Indigenous tourism’s interest-action disparity reflects sustainable tourism’s ‘say-do gap’
Indigenous community-led tourism has enormous potential as travellers’ expectations evolve, according to Alastair Naughton. Perhaps the biggest challenge now is turning interest in indigenous tourism experiences into investment and bookings.
It’s a “Good Tourism” Insight. (You too can write a “GT” Insight.)
The traditional tourism model is no longer sustainable. Indeed, it never was.
The last three years have brought that reality into stark relief.
Ideally tourism should be rebuilt from the bottom up.
When tourists visit remote destinations that are home to indigenous populations, it is especially important that these groups are central to the process at every step.
Where this is happening, indigenous tourism is highly successful.
Offbeat Tracks, based in India, for example, is a travel company that offers only responsible travel options that fully involve local people (as far as I can tell).
The social enterprise Red Rocks Rwanda and its affiliated NGO Red Rocks Initiative for Sustainable Development promote the same in Rwanda.
Great examples aside, more could and must be done to give this model traction.
A war on two fronts: Survival and sustainability
The COVID pandemic decimated the tourism industry worldwide.
OECD statistics speak for themselves:
- An estimated 174 million jobs lost in 2020, and
- 80% drop in tourism in 2020 compared to 2019 (which is eight times the drop in tourism compared to 2009 during the financial crash).
By comparison, the level of unemployment or underemployment for the entire European Union was 27.5 million in May 2022.
As the service providers who survived started to bounce back, it was widely recognised that the status quo ante was no longer sustainable; that it was time to find a completely different, more holistic model.
The industry was (and remains) left with two seemingly conflicting goals — to get back to break-even (and then profitability) quickly, and to be more sustainable — that are, on closer examination, mutually complementary … continue reading this “Good Tourism” Insight at The “Good Tourism” Blog.
