Sustainable Tourism

Rebecca Hawkins, Victor T.C. Middleton

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN: 9781138146501
• eBook ISBN: 9781136360558
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Hospitality, Travel & Tourism Industry
• Index: Business

Looking ahead to the 21st century, Sustainable Tourism explains the current thinking process that underlies the emerging international principles of more sustainable development in travel and tourism. Using international illustrations it draws on experience and good practice as they are being increasingly applied around the world in the late 1990s. In sharp contrast to the problem analysis approach adopted by so many authors to this subject, this book is focused on the pro-active role the private sector industry can play in partnership with the public sector to achieve solutions through its day-to-day operations and marketing, expecially in product enhancement and quality controls.Case material, contributed by senior professionals in the industry, include:
*Kruger National Park, South Africa *Quicksilver Connections, Barrier Reef, Australia *Edinburgh's Old Town, UK *Ironbridge Gorge Museum, UK *Rutland Water, UK.Industry illustrations are drawn from British Airways, Grecotel, Inter-Continental Hotels and Resorts, the International Federation of Tour Operators, P&O and TUI.Professor Victor Middleton has had some thirty years' international experience of marketing practice covering most of the private and public sectors of travel and tourism. He holds appointments as Visiting Professor at Oxford Brookes University and University of Central Lancashire.Dr Rebecca Hawkins runs her own business specialising in environmental aspects of tourism projects and has undertaken a number of pioneering programmes in this role. She was Deputy Director of the World Travel and Tourism Environment Research Centre at Oxford Brookes University, where she worked with Victor Middleton.

Part One The Context; The Issues; A Global Overview

Environment; Tourism; a Marketing Perspective

DOI: 10.4324/9780080938387-1

… Probably the single greatest concern for every country is the impact tourism will have on its environment

(Naisbitt, 1994: p. 140).

So far, the travel and tourism industry has taken little active part in framing the environmental policies so vital to its own interests

(Economist Intelligence Unit, 1992).

This book records extensive activity and many examples of international good practice in various sectors of travel and tourism since 1992. The judgement expressed in the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) Review nevertheless remains fair comment for the bulk of the world-wide international and domestic tourism industry in the late 1990s. Stimulated by the Earth Summit at Rio (1992) and the associated publication of AGENDA 21, there has been a remarkable outpouring of academic contributions and conferences on the issues of sustainability and many exhortations from governments, NGOs, business leaders and from trade associations. At some destinations, among both large and small commercial businesses, there is now real progress to cite. But to turn around the EIU view will require a much greater level of energy and activity within the industry than is evident in 1997/8. As this book goes to print, there is no consensus on where that energy and activity will come from and it is our object to outline practical ways and means to make progress.

To some extent the environmental inertia in the tourism industry noted in the EIU report reflects a traditional view common in many businesses that tourism is not a smokestack industry of the heavy industrial era, and therefore does not create pollution in the same way as manufacturing and other industries. More importantly it also reflects the structure and business economics of a highly diverse and complex industry comprising many different sectors that typically recognize no community of interest with each other. From airlines to zoos, the sectors of travel and tourism are mutually competitive rather than cooperative (see Chapter 5) and they are only an ‘industry’ in the collective sense that the population of a multi-ethnic town or city can be termed a ‘community’. The component sectors typically recognize no common strategy for environmental or any other purposes, either nationally or locally.

This chapter introduces the three themes that are woven into every chapter of this book. It deals first with global environment issues and the concepts of sustainability which are developed with specific examples in Chapter 2–4. It deals, second, with travel and tourism as a global industry, establishing an overview developed in more detail in Chapters 5 and 6. Third, this chapter introduces the role of marketing as a management attitude and process which the authors believe provides the essential management insight and a practical way forward for achieving sustainability in travel and tourism. The marketing approach is further developed in Chapters 9 and 10 and Part Three of the book.

Global Environmental Issues

The first point to make is that recognition of particular environmental damage resulting from human economic activity is not new. Most people behave now, as they always have, to maximize their personal position by whatever means are most easily to hand and are permissible within social and legal constraints. Small businesses behave in exactly the same way. For example, 2400 years ago, Plato wrote of soil erosion and deforestation caused by overgrazing and tree felling for fuel in the hills of Attica (Chapter 2). The reasons would have been identical to those now driving developing countries to cut down rain forests; those which created the dust bowls in America in the 1930s; and those currently destroying ocean life through overfishing. The difference in the late twentieth century is the environmentally lethal combination of growing population size, universal demand for economic development, and global access to rapid developments in science and technology. For the first time in history economic activity in one part of the world can have an immediate and massive impact on other parts. Acid rain across Europe and overfishing off the coasts of Europe are examples. The fallout and future implications from the Chernobyl nuclear reactor disaster in Russia in 1986 starkly illustrates modern forms of international pollution.

Travel and tourism has developed into a major international ‘industry’ only over the last twenty-five years or so. It has many critics who believe that tourism is a primary cause of environmental pollution and degradation. Such critics, promoted internationally by the British Broadcasting Corporation, for example (The Tourist 1996: p. 13), would have students of tourism and the public believe that ‘tourism packages entire cultures and environments … producing an emergent culture of tourism made from the fragments of the local cultures which tourism destroyed … ‘Tourism has ended up representing the final stages of colonialism and Empire.’

Away from the heady world of sociological myths, however, practical progress toward sustainability depends on world travel and tourism being understood as just one aspect of the total impact of world-wide human economic activity on the environment. We believe it to be an economic activity which is potentially not only more beneficial to the environment than any other major global industry but also more amenable to management action.

Using the estimates calculated for the World Travel & Tourism Council (WTTC), which include allowance for day and staying visits for all purposes as well as investment in tourism infrastructure, tourism already accounts for over 10 per cent of World GDP (see below). It is nevertheless only one of many players in the global issues of economic development and the associated environmental impact. The principal causes of global environmental pollution and degradation, reviewed in Chapter 2, can be briefly summarized as:

• Exponential population growth (2.5 billion in 1950, 5 billion in 1990 to a projected 10 – 12 billion by 2030).
• Subsidized/mechanized/chemical assisted agriculture, or ‘slash and bum’ survival tactics in many of the economically developing countries
• Waste discharges including outflow of toxic wastes and human effluent into rivers and seas.
• Overfishing; mineral extraction industries; industrial production processes and waste.
• Destruction of species consequent on these economic practices.
• Use of non-renewable energy sources for public and private transport – emission of carbon dioxide and other gases affecting air quality and global warning.
• Leisure and holiday pursuits, especially by resident of the economically developed countries of the world.

Leisure tourism, a consequence of the free worlds achievement of greater affluence, most notably demonstrated at present by tourism trends in the Asia-Pacific Region, is adding to overall pollution in many environmentally fragile areas. As the worlds ‘largest industry’ collectively, and the dominant economic sector in parts of the world such as the Caribbean, South Pacific Islands, and Hawaii, it is essential that environmental impacts are recognized, adequately defined and measured, and tackled urgently.

Travel and Tourism – A Composite Market of Global Significance

Although travel and tourism is invariably identified as an ‘industry’ it is best understood as a total market. This market reflects the cumulative demand and consumption patterns of visitors for a very wide range of travel-related products that fall within the internationally adopted definitions of tourism activity (see Chapter 5). In practice, travel and tourism is not one market, however, but literally hundreds of separate international and domestic market segments, mostly with little in common, but usually lumped together for convenience. The total market is serviced by a range of large and small organizations which, depending on definitions used, can now be estimated collectively to represent the worlds ‘largest industry’ (WTTC, 1995).

The main sectors involved in providing services to visitors are noted below for the purpose of introduction and developed in Chapter 5.

Directly involved	Indirectly involved
Airlines	Cafés
Airports	Clubs
Car rental	Discos
Coaches and buses	Casinos
Conference centres	Exhibition centres
Guest houses/pensions	Fast-food outlets
Heritage sitesbuildings	Golf courses
Hotels/motels	Museums and galleries
Holiday cottages	Night clubs
Holiday villages/condominia	Pubs
Railways	Restaurants
Resorts	Retail shops
Theme parks	Sports stadia
Time share	Theatres
Tour operators	Taxis
Travel agencies	University accommodation
Tourist offices (nationaVregiona1)
Sea ferries	Yacht harbours
Visitor attractions	Zoos

In this context, directly involved means provided primarily for the purpose of tourism; indirectly means that visitors are welcomed and may be essential to business prosperity and survival, but typically are not the primary reason for provision. The list above is illustrative of the range of sectors covered, but it does not pretend to be comprehensive.

Treating travel and tourism as a global industry, with a prediction that the industry turnover could double in size in little over a decade, the WTTC estimated that tourism in all its forms accounted in 1995 for:

10.9%	of world total GDP
10.7%	of the global workforce – 212 million jobs (equivalent to 1in every 9 jobs), and
11.4%	of global capital expenditure
11.1%	of total corporate and personal taxes paid
12.6%	of global export earnings.
(Source: WTTC/WEFA, 1995)

Caveat: It needs to be understood that these are not the same figures as those published by the World Tourism Organization, which estimates the direct expenditure of international tourism involving overnight stays. Nor are they comparable with tourism estimates produced by OECD or the European Commission. WTTC estimates are based on satellite accounting procedures and allow for domestic as well as international travel, for day visits, and for capital expenditure on investment in all types of tourism related infrastructure such as airports and aircraft manufacture. With these additional allowances the WTTC percentages are roughly twice the size of traditional estimates based solely on the direct expenditure of visitors.

World-wide economic activity on this massive scale and growth potential has created powerful multinational major business corporations, some with global interests, and there are close similarities in business operations from Acapulco to Zimbabwe. These large businesses are now under increasing pressure to operate in more sustainable ways and many are responding. But uncounted millions of small businesses around the world are also involved and they dominate numerically in all destinations which are not enclosed resorts. It is a major structural problem in tourism that small businesses located at destinations, such as hotels or attractions, and tour operators negotiating down the prices of product components from distant bases in markets of origin, have not needed to accept responsibility individually for what is happening overall to the local environment. There are typically few constraints on them other than appeals to altruism. The owner of a small travel agency in Iowa or of a guesthouse in the Peak District or the Lake District in the UK, struggling to survive, is unlikely to perceive himself as personally responsible for traffic congestion and the erosion of hills and mountains by too many cars and feet. This deep-seated myopia has to be tackled but it is understandable and a major issue in an industry in which small businesses outweigh larger ones, in some countries by up to 1000 : 1. It is not a tenable position for the twenty-first century, however, and strategies for change are obviously needed. Such strategies are not going to emerge spontaneously from an ‘industry’ which in practice is just a convenient label or statistical concept used to embrace a highly disparate combination of thousands of small businesses in many sectors, plus local government and numerous public sector agencies. The numerical dominance of small businesses at most destinations is a key issue for sustainability and addressed later in Chapter 5.

The Attraction of Tourism for Governments

Given the size and growth potential noted above, travel and tourism is a logical target for intensive marketing by all the commercial players within it. I...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Series
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• About the authors
• Foreword
• Preface
• Structure of the book
• Acknowledgements
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Part One The Context; The Issues; A Global Overview
• Part Two Managing Tourism for Sustainability at Specific Destinations
• Part Three The Issues and Cases of Good Management Practice in the Main Sectors of Travel and Tourism
• Part Four International Cases of Good Management Practice for Sustainability
• Appendix I: Select glossary of environment, tourism and marketing terms
• Appendix II: Environmental regulations, market mechanisms and self-regulatory codes of conduct influencing the tourism industry
• Select bibliography
• Index