Global Leaders of Responsible Tourism Webinar

• Tweet

• Tweet

The audio begins about 30 seconds into the video, and although the host’s voice (Sally Broom, Your Safe Planet) is unfortunately out of sync with presenters in this recording it should be possible to hear most of what was discussed. A full summary of what was said is also available to read below.

You can view the companion chat transcript for this Webinar in a new window to follow what was typed during the event.

Please comment below if you have any suggestions on how to improve this recording?

How Social Media can engage the global community in Responsible Tourism

Ron Mader, Planeta.com (Oaxaca, Mexico)

Ron Mader

Following the postponement of the Belize conference on Responsible Tourism we decided to have an online discussion on various platforms – Flickr, Twitter, YouTube, Facebook.  There is no single owner of ‘Responsible Tourism’, and the best way to start to understand it is to see what everyone else around the world is saying about it.

One of the best highlights of RT week 09 was a heightened awareness of what Twitter can bring us (more than 30 people participated) – archived on Twubs.  ICRT Belize and Canada developed their sites on Facebook.  One of the advantages of having an online dicussion is the ability to have a global conversation prior to a meeting so that when the time does arrive we’re not all just reading at each other.

Hashtags (#rtweek09) are indispensible for using sites like Twitter and Delicious to enable easy searching of discussions.  Any conference that does not have a hashtag or a back channel on Twitter does not have a proper understanding of how to engage its participants.  If we want to broaden the appeal of responsible tourism and sustainable practices then what we need is a way that we can connect with one and other.

How we need to change our approach to Responsible Tourism

Len Cordiner, CEO – whl.travel (Sydney, Australia)

Len Cordiner

Concerns lie in the fact that Responsible Tourism is basically the industry talking to itself. Hopefully we can broaden the audience over the coming months through these sessions.    The history of Responsible Tourism is a history of top down standards and norms where ‘experts’ in tourism have designed systems and processes that they want industry to follow, whilst there’s nothing wrong with that, the problem is that the main stakeholders, people like travellers and even accommodation/tour providers themselves have been left out of the equation.

We in the industry need to do a much better job of reaching out to a broader stakeholder audience.  A lot of the way responsible tourism product is marketed doesn’t really have a traveller focussed message to it, and that’s fairly typical of the industry as a whole.  We’re not engaging a broad enough spread of stakeholders.  The message needs to be aimed at travellers, engage them and relate them to the local community, cross cultural understanding, sensitivity.  It’s a completely different way of spreading the message to people who care.  This is something that doesn’t come across enough in the industry.  My bugbear is that we need to collectively work towards getting the message out to a much wider audience, not just focussing on certification and compliance but more about embracing a wider audience.

1. How can we can engage travellers better?
2. We need to broaden the stakeholder audience.  There’s a huge movement sitting alongside tourism called the Slow Food movement who are frankly very much in our space but there’s very little overlap.  We need to work with groups like this if we are to bring more travellers onboard.
3. A lot more people with a shared vision need to be collaborating in forums like this.

The new vision for Responsible Tourism is about engaging, enriching and inspiring people, that means taking responsible travel a little more holistically and getting travellers engaged in the process with feeding back to other travellers about the travel experience.

What else needs to change?

Valere Tjolle, Editor – VISON on sustainable tourism (Bath, UK)

Valere Tjolle

Travel business is all about marketing. It’s not about telling travellers how good we are, it’s about telling travellers what we can do for them and I think that’s where we’ve missed a trick sometimes in responsible tourism. This year particularly we face a lot of challenges:

Economy, Environment, Climate, Food, Energy, Water, Culture, Social Interaction, Security, Health.

Responsible Tourism can put itself in a position where it can engage with people. A lot of tourism companies/entities are run with short term issues in mind, many get bigger and bigger then disappear. We need to have a political background to tourism and the sustainability agenda. We aren’t doing enough.

Kenrick Theus, Director – ICRT Belize (Belize)

Kenrick was online for most of the event and was due to present, unfortunately due to audio problems he was unable to participate fully.  Hopefully there will be another chance soon for us to hear from Kenrick.

Question: Is it possible to ask donors and foundations to hold more meetings that include the specialists and the interested public?

Len Cordiner:

Len Cordiner

It’s a hopeless task. I’d like to have better news for you. The other thing that really disturbed me is that the development organisations and also a lot of NGOs are just nowhere near the commercial side of tourism.

Where all the action is, where all the people are booking and doing those sorts of things is not where development organisations sit. They’re very good at pushing learning down to the bottom of the tree but they’re very poor at connecting anything they do to market, so the private sector tends to sit in a very different place to the development sector. I’d really like to see the private sector and the development world get much closer together, and I think there is real work to be done but they speak a different language.

Valere Tjolle:

Valere Tjolle

Development organisations are great as far as developing themselves is concerned. I know that there are funds availble to do different things. Both the IFC and IADB are looking at the situation of hotel footprints in developing countries.

At the end of the day none of the small accommodation providers/tour providers can be looked after by development agencies, however much money they’ve got.  It will only work if the public supports it and the public can only support it by spending their money, and the public will only spend their money (not because you say it’s green, it’s responsible, it’s fantastic, it’s wonderful) if they think they’re going to get a good deal, and I think we really need to get back to that.

I’ve identified all these challenges this year but all of them can be got over if we engage with our clients. They are our only support ultimately. If we have a proper engagement with our customers, make sure that our marketing’s done properly and thoughtfully we’ll get the business.

Further information:

• Much of the information regarding RT Week 09 and Responsible Tourism generally can be found on Planeta.  VISION on Sustainable Tourism is also another great resource for industry news.
• What are your comments and thoughts on any of the points raised here, or on how we can move forward with more of these sessions?  There are also discussions taking place on the whl.travel blog.