Posts

Sustainable Tourism and the Triple Bottom Line

Image
So what is sustainable tourism? The UN World Tourism Organization (UNWTO) (www.unwto.org) has defined sustainable tourism as an enterprise that achieves a balance between the environmental, economic, and socio-cultural aspects of tourism development so as to guarantee long-term benefits to recipient communities. According to UNWTO, it should: -  Make optimal use of environmental resources, maintaining essential ecosystems and helping conserve biodiversity Respect socio-cultural authenticity, conserve built and living cultural heritage, and contribute to cross-cultural understanding and tolerance Ensure long-term socio-economic benefits, fairly distributed to all community stakeholders, including stable employment and income-earning opportunities, social services, and poverty alleviation  Sustainable Tourism and the Triple Bottom Line This is commonly called the triple bottom line for sustainable development: environmental, economic, and cultural returns on investme
Post a Comment
Read more

Traditional Tourism Vs. Sustainable Tourism

You know the scene: it is a high season and today the famous historic site is drawing hundreds maybe even thousands of visitors. Tourists trail guides with colourful umbrellas held high. You hear routine explanations about kings, battles, artists, and architecture delivered in English, Japanese, French, Italian, and Arabic. A minister of tourism might look at the scene and smile, “Business is good.” Preservationists might look at the scene and fret, “Can the site withstand all this traffic?” Many residents simply avoid the area, while other more entrepreneurial types rush in with their wares and scams to prey on the crowds. Traditional Tourism Vs. Sustainable Tourism And many affluent and educated visitors take one look at this scene and hasten elsewhere, “Too touristy!” How to handle all this? In 1960, when affordable jetliners helped to launch the modern-day tourism explosion, the world experienced fewer than 70 million international arrivals a year. Since then, humankind has gro
Post a Comment
Read more

Tourism Products

Despite products’ being the central feature of the industry, much confusion washes over the concept. Products like attractions are often confused with the activity and with services, but a product is more than these. A useful definition comes from the Honduran Institute of Tourism, slightly modified by the Public Use Planning effort. Though each industry defines product components according to its own realities, tourism can be thought of as six components aligned in a logical sequence. Tourism Products Attraction. All tourism products begin with an attraction, without which no further discussion is needed. Access. An attraction must have access or else no further discussion is needed. Do note, however, that most often access refers to visitor capacity to arrive. Sometimes access means the opposite. Sometimes an attraction is attractive because it is difficult to get to, such as wilderness areas and for adventure activities. Either way, access is essential to the exploita
Post a Comment
Read more

Attractions in Destinations

An attraction is an object, person, place, or concept that draws people either geographically or through remote electronic means so that they might have experience. The experience can be recreational, spiritual, or otherwise. An attraction is an outstanding example (for whatever criteria used) of a resource which includes all the elements in a particular class. For example, the Monarch Butterfly is an attraction among the 1,000s of Lepidoptera species, the resource class of butterflies and moths, in Mexico. Attractions in Destinations Thousands and thousands of Mayan burial sites exist in Guatemala, yet only very few actually earn the distinction of being an attraction. Ultimately the market — not tourism experts or magazines — decide what is an attraction among its much wider resource class. If people spend time and money to experience a particular resource, then that resource is also an attraction. Traditionally, people divide up attractions between cultural and natural. Cu
Post a Comment
Read more

What is Travel?

People travel for a variety of reasons: to escape, explore, understand, and participate. But at the core of the experience lies the destination - the place that hands something to the traveller to keep forever and share with others. This toolkit helps destinations put in place strategies and programs that will best tell their unique story and become an inviting host for visitors no matter the purpose of their journey. Destination management organizations (DMO) are often the only advocates for the holistic tourism industry in a place, and in this role, they ensure the mitigation of tourism’s negative impacts to the environment and local communities as well as the sharing of opportunities for a vibrant exchange of people. What is Travel? In fact, a DMO may best serve to facilitate dialogue among the private sector, public sector, and other stakeholders that may otherwise never collaborate or understand how their decisions reverberate down a destination’s long tourism value chain. Be
Post a Comment
Read more