-founder of adventure-travel company Much Better Adventures:
You can see the changes as well when you travel – I always find it really interesting listening to our guides telling us how their environment has changed over the last few years. You get to hear about the real-world impact of climate change, of capitalism, of constant growth, that you don’t see in your own postcode day-to-day. Travel provides an essential perspective on the impact we’re all having.
That kind of cultural exchange can have an even broader effect than helping us appreciate nature, argues Tom Power, CEO of travel company Pura Aventura, a certified B Corp (an exacting sustainability certification that demands businesses balance purpose and profit). He goes so far as to attribute enduring peace in Europe (at least until Russia’s shocking and unprovoked attack on Ukraine in February 2022) in large part to tourism:
This world is a far, far poorer place without travel, economically and culturally. In Europe, we were at war every decade. But people got used to visiting other countries and staying there. Travel is what I think has basically turned the idea of European war from an inevitability to a laughable impossibility.
Aside from that, the economic value of a tourist’s visit can help bolster the protection around precious environments, cultures and lifestyles, says Tom, ‘because suddenly, because of tourists that will pay to see it, that tree’s worth more standing than chopped down’.
Like many of the tourism professionals I speak to, Much Better Adventures’ Sam cites Covid as the perfect example of why tourism is so desperately needed as the ultimate wealth distributor. Ordinarily, his company reaches communities in remote places with its trips – places whose key pillars of income were demolished overnight. ‘Tourism employs 10 per cent of the population globally and contributes 10 per cent of GDP,’ he says. Without that income, the cost, both human and environmental, was devastating. ‘We witnessed communities whose tourism industries were still in their infancy, such as in Colombia, struck down – it was like chopping off a flower that was just starting to flourish before it had a chance to grow.’
Not only were local guides and their families left with almost no income, but a huge number of environmental conservation projects funded by tourists – whose sole job it was to look after the most beautiful, vulnerable pockets of the natural world – were left in a perilous financial position.
Ben Lynam, head of strategic communications for The Travel Foundation, which works with governments and businesses worldwide to help foster tourism models that are beneficial for destinations, from both an environmental and a community perspective, agrees that the boost tourism brings is hard to replicate:
If you took tourism away from some of these places, and especially at pace, it would clearly have lots of devastating knock-on effects. Where destinations have no option but long-haul, we need to be pragmatic rather than pulling away a lifeline. I don’t think stopping tourism is going to be a helpful thing; it can be brilliant for places if done well. What other industry values nature, biodiversity and culture in the same way that tourism can?
He points out that it’s often one of the few options a destination has, and one that is seen as a fairly low-investment industry to build and grow:
It’s a good way of bringing in foreign exchange; it helps to boost other industries within a destination and support other local economies (for instance retail, food and agriculture). And it’s often got an SME (small and medium-sized enterprises) component that’s good, both for encouraging entrepreneurialism and for money going back into communities.
But he’s very aware of the flipside of the tourism coin. ‘You do have to look at what the impact is versus the benefits that you gain. There are lots of costs involved too – you want to make sure they’re outweighed by the benefits.’
Where does the money go?
Tourism could be described as the single greatest experiment in wealth redistribution in human history, argues Pura Aventura’s Tom; it can represent an extraordinary transfer of wealth from the better off to the less well off, broadly speaking moving money from the Global North to the South. But it certainly isn’t a perfect system.
‘You’d be a fool to think that it was always equitable,’ he says. ‘There are vast resorts in Cancun, Mexico, for example, that are essentially Spanish-owned tax havens – so it’s silly to think all tourism magically redistributes wealth.’
This idea of the money from tourism not staying within a community or country even has a name: economic leakage. The phenomenon is hard to track and it’s even harder to get data on. ‘Some of the money might go straight to shareholders of large multinationals,’ says The Travel Foundation’s Ben:
Equally, money spent in a destination might quickly leave again, for example via imports – on islands this is happening to meet tourist demands. I’ve seen one bit of research based on the Caribbean that suggested up to 80 per cent of spend can leave.
It was exactly this ‘leakage’ that inspired Sam to start his travel company, Much Better Adventures, in the first place. He saw a stat in a 2008 UN report that said as little as 5 per cent – £5 in every £100 – of tourism spend could end up staying in a country. ‘That really pissed us off and inspired our whole model,’ he says. ‘We make sure £80 in every £100 spent on our trips stays in the local economy.’ He argues passionately that the beneficiaries of tourism should be the people who live in that destination; ‘otherwise I don’t see how that’s sustainable at all, you see resentment brewing locally.’
The University of Bournemouth’s Professor John Fletcher, an economist known for his work on the economic impact of tourism, argues that much of the potential economic good is effectively neutered by the fact that the money spent often never reaches communities in the Global South:
The vast majority of tourism takes place between industrialised countries rather than from North to South economies. I don’t think tourism has done a great deal to bridge the gap between the North and South divide. If tourism was developed properly in poorer countries, then it could be of enormous economic benefit, where the profits and the higher wages remain in situ. If the local economies built the hotels, owned the transport systems and tourists bought local food and beverages – but in practice, there are too many instances where tourists are flown in on airlines owned by foreign businesses, stay in hotels that are built and operated by multinational companies and where the food and beverages are imported. Under such systems it is also not unusual to find that the higher paid jobs are occupied by staff brought in by those companies and the local employment tends to be left with the lower paid jobs.
So, too, the way a person is travelling can negate the economic benefit they might otherwise have had as a visitor. James Higham, a tourism professor at the University of Otago in New Zealand and co-editor of the Journal of Sustainable Tourism, gives cruising as an example:
In New Zealand, cruise passengers account for 9 per cent of total visitors but only 3 per cent of total spend. It’s because their expenditure is locked up by the cruise companies – who want customers to spend as much money as possible when they’re onboard, not when they’re off the ship. In fact, they spend almost nothing in destination.
Worse still are suggestions that even the experiences that should be putting money into local hands are sometimes stolen by unscrupulous companies. Sam reports:
I’ve heard stories about cruise liners hiring a local guide for the first excursion, learning the route, and then using a staff member from the ship to lead the tour instead. So from then on the local guide loses that business. I find that despicable.
It’s incredibly difficult to navigate all this as an ethically minded tourist wanting to ensure your money does some good. Lack of transparency means even your most basic assumptions might turn out to be wrong. Pura Aventura’s Tom gives the following example:
It’s perfectly possible that you might choose a boutique hotel with six rooms and manned by local staff over the massive Hilton down the road, in the belief that you’re better benefiting the local economy. But the truth is, the owner of that boutique hotel might be a millionaire businessman who takes all the money out of the business each year and squirrels it away in a tax haven or spends it all on elaborate trips to the Maldives; his local staff might be paid a pittance and have no holiday allowance. Meanwhile, the Hilton could be a franchise, operated by a local boy-done-good who pulled himself up by his bootstraps and now treats all his staff fairly and pays them a great wage.
He adds that we shouldn’t waste time beating ourselves up too much: ‘We always have to bear in mind that we’re working with our best endeavours, rather than holding ourselves to some impossible standard of perfection.’
The distribution of tourist spend is something that many of the more sustainable and environmentally conscious travel businesses are being transparent about. But until this practice becomes more mainstream, it’s up to us as consumers to be a bit more diligent and do some research. ‘It’s a case of looking down the supply chain and seeing where that money is going,’ says Sam. ‘With the current lack of transparency, it’s up to the consumer to look into that – and sometimes you do have to dig, but it’s worth doing.’
Destinations themselves often say they are keen for foreign investment, and this isn’t necessarily a bad thing, in and of itself, because it’s what’s needed to introduce tourism in the first place. Ben states:
It’s about looking at the life cycle of a destination – about when it’s helpful to have international brands and foreign investment, and when you should localise. That’s what we advocate for. It’s not that we’re against big brands even – some of them might be particularly mindful about how they’re sourcing, both in terms of materials and staff, and prioritising locals so they have a beneficial impact on the local economy.
We’re not forensic accountants – we’re not always going to get it right. But, broadly speaking, many of our instincts are likely to serve us well. Using a local guide, eating at what is clearly a locally owned, independent restaurant or café, seeking out locally owned shops rather than global chains – these things can all help ensure our spend is staying in location.
Or, easier still, you can always book through one of the companies mentioned in this chapter – all of them are doing the work of proactively ploughing money back into the communities they visit.
The invisible burden
Aside from the complex dance of money flowing in and out, destinations face other less obvious costs from tourism – something Ben refers to as the ‘invisible burden’. A lot of these costs go unaccounted for: the use of land and space to suit visitors instead of residents; the extra wear and tear and strain put on public amenities and facilities by a steady stream of extra bodies who do not have to live with the consequences. The impact of this is borne by locals, yes, but often the actual monetary cost as well in the form of taxpayer money to maintain services – for example roads and public transport infrastructure. Ben states:
If no one bears these costs, that means you end up with a degraded destination. We’re advocating for destinations ensuring that their communities really get what they want out of tourism at the right cost – not just any cost. Any economic benefit needs to be weighed against the potential negative costs on the environment and community.
We even saw this in the UK. During the pandemic, residents of Cornwall became less and less tolerant of Brits from other parts of the country flooding their beaches and local amenities every weekend, bringing rising Covid rates with them.8 Anyone not directly employed in the hospitality industry ends up bearing the negative brunt of an influx of visitors – prices go up, beaches are rammed, they can’t get a table at their local pub, etc. – with no obvious personal benefit.
Professor John Fletcher saw this resentment first-hand when undertaking economic research for the islands in the South Pacific:
There was certainly a tension in many of the islands between the general local population and those that would benefit directly from tourism activity. Many islands have little in the way of resources other than their environment and culture – these are the very things that attract the tourists. The tour operators and airlines need volume to be able to make it pay, and so when tourism starts it is difficult to keep it at relatively low levels. It tends to snowball, particularly if the destination is attractive.
Traditionally, the problem has occurred, in part, because destinations focused on visitor numbers above all else. They wanted bums on seats, regardless of whether it might be to the detriment of the people who lived there and the place itself.
According to Ben, destinations need to shift the question to what they want to get out of tourism:
You need to reset what you’re measuring. There has to be a public and private shared vision for a destination that’s not just about what visitors want, but about where the destination wants to be in five to ten years’ time, and looks at how tourism helps you get there. If you asked residents, especially those who maybe feel like they don’t directly benefit, you’ll get other answers – for example, better facilities. Once you know what you want out of your tourism industry, you can try to focus on that – it creates a new value that comes from tourism, not just this calculation of the number of arrivals and measuring visitor spend.
Although some destinations have already made the switch from volume to value as their primary determinant of tourism success – ranking ‘quality’ over quantity when it comes to visitors – even this is missing the point, argues Ben:
When we talk about what a community would value from tourism, most people assume it’s money. There’s a tendency to think that we want high spenders. But, although they do spend more, high spenders bring a different balance of benefits and costs. The five-star hotel they stay in probably has a far higher carbon footprint than a cheaper alternative; they might buy more premium products that have been imported rather than spending money in a way that would drip through the community.
It may be better than the old ‘pack ’em in at any cost’ model, but it still fundamentally fails to address Ben’s primary question: what do you want tourism to do? ‘Destinations need to understand that and get the balance right to achieve what they’re trying to achieve for the local community.’
What are destinations doing?
Despite the doom and gloom of the previous paragraphs, there are destinations that are making great efforts to grapple with these difficult questions to build a better kind of tourism industry – particularly in the wake of the pandemic.
Barcelona – which has had more than its fair share of overtourism in the past – has set up a governance model bringing in numerous stakeholders, including community representatives, to be involved in decision-making. Greendestinations.org has a list of the 100 top destinations that are working hard to balance local needs with tourism to create something mutually beneficial.
Talking to Professor Higham about how New Zealand is reshaping its stance towards tourism as it builds back after coronavirus – having literally shut down its borders for going on eighteen months – is especially inspiring.
‘The post-Covid rebuilding discussion in this country is fascinating,’ he says. ‘We’re focusing on a so-called regenerative tourism paradigm, inspired by indigenous world views and Maori views around nature. We’re reframing the whole thing to dovetail with the government’s commitment to the four capitals.’
That’s right – four capitals. Rather than the government just focusing on GDP – or economic capital – it is now equally invested in how activities contribute to social, cultural and environmental capitals. It’s completely switching up New Zealand’s tourism model:
Under this regenerative tourism paradigm, we’re interested in decarbonising tourism, yes, but we’re also looking at how tourist activities contribute to local communities, how they contribute culturally, how they contribute positively to the environment – and how they contribute economically.
He gives the example of a Maori project that takes visitors to see a breed of little blue penguin that had almost disappeared before the local intervention. Visitors pay NZ$35 for a guided visit to the colony, with pretty much every cent reinvested into helping protect the species. The project hires a scientist to monitor the penguins, engages local volunteers to help out and allows visitors to be part of the conservation project. It hits all of the four capitals: economic, in that tourists pay to visit; cultural, in that it allows the Maori people to educate locals and visitors about the principle of guardianship (the idea that we are responsible for protecting the environment); social, in that it engages local volunteers; and, of course, environmental, in that these adorable penguins have been brought back from the brink of extinction.
It’s such a refreshing approach to tourism – and to how we assess whether businesses and enterprises are ‘successful’ in general. The idea that financial performance should be the only, or even primary, indicator of something’s worth seems wholly outdated at this point in the climate emergency.
New Zealand is a useful case study to use too because of its status as an island nation plopped in a remote location – international tourists have very little choice but to hop on a plane to reach it. But those in government are even talking seriously about whether they really want the same volume of foreign visitors as they had pre-pandemic.
In the summer of 2021, the minister for tourism, Stuart Nash, released a new strategy for the phenomenally popular Milford Sound attraction (a fiord in the south-west of New Zealand’s South Island): he closed the local airport, put a ban on cruise ships sailing in and introduced visitor caps. The previous formula – to attract as many visitors as possible – was not only unsustainable, it was undesirable for the visitors themselves. Most people felt rushed and crowded; there was often a bottleneck of bus tours. The minister declared that that system no longer complied with New Zealand’s vision of regenerative tourism and that a new formula was needed. It presents a radical shift in the thinking behind what tourism should be – in this case, something that provides the visitor with a valuable experience while not overwhelming the precious piece of nature they’ve come to see. Professor Higham says:
When Covid struck and we closed the border, Tourism NZ was told to refocus its energy on the domestic market. Domestic tourism has zero international aviation emissions – so the future of tourism in this country will, by necessity, have to focus on that market.
In comparison, the average international visitor flies 10,000km to reach New Zealand. And the emissions-to-visitor ratio rarely adds up; Europe provides about 18 per cent of total visitors, who produce around 50 per cent of the emissions from aviation. Meanwhile, much-nearer Australia provides half of visitors who only produce around 12 per cent of aviation emissions. It means the latter is a far more sustainable tourism market.
Does that mean they don’t want us Europeans to ever visit again? Not necessarily – but, as Professor Higham describes, they do want us to visit differently:
We’re looking for tourists offering the lowest carbon impact, the highest length of stay, the highest visitor spend, the highest contribution to social and cultural capitals. When it comes to the environment, we want visitors who are committed to offsetting all unavoidable emissions. Currently aviation is unavoidable for international tourists – but we want visitors who are prepared to pay for that. We want tourists to come here with the regenerative paradigm in mind; we want them to think about it every step of the way, to spend more time here, to have a lighter footprint, to have contributed a net positive effect through their visit.
Even the country’s airline is getting on board – Air New Zealand, which claims to be the least unsustainable airline in the world, is committed to offering a zero-carbon domestic network by 2030. In the carrier’s latest report, British environmentalist and writer Sir Jonathon Porritt, who sits on Air New Zealand’s Sustainability Advisory Panel, actually challenged people to fly less and be more mindful, reflecting Dutch airline KLM’s ‘Fly Responsibly’ programme (which amazingly encourages people not to fly: ‘In some cases, railway or other modes of transportation can be more sustainable than flying, especially for short distances such as within Europe. KLM is a supporter of sustainable alternative models of transport for short distances instead of short-haul flights.’).9
What are travel companies doing?
There are many other reasons to stay positive. One of which is that if you book with a business that cares about this stuff – and a fair number of them do – they have already been engaging with the tangle of issues above and are doing their utmost to have a net-positive impact with the trips they run. As well as creating their own comprehensive sustainability strategies as businesses – measuring their carbon footprint, reducing as much as possible, offsetting what’s left – they’re committed to engaging with local stakeholders to ensure they put back more than they take.
Companies like Responsible Travel and Exodus have decided that the idea of being carbon neutral isn’t enough – they’ve both committed to going a step further and offering ‘nature positive’ travel. The aim is to make sure every element of a trip does more good than harm, leaving the environments not just in the same state that we find them, but better off. Responsible Travel’s goal is to be nature positive by 2030. The company is proactively sourcing accommodation and transport options that use renewable energy – and is encouraging holidaymakers to take fewer flights.
Exodus has an aim of being ‘nature net positive’ by 2024. ‘For us, it means ensuring our adventures give far more to nature than they take,’ says Kasia Morgan, the brand’s head of sustainability. ‘We are seeking first to understand the negative impact of our travel, and then to offset that with the three Rs: removing, reducing, restoring.’
Another trend gaining traction is ‘philantourism’ – a model that positions travel as a force for good, with itineraries that focus on using local guides, staying in homestays or properties that employ locals or are owned locally and enjoying experiences that support or contribute to conservation or community projects. ‘It’s a natural evolution of voluntourism, but less of a commitment; you don’t need to do anything after you arrive, other than enjoy the culture, buy local and put your spending money into the tourism economy,’ says Tom Barber of Original Travel, which offers a portfolio of philantourism packages. ‘We have no doubt that this trend will continue to grow once travel restrictions are lifted and people are able to help the worst-affected countries get back on their feet.’
And it doesn’t need to be seen as some worthy, selfless decision either: ‘The destinations we recommend in the Philantourism portfolio are amazing places that just happen to have been dependent on tourism and suffered some unfortunate circumstances such as a natural disaster, or a terrorist attack, which have dented tourist numbers,’ says Tom.
Some companies, like Intrepid and Pura Aventura, are beginning to encourage customers to travel closer to home, offering incredible, one-of-a-kind itineraries to domestic or near/short-haul markets. Intrepid’s teams in destination are all staffed top to bottom by local people, too, ensuring that only local suppliers are used and that money stays in the community. ‘It means we can control who we contract and fully control our supply chain,’ says Zina. Recent initiatives the business is getting involved in include partnering with a programme called MEET, which selects places badly affected by overtourism in Europe and works with the local population to do capacity-building and create eco-tourism in lesser-known locations, training up locals as guides. These are often the experiences tourists rate the most highly, according to Zina – an example of something that benefits the destination while also benefiting the visitor.
Introducing changes that are good for the holidaymaker and the place they’re visiting has also been a focus for Much Better Adventures. They’ve put a cap on group sizes, reducing the maximum number of people from eighteen to fourteen, or twelve for a more intimate experience. ‘You can ruin the place you’re there to enjoy so quickly if you’re not careful,’ says Sam.
Pura Aventura has limits in mind too, separating out travel parties so that destinations aren’t overwhelmed, aiming to spread the economic benefit out without throwing off the balance of the local-to-visitor ratio. Tom says:
It’s a restricted growth model – a Small Giants model. I don’t want to walk in rural Spain and speak to someone from Hove, I want unmediated interactions with the local people and landscapes. We sacrifice that if we’re just on a conveyor belt with a bunch of people who look and sound like us. That’s why we limit the number of people we take at a time – otherwise we bastardise the product, the very thing we claim to be championing.
The company also measures its holidays to get a clear picture of how many local partners are involved in delivering the trip – the idea is to make sure that around fourteen local people or small businesses are profiting directly from any one holiday.
It’s enough to restore your faith in this whole travel business. It’s certainly enough to make me want to go on holiday again. But with responsible companies putting in so much effort, how can we guarantee we’re playing our part as responsible tourists?
How can we do tourism well?
Go for longer
Everyone I speak to is agreed on this one: we need to break the trend for short breaks (at least if we’re not travelling domestically). ‘Go away less for longer’ is one of the cornerstones that will see our travel habits become more sustainable. One reason is that if we adopt the principles of slow travel, we can take our time getting to a destination without flying.
But even if this is impossible and you have to get on a plane, you can at least make it count. Having one long break instead of three or four shorter ones will mean fewer aviation emissions, but it has other benefits too. Spending more time in a destination means, to put it bluntly, you will spend more money in that destination. More than that, you’ll likely spread your money further – once you’ve done the big-hitting attractions that tend to suck in a lot of visitor spend, you’ll gain confidence, get exploring, go further afield, visit places that don’t tend to attract so many people (and their shiny tourist pounds).
‘Don’t go away twice a year for two weeks, go away once for four weeks,’ says Pura Aventura’s Tom. The company has stopped selling any packages fewer than five nights for short haul; the long-haul minimum trip length is two weeks. One benefit of the pandemic is that people seem to be embracing the longer break, in large part because of the new opportunities for remote working. ‘The average length of our trips has gone up by 50 per cent,’ says Tom.
If you’re in a position to speak to your workplace and embrace your inner digital nomad, consider whether you can plan a lengthier holiday, scheduling in days when you’ll be working amid days when you’ll be exploring.
Respect local customs
Part of being a ‘good’ tourist is accepting and embracing the fact that you are somewhere new with its own cultural norms and customs. Intrepid’s Zina explains:
Sometimes it starts with your behaviour when you’re in a destination. It’s about respecting these communities, looking at how you dress, how you communicate. And choosing what activities you participate in: don’t visit orphanages and take pictures of the children; don’t take part in any activity associated with animal cruelty or child labour.
So, as cute as that snap of you riding an elephant or posing with a tiger might look on your Tinder profile, probably best to swipe left.
Pick your destination with care
The world is shrinking … or at least that’s how it feels. Of the 195 countries across the globe, the top twenty most-visited account for almost two-thirds of tourist visits. Put simply, ‘overtourism’ means too many of us in too few destinations. The result? ‘We are destroying the very places we love the most: enraging locals, damaging historical monuments and fighting for photo ops,’ says Original Travel’s Tom. ‘It’s time to trade in Instagram hotspots for offbeat havens and rediscover our curiosity for travel beyond the guidebook or the Facebook feed.’
To that end, the company is promoting ‘undertourism’ – visiting destinations away from the tourist trail. Choosing somewhere lesser known for your holiday (such as swapping Santorini for the Cycladic islands in Greece or exchanging Peru’s Inca Trail for its Lares Trail) can have wide-ranging positive impacts, from being more beneficial to the local economy to ensuring you’re not contributing to the damage suffered by destinations already groaning under the pressure of too much footfall.
Visit popular places in the right way
Does that mean you can never visit Venice? No, according to the experts. But it’s all about how – and, crucially, when – you visit.
Intrepid’s Zina recommends visiting in ‘shoulder season’ (the period between high and low season) or off-season instead of peak season – ‘think Italy in November or March rather than focusing on June to September’ – a recommendation backed up by Original Travel’s Tom. ‘Visit out of high season, when the tourist trade will be more grateful of your investment and you are not contributing to a throng of people,’ he advises.
Overtourism isn’t the simple problem we think it is, according to The Travel Foundation’s Ben – we need to unpack the concept more. ‘Speak to many of these destinations, and they’ll say overtourism is an issue in these particular streets or at this particular attraction, or on these particular dates. So a more sophisticated understanding is needed to negotiate the question of overtourism.’
One of the tactics destinations are using is to try to encourage people to see different types of attractions, and to attract a different type of traveller – for example, in Amsterdam, they want visitors who aren’t coming for the Red Light District, but who are there to appreciate culture further afield (something I’ll be taking on board in the next chapter).
Seeking out undiscovered bits of a city means you won’t be contributing to the strain – but, equally important, you’ll probably have a better experience because of it.
Make long haul a treat
We need to reframe travel as the luxury that it is. It is one of life’s true privileges, not a right – it shouldn’t be something cheap and disposable to be mindlessly consumed and taken for granted.
‘It might be better to see it as a real treat to go on a long-haul trip,’ says Ben. ‘Maybe you allow yourself one short-haul trip a year instead, and long-haul becomes even more occasional.’
Pura Aventura’s Tom agrees that we need to change our perception of travel as something we do heedlessly:
I like to think that people wouldn’t feel the need to jump on a plane to go away for a weekend anymore. If you’re getting on a plane, just think about it – do you need to? How long are you going for? How many times have you been on a plane this year? If we rethink it and give ourselves an allowance in our head – one short-haul flight a year and one long-haul flight every other year, perhaps – what would you do with that, where would you go?
The bottom line
The cost versus the gain that comes from tourism is an intensely complex equation, and one that doesn’t come with easy answers. Clearly, stripping away all tourism in order to stop long-haul flights would cause a huge amount of damage. But the notion of being able to mindlessly fly wherever and whenever we want and using the ‘tourist economy’ as our justification also doesn’t stack up.
If we follow some of the previous advice – really being mindful about where and when we go, what we do when we get there and how our money is spent – our holidays have the potential to do some real good in this complicated world. It’s up to us to step up to the challenge; and, when we do, we might just find we have a much better time because of it.