Category Archives: Findings

A Revealing Ocean View of Tourism

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A “High Level” international Ocean Panel has come out with a blunt change-your-ways-or-else report aimed at the customary models for coastal and marine tourism. Norwegian journalist and consultant-participant Arild Molstad sums up the content and opines about its implications for any destination with a port and a coast.

The Mediterranean Sea is more vulnerable even than open ocean due to its confined geography. Photo: Arild Molstad

A powerful call for regenerative tourism on coastal destinations

“The very thing that draws people to coastal and marine destinations continues to be threatened by tourism itself. The unprecedented pause in global tourism has provided a unique opportunity to reassess and reset.” So states a recent report on international coastal zones – Opportunities for Transforming Coastal and Marine Tourism.* Co-authored by the 17 nations** of the High Level Panel for a Sustainable Ocean Economy (Ocean Panel), the tourism report has indeed done some reassessing, with observations and recommendations relevant for coastal destinations everywhere.

The report doesn’t mince words, calling “the current model of coastal and marine tourism … inherently unsustainable, characterised by high levels of economic leakage, seasonality and vulnerability.” Don’t be misled by the abundance of marine references. The tourism report is not a message in a bottle from the swirling Garbage Patch somewhere out there in the Pacific.

Coral reefs and one of the longest coastlines in the world make the Philippine marine environment rich in biodiversity – a draw for marine tourism crucial to the economy. [Photo courtesy of Arild Molstad]

Marine and coastal tourism represents approximately 50% of the total sector globally, including infrastructure, impact, visitation, and spending.

Considering that magnitude, the report should be seen as much more than a critical view from somebody just “…sittin’ at the dock of the bay/ watchin’ the tide roll away,” as Otis Redding sang.

Background

As a seafaring nation with one of the longest coastlines in the world, it fell to Norway to take the initiative in launching a fast-track action plan to safeguard the oceans from escalating pollution, accelerating climate change, and rapid loss of biodiversity.

Three years ago Norway’s government invited 13 countries to form a multi-sector ‘coastal coalition’ to spearhead and embrace a more sustainable, holistic approach to industries such as fishing, shipping, food production and finance. Marine-related tourism was also an obvious choice for this list: By 2030, according to the report, coastal and marine tourism will become the largest ocean economic sector.

The idea of the Ocean Panel was conceived in 2017 in a meeting between the former president of the World Resources Institute, Andrew Steer, and Norway’s Minister for Climate and Environment, Vidar Helgesen. Present at the conference was John Kerry, who has since been a strong supporter of the initiative, which was initially financed by Norway.

Headed by a “High Panel” of professionals, and with the World Resources Institute as a secretariat, the Ocean Panel subsequently brought in many tourism experts, including me. In 2019 we were all looking forward to going to work in brainstorming and problem-solving sessions on all continents. That didn’t happen.

What happened was Covid-19, triggering instead innumerable digital encounters over two years across all time zones. Confronted by the implosion of coastal tourism everywhere – we realized that the otherwise catastrophic coronavirus crisis came with some silver linings.

It would give us time to:

a) identify and diagnose structural weaknesses in the traditional tourism industry,
b) find ways to address the acute needs of nearly one million tourism workers whose future livelihoods were jeopardized, and
c) build a more sustainable tourism model for ports, bays, beaches, fjords, inlets, archipelagos, islands and coastal communities, where counting visitors as a prime measure of success must end.

John Kerry. [Photo courtesy United Nations]

In April 2022, international delegates from the private and public sectors, plus youth leaders and philanthropic organizations announced major commitments worth more than $16 billion to protect ocean health at an ocean conference in the Pacific island nation of Palau, a member of the Ocean Panel initiative. In his keynote speech, John Kerry, now the U.S. special presidential envoy for climate, told the audience: ‘We’re starting now finally to act with the urgency that the moment demands, even as we understand that we have to accelerate even more.’

 

A circuit breaker

The report launched at the Ocean Summit this summer put it this way: “The global pandemic… offered a circuit breaker to reflect on traditional forms of coastal and marine tourism that are no longer sustainable or viable.” The pandemic, the report stated, became a “unique and timely opportunity for bold action” that gave the industry and the public sector “a chance to change and reshape the sector” through political leadership.

I find much of the wording in the report (digesting the 12-page Executive summary is a good start) to be remarkably clear and topical, hitting most of the marks where global tourism so far has failed. In particular I welcome the use of the term regenerative, as it goes beyond ‘sustainability’ with its emphasis on ‘rebuilding and restoring damaged or depleted ecosystems, communities and traditions.’

A regenerative approach

The regenerative concept makes an important link to the threat that has been called ‘the twin brother of climate change’ – the speeding decline of global biodiversity. It also makes reference to traditions and community values, significant when many of the 50-plus marine World Heritage sites are besieged by mass tourism.

The report strongly encourages a more systemic, holistic approach to tourism in places where water meets land, from ports to all types of coastal shorelines. This struck me: Isn’t it about time that we begin to view ports as portals, that is, entry points where marine and terrestrial ecosystems, e.g. National Parks and Marine Protected Areas, communicate and connect – sustainably as well as synergistically?

When the report makes an important reference to the tourism industry’s “invisible burden” I am reminded how many of the sharpest industry experts and advisors have been at work. Their thinking appears in such summarizing assertions such as “… the economic gains from tourism are not distributed equally, with large foreign companies and tour operators typically receiving disproportional benefits. When comparing the true socio-economic impacts, the costs of attracting and retaining mass tourism arrivals often outweigh the benefits.”

A transformation needed

The report calls for a transformation of tourism. Existing financial and incentive structures will need to be revised, requiring innovative financial mechanisms to ensure a just transition. The economic damage of the pandemic to tourism-dependent destinations calls for new funding packages, fiscal policies, and non-traditional lending arrangements. As examples, the report describes user and entry fees, conservation and environment taxes, concession fees, plus the use of “blue bonds” and conservation trust funds, lease arrangements and protected area charges.  Such a paradigm shift will require investments and monetary stimuli.

What the High Panel calls the “the underutilisation of tourist fees” can represent a vast source of revenue for conservation initiatives to strengthen resource management and help raise revenues locally.

Large cruise ships such as these in St. Maarten will face more restrictions in countries such as Norway, which plans to protect its fjord ecosystems from megaship pollution. [Photo: Jonathan Tourtellot]

One would be to “undertake value chain analysis to align strategies and interventions to eliminate leakage and boost local economic prosperity” – proposed in various EU regions. This is a hot topic in a country such as Norway, where polluting cruise vessels will likely no longer be welcome in the fjords by 2026. An intervention of this magnitude will clearly pose a challenge for a cruise industry facing turbulent times, with frozen assets and an increasingly debated Big Cruise business model. This is prompting urgent demands from fragile Caribbean and Mediterranean destinations “to re-think and re-imagine tourism.”

New series of work sessions planned

In Norway, the nation’s 2017 “Road Map to Sustainable Tourism” will likely be revised and updated. Since the nation remains a major financing source for the Ocean Panel, its prime minister will co-lead upcoming High Panel meetings.

Will the report trigger enough courage and resources to transform a tourism industry ripe for reform? Or will “build back better” recede into merely “build back” – the way Otis Redding’s song ends: “Nothin’s gonna change/ everything still remains the same”?

If so, an enormous amount of wisdom and energy has been misspent.

*Full title: “Opportunities for Transforming Coastal and Marine Tourism” Towards Sustainability, Regeneration and Resilience.] An excellent 12-page Executive Summary report is available, giving an overview of the core messages in 132 pages report (which would have benefited greatly from a more thoughtful selection of photos, with captions, to illustrate and underscore more of the cases covered in the main text).  The report is accompanied by a collection of Expert Perspectives on how to enact the shift to a sustainable, more equitable tourism sector, across the value chain. 

**This year the US, France and the UK came on board, joining Norway, Australia, Ghana, Canada, Chile, Fiji, Mexico, Indonesia, Palau, Kenya, Namibia, Japan, Portugal, Jamaica. All 17 nations met this June in Portugal at the pandemic-postponed (twice) Ocean Summit. 

Arild Molstad is the author of several acclaimed books, hundreds of articles. He is also a photographer, film-maker, and an internationally recognized conservation and tourism expert.

Resources for Tourism Recovery

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The DSC’s Cultural Heritage Editor, Lucy Matthews, has been scouring the Internet for information that might help destinations plan a reboot as the pandemic recedes. Here’s what she found – from WTTC, UNWTO, and, interestingly, the U.S. state of Maryland.

Better Stewardship – a Pandemic Recovery Trend

It’s no trade secret that the tourism industry has been hit hard by the pandemic. According to the World Travel & Tourism Council’s (WTTC) Travel & Tourism: Economic Impact 2021 report, the industry experienced a dramatic decline from a total GDP contribution of 10.4% in 2019 to 5.5% in 2020, and job numbers fell from 334 million (2019) to 272 million (2020).

The WTTC report from September 2020, “To Recovery & Beyond: The Future of Travel & Tourism in the Wake of COVID-19,” suggests a variety of trends for the industry’s recovery, including that “the world has been re-invigorated to tackle social, environmental, and institutional sustainability” and the moment is right for the tourism industry to “enact meaningful changes that will transform the world and make a lasting difference for future generations.”

The report highlights the importance of destination preparedness, and that “local tourism councils” can “help boost destination stewardship as local communities drive action for preservation of cultural and natural assets.”

This was also a theme coming out of the late September 2020 virtual discussion, “Culture, Tourism and COVID-19: Recovery, Resiliency and Rejuvenation,” arranged by UNESCO with IUCN, ICOMOS, and ICCROM, with speakers advocating “a shift towards tourism that regenerates destinations and provides economic, social and environmental benefits.”

These statements echo that this moment could be what the Destination Stewardship Center’s (DSC) Jonathan Tourtellot called “A Destination Management Opportunity.” A moment to take stock of what tourism has been and what we would like it to be in the future.

In March 2021, the Future of Tourism Coalition (comprising the Center for Responsible Travel (CREST), DSC, Green Destinations, Sustainable Travel International, Tourism Cares, and the Travel Foundation) hosted the opening webinar of its “Reset Tourism” series with a session led by CREST and DSC on “Destination Stewardship and Stakeholder Engagement.” (See the story in the Spring 2021 issue of the Destination Stewardship Report). The presentation advocates for looking holistically at destinations for better tourism management. The management approach, recommendations from the session about how to set up a destination stewardship council, and on-the-ground expertise from an esteemed panel of destination representatives provide a regenerative blueprint for destinations coming out of the pandemic. Other webinars in the series led by other Coalition organizations include “Measuring Tourism’s Impacts and Success,” and “Local and Sustainable Supply Chains.” (See accompanying story in this issue of the Destination Stewardship Report).

Another good resource is “How Can Destinations Resume Tourism After the Pandemic, While Ensuring Sustainability?” from The Place Brand Observer in partnership with the Sustainability Leaders Project and a variety of contributors from August 2020. Florian Kaefer, editor of The Place Brand Observer, wrote about the white paper in “After Covid, 10 Ways for Destinations To Manage Tourism Better” in DSC’s Autumn 2020 Destination Stewardship Report. The paper looks not only at pandemic recovery but also at how destinations can be “resilient in the face of future crises.” Adding that “this is the moment where success will depend on courage, and the power of imagination of a ‘different’ destination – one with greater local participation, and a smaller ecological footprint.”

Destination stewardship should be a key element of tourism’s recovery, with potential to maximize the benefits for all, from the tourists to the communities, environment, heritage, industry, and governments. The pandemic has impacted us all – let’s ensure that the solutions do too.

Recovery Resources

A variety of resources that can help track the industry’s progress.

WTTC Resources

The World Travel & Tourism Council (WTTC) has developed sector-specific protocols for travel safety and recovery (such as for hospitality, outdoor shopping, aviation, tour operators, and more). These protocols, while from May 2020, still provide helpful avenues to navigate resiliency for the sector from the pandemic and future crises.

WTTC also developed a Safe Travels Stamp for public and private sector stakeholders that are reaching WTTC’s global health and safety standards. The idea is that the stamp provides a sort of seal of approval of health measures being taken, thus providing peace of mind for the traveler. The WTTC website has a map of what destinations have received the stamp, delineated by country or sub region.

The WTTC Travel Demand Recovery Dashboard shows both a regional and segment overview of Google travel searches, as well as movement and booking behaviors. There are also downloadable global and regional recovery scenarios from November 2020.

There is also information about Government COVID-19 Policies and the G20 Recovery Plan.

The One in 330 Million initiative shares the stories of the people involved in the tourism industry, including the impacts of the pandemic on their livelihoods.

UNWTO Resources

The UNWTO Tourism Data Dashboard includes:

  • UNWTO/IATA Destination Tracker. Search by country to see Covid percent positivity rates, vaccination rates, air travel and country restrictions, and more.
  • UNWTO Tourism Recovery Tracker. See information overall, by region, destination etc., in terms of tourism arrivals, travel restrictions, accommodation, air travel, and more.
  • International Tourism and COVID-19. See pandemic impacts on tourism on a global, regional, or country scale, including arrivals, monthly and YTD change, vulnerability of destination, and impact assessment.

Additional resources

Particularly for US-related resources, I recommend also taking a look at the Maryland Office of Tourism Development’s Covid-19 Travel and Tourism Research Resources. When I started searching for industry recovery resources, I found Maryland’s list to be relatively robust from an American perspective, and some resources may also be useful for other markets. A selection:

What other tourism resources have you found useful for pandemic recovery? Leave a comment below.

Overtourism, Airbnb, and the Numbers Problem

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[Above: Tourists pack a walkway at China’s Hongcun Village, a World Heritage site. Photo: Jonathan Tourtellot]

Airbnb Addresses Overtourism

My Foreword to Airbnb’s recently-released report, Healthy Travel and Healthy Destinations (download it here) sets up some basic issues of destination stewardship and the problem of overtourism. The balance of the report makes Airbnb’s case for its support of sustainable tourism over mass tourism, which you can judge for yourself.

While nonresident units on home-sharing platforms obviously contribute to overtourism disruption in popular city centers, the balance of Airbnb’s effects on destinations may equal or surpass the benefits of conventional tourism, all while dispersing a portion of visitor traffic. Full reveal: Airbnb paid me for the Foreword, but they let me write it the way I wanted, and—barring new information—I stand by its content.

Part of Airbnb’s conundrum stems from its swift evolution, morphing from a true home-sharing platform—i.e., a room in a home or in the mother-in-law unit next door—into one that also lists hosts’ often-empty vacation units and eventually those of commercial “hosts” who buy up and rent out multiple units dedicated only for tourists—not home sharing at all. Each of these rental patterns can have very different impacts on the destination.

Airbnb has at least demonstrated a (sometimes reluctant) willingness to work with communities in coping with overtourism. Meanwhile, other players keep trying to pack in the crowds like commuters on the Tokyo underground. Most concerning are the government and tourist authorities that continue to call for ever more tourist arrivals, as noted in our GWU/Travel Massive webinar held in February.

Last year I addressed overtourism in National Geographic Voices. That platform may be soon replaced, so I repeat the Nat Geo post here, as it ran on 29 October 2017:

Tourism has a numbers problem.

The world’s population explosion has finally arrived. It has manifested itself not in global waves of famine as was feared half a century ago, but in waves of Airbuses, tour buses, and minibuses. Tourists by the millions.

This population explosion overwhelms St Mark’s Square in Venice. It pushes through the streets of Barcelona, angering residents. It forms hours-long queues in China for the cable cars up Mount Huangshan and fills all the lanes in the World Heritage Village of Hongcun. It paves the beaches of the Mediterranean in simmering northern European flesh. In the Louvre it blocks your view of the Mona Lisa with forests of smartphones held high in selfie mode. It pushes through the ruins of Tulum in Mexico with busloads of Spaniards, Americans, Chinese. It even creates traffic jams on the climbing routes up Mount Everest.

It has spawned a new word: Overtourism. Too many tourists.

Taking selfies with the Mona Lisa. Photo: Krista Rossow

Overtourism has been manifesting itself for over two decades in popular countries like Spain, Italy, and France. But somehow the population pressure hit the red zone this year. Says one colleague, “It’s the topic du jour. The phrase is on the lips of every travel expert, every pseudo-expert, and every travel industry opportunist.”

“Too many tourists!”

No surprise. From Barcelona to Venice, from Reykjavik to Santorini, residents have raised a chorus of protest: “TOO MANY TOURISTS!” Plenty of visitors chime in: Not what we came for. How can a visitor experience the delights of a foreign city if the streets are packed with thousands—yes, thousands—of cruise-ship passengers and lined with global franchises to cater to them? Serious travelers increasingly dismiss such places—“too touristy.”

Pressed beyond tolerable limits, some destinations are fighting back. Dubrovnik is instituting severe caps on cruise passengers, as is Santorini. Italy’s Cinque Terre is ready to impose quotas on people hiking between the five picturesque villages. The Seychelles wants to limit hotel sizes to protect their reputation as an Indian Ocean paradise.

Yet Some Insist: More Is Better

Despite all this backlash, development bankers, government planners, and tourism ministers—many of them political appointees with little knowledge of sustainable tourism principles—still continue to press for yet more tourists. And boast about it.

Just see what I discovered as I was getting ready for this year’s [2017] international conference of the Global Sustainable Tourism Council (GSTC). It convened a few weeks ago in the cool air of one of the most sparsely populated places on the planet: Chile’s northern Patagonia region of Aysén. Even here, overtourism was the hot-button topic.

Tourists in still-uncrowded (sometimes) Patagonia. Photo: Jonathan Tourtellot

GSTC’s purpose is to work with governments and companies to help protect both the planet and the delights of travel—a delicate balancing act. In addition to countering such threats as climate change, pollution, habitat loss, and overdevelopment, GSTC now confronts the predictable but long-disregarded threat posed by tourism itself.

I moderated the panel addressing overtourism. To prepare for it, I went online and did a search. It took only 30 minutes to find these statements, all published in the previous week:

  • “Jamaica is on target to hit its record goal of 4.2 million visitors for 2017.”
  • “For 2017, Bali’s foreign arrivals target is an ambitious 6 million.”
  • Peru hopes to “double tourism arrivals to 7 million by 2021.”
  • Vietnam “has set the target of attracting 13 million-15 million foreign visitors…year-on-year growth of 30-50 percent.”
  • Sharjah, U.A.E.: “Draw 10 million visitors a year by 2021.”
  • Maldives: “Tourist arrivals have crossed the one million milestone, on course to reach an ambitious target of 1.5 million.”

And those announcements were issued in just one week!

Quantity, not Quality

For government officials it’s easy to set goals by using the convenient turnstile of a passport check to count international arrivals. It’s more trouble and expense to collect more significant data: How long did visitors stay? What did they do? How much did they spend, on what, and who got the money? How did their presence affect local society, culture, and environment? Or the question rarely asked: How many is too many?

Tourists explore atop Ireland’s Cliffs of Moher. The geopark wants fewer tourists; the county wants more. Photo: Jonathan Tourtellot

Simply striving for more arrivals leads to tourism quantity over quality. That doesn’t seem to bother national leaders who favor a simplistic “more is better” approach to economics, especially if guided by the World Economic Forum’s very informative but flawed Travel and Tourism Competitiveness Report, which among other oddities measures a country’s cultural wealth by number of stadium seats, as noted in a previous post.

Officials and businesses seeking only to boost tourist quantity can undermine the stewards who try to protect destination quality. An official at western Ireland’s popular Cliffs of Moher, for instance, told me that the number of coach tours was getting out of hand, raising fears that the clifftops would gain a reputation as an overcrowded tourist trap. So geopark management wants to raise the fees for buses, but the County Clare government has so far refused. It might hurt their tourist arrivals target.

Could overcrowding be a problem even down here near empty Patagonia? Yes, it could. On my panel, Hernan Mladinic, Executive Director of the Fundación Pumalín, described traffic jams and competition for camping sites in Patagonia’s great national parks. In only three years, camping demand has more than doubled in Chile’s new Pumalín Park. This problem can at least be solved, as there’s room for more campsites.

Tour buses at the Perito Moreno Glacier, Los Glaciares National Park, Argentine Patagonia. Photo: Jonathan Tourtellot

So the overtourism situation is far from hopeless.  An art-history buff we know spent a week last summer visiting crowd-plagued Florence. She avoided the tourist routes, hit the museums at slack times, stayed in a charming neighborhood across the river, and had a great time. Fine, but overtourism is a bullet one should not have to dodge. Its negative impacts on Florence and many Florentines are undeniable.

Population + Technology + Money = Boom!

The tourism explosion is due not just to more people, but more people with money. A significant portion of the Earth’s population has grown more affluent—think India, China, Brazil, among many others—and travel technology from jumbo jets to the sharing economy has grown cheaper, bigger, and faster. The result: According to figures from the United Nations World Tourism Organization, international tourism has grown 40 fold since commercial jet traffic began some six decades ago. The places that these people visit, however—the museums, the archaeological ruins, the natural attractions, the narrow medieval streets of historic cities—are still the same physical size. These cups runneth over, as I somewhat clumsily demonstrated for the Reinvent project (3:00 on the video) earlier this year.

That means that if there were, say, five people admiring a painting at a given time back in 1960, there are 200 trying to see it today. Unpleasant, and ultimately unsustainable. Last year saw more than 1.2 billion international arrivals. By 2050, according to David Scowsill, former head of the World Travel and Tourism Council (WTTC), some 3 billion people will be affluent enough to make such trips.

Overtourism Has Come to My Beloved Iceland.

Since my first visit in the 1970s, I’ve loved Iceland for its wide views, its unique culture, its geological wonders, and, well, its freedom from crowds. The saddest compliment I ever received was from a long-time friend in Reykjavik, where tourists now seem to rule the downtown throughout summer. “Everything that you said would happen,” she told me, “has happened.” She was wrong actually; while I had warned of the changes that high-volume tourism could bring to Iceland, I never imaged just how much volume. According to a Skift report, almost half a million tourists visited Iceland in 2010, far exceeding the national population of 330,000. That was then. Now quintuple it: Some 2.5 million tourists are expected to have visited this year.

Tourists visit Skógafoss waterfall in southern Iceland. Photo: Jonathan Tourtellot

Her husband, a former captain with Icelandair, tried to talk his old employer into providing passage for me to visit and speak about the value of improving the quality of tourism rather than boosting the quantity. He didn’t get far. The response was along the lines of “Are you crazy? You want us to bring a guy here to argue for fewer tourists?” Airlines like to add more planes and fill more seats.

Thus the tourism industry is both victim and vector of overtourism. Even as some hotels and tour operators seek ways to avoid crowding, other elements of the industry that benefit from high volume—cruise ships, airlines, taxi services—continue to encourage tourism quantity over quality. That dissuades the true travelers, who don’t clog the streets for a couple of hours just to take some selfies, buy a T-shirt made in some other country, and then go back to the ship for dinner.

Solutions, or stop-gaps?

The good news, if long overdue, is that tourism media now brim with opinions on how to deal with overtourism.

Pollock is on to something. Most of those overtourism recommendations merely mitigate the problem. The population explosion has already happened. The term “overtourism” may lose its cachet from overuse, but the problem is here for generations. It cannot be solved until world leaders face a simple geometric reality:

It is impossible to pack infinitely growing
numbers of tourists into finite spaces.

So what to do? A world of more than 7 billion people requires rethinking tourism, namely:

  1. Change the prevailing paradigm: More tourism is not necessarily better. Better tourism is better.
  2. Governments and industry should therefore abolish the practice of setting tourism goals based only on arrivals.
  3. Instead, incentivize longer stays and discourage hit-and-run, selfie-stick tourism.
  4. To help do that, destination stakeholders should form stewardship councils that help government and industry plan according to limits of acceptable change.

Who’s a stakeholder? You are.

If you are a thoughtful traveler, voice your opinion and vote with your wallet. Spend your money on destinations that take care of themselves, and on businesses that help them do it.

If you are a resident, team up with your neighbors and civic groups to take charge of how tourism is managed there. If you don’t, someone else will. With their own interests in mind, not yours.

That’s how overtourism gets started.

——————-

For more on overtourism, watch my February 2018 webinar, conducted in cooperation with the George Washington University and Travel Massive.

 

A First: 440 Destinations Rated by Nat Geo Experts Compiled in One Place

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[Above: Portion of the 2006 Traveler cover featuring the stewardship survey of 94 World Heritage destinations. Courtesy, National Geographic Traveler.]
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Landmark Research There has been nothing like them, before or since. For seven years, from 2004 to 2010, I was privileged to oversee National Geographic’s  Destination Scorecard surveys of experts’ opinions on stewardship for hundreds of places around the world. We published the numerical scores annually as a cover story in National Geographic Traveler.
Now, for the first time, we at the have compiled in our Destination Watch section a master list of most of the destinations surveyed by Nat Geo since 2006. For ease of understanding, we’ve translated the numerical scores into letter grades for 440 places, listed on these five pages:

Those links show destinations by grade. Download this pdf to see all 440 destinations and grades listed by country.

The surveys polled a panel of hundreds of experts on destinations that they knew well. For each place, we asked these panelists to consider six stewardship criteria: environment, built heritage, social/cultural impacts, aesthetics, tourism management, and overall trend. After exchanging comments anonymously, they then rated each destination on a scale from 0 to 10. We calculated the averages and published the results.

You can read more About the Surveys and their methodology. Basically, it was a “wisdom of crowds” approach—in this case, a very knowledgeable crowd. It proved remarkably consistent. In our first survey, conducted in 2003-4 with fewer than 200 panelists, the Norwegian Fjords won the top place, and the Costa del Sol came in with the lowest score. After a five-year interval, we surveyed many of the same destinations again, this time with a very different panel of over 400 experts. Those 2009 results? Norwegian fjords best, Costa del Sol worst.

Please Join In

Some of these grades need updating, and we will be soliciting your opinions on whether they should go up, down, or stay the same.

As administrator of the surveys, I did not rate any destinations myself. In some cases I thought the consensus was way off, but more often than not it would turn out that the experts knew some things that I didn’t. In few cases, I still disagree! More important, new developments in some places suggest a new grade. I’ll be offering a few comments in those cases at the bottom of each list. You can, too.

We plan to start featuring individual destinations from month to month and asking your opinions about them. If there’s a particular destination whose condition interests or concerns you, please contact us.

 

 

Beach & Cruise Tourism: Volume vs. Value

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[Above: Three cruise ships at the Philipsburg pier in St. Martin. Photo: Jonathan Tourtellot]

July Symposium in Grenada to Address Worldwide Coastal Tourism Overload

Tourism based on sun, sand, and sea is the largest, fastest growing, and most lucrative sector of the tourism industry. Globally, 12 of the 15 top international destinations – including Mexico, France and the United States — are countries with coastlines. In the U.S., three coastal states (New York, Florida and California) host nearly three quarters (74%) of the total number of overseas visitors to the country. And Mexico has over 2,000 hotels along its Pacific, Gulf, and Caribbean coastlines.

The growth and expansion of cruise tourism has been even more dramatic, with the number and size of ships, passengers, ports of call, and profits all on the rise. Cruise tourism is dominated by three main cruise lines – Royal Caribbean, Carnival, and Star/Norwegian Cruise Lines – which control 90% of the North American market. From 1970 to 2012, the cruise industry grew 40-fold, from 500,000 in 1970 and 4 million in 1990, to 20 million in 2012. Ship size increased from 500 – 800 passengers in the 1970s to today’s “floating cities”, the largest of which accommodates over 7,000 passengers and crew.

Cruise and all-inclusive coastal resorts are expected to remain popular, as increasingly urbanized travelers in the Americas, Europe, and Asia seek sun and sea combined with easy-to-book, fixed-price, and standardized holiday packages. Cruise and resort bookings have become the bread-and-butter business for tour operators and travel agents. And tourism-dependent countries, which typically measure success by increased tourist arrivals, have put out the welcome mat for big box coastal resorts and mega-cruise ships.

Environmental and Social Impacts

The expansion of coastal and marine tourism has, however, led to a range of serious environmental and social problems. These, in turn, have spawned increasing resistance from coastal communities and environmental groups, alarmed by destruction of mangroves and coral reefs, competition for fresh water and other scarce resources, rising real estate prices, and displacement of local fishing and farming communities.

High-volume, low-margin beach tourism in Spain. Photo: Jonathan Tourtellot

High-volume, low-margin beach tourism in Spain. Photo: Jonathan Tourtellot

In April 2013, for instance, a group of eleven conservation organizations petitioned Mexico’s Commission for Environmental Cooperation to stop development of four massive tourism resort projects around the Gulf of California. They charge that the projects violate Mexico’s environmental laws and threaten unique coral reefs and mangrove ecosystems as well as endangered species of whales, sharks and many types of migratory birds. And currently, in Haiti, the extremely poor residents on the tiny island of Ile-a-Vache are protesting government moves to expropriate their land to make way for high-end resort development.

Cruise ships have also caused a range of environmental problems. Beginning in the late 1980s, garbage dumped by cruise ships was washing up on Florida beaches and the Gulf of Mexico coastlines. Cruise lines have faced a steady stream of fines for illegal dumping. Between 1998 and 2002, for instance, the cruise lines paid over $50 million in fines. A combination of new regulations, NGO campaigns, and bad press has led cruise companies to take series of steps to clean up their practices – and their image. However, by the new millennium, civic activism had expanded to also include concerns about cruise ship impacts on destinations, both ports of call and home ports. Public protests have percolated in destinations as diverse as Hawaii, Alaska, Key West, Charleston, S.C. in the U.S.; Venice, Italy; Cozumel, Mexico, and Bermuda in the Caribbean.

The Economics of Cruise and All-Inclusive Resort Tourism

The economic model of cruise lines and all-inclusive resorts is largely the same — to keep tourist spending concentrated within the business – and this, in turn, has negative consequences for the economies of coastal destinations.

The cruise sector’s economic success is facilitated by a legal loophole: the “flag of convenience.” The three major cruise lines, while headquartered in Florida and carrying mainly American passengers, have registered their ships offshore, in Liberia in West Africa, Panama, and, the Bahamas. This allows them to circumvent a range of U.S. laws, including minimum wages and tax liabilities as well as safety standards, inspections, and environmental and labor laws.

In addition, on-board spending is an increasingly important part of cruise line income, ranging, according to a UN World Tourism Organization study, to between 25% and 35% of total income.   Cruises have a captive market within ships as well as at ports, with onshore excursions and facilities often owned by subsidiaries of cruise lines. According to another recent study, the average customer spends about $1700 for a cruise, including on ship and on land expenses and the majority of these expenses are captured within the cruise ship.

Fifty percent of cruise tourism takes place in the Caribbean where it goes toe-to-toe with land-based tourism. Both bring about 15 million visitors a year, but, according to the Caribbean Tourism Organization (CTO), land-based, stay over tourists spend 13 times more than cruise passengers ($994 vs. $77). CREST’s studies in Central America (Costa Rica, Honduras, and Belize) found similar disparities, with stay over visitors spending between six and eighteen times more than cruise passengers. These findings from the Caribbean and Central America confirm that stay over tourism is far more beneficial to the local economy than cruise tourism.

CREST has also analyzed the different types of stay over tourists in Costa Rica, comparing those coming to the large coastal resorts versus those coming for ecotourism. Based on airport departure surveys, we found that ecotourists in Costa Rica stay longer – on average, 12 nights in 2012 compared with 9 nights for those staying in coastal resorts – and spend more — $1300 compared with $1079. In addition, ecotourists visit more parts of the country and engage in a wider range of activities. Ecotourism therefore leaves more in the local economy and spreads the economic benefits around the country.

A range of other studies in Tobago, Turkey, Kenya, Canary Islands, and Barbados have found that all-inclusive resorts tend to kill off local restaurants and other businesses located outside the resort, while staff in all-inclusives face less favorable working conditions, including greater levels of stress, considerably less tips, and larger numbers on short term contracts than employees in other types of accommodations.

These findings show that that arrival numbers alone say little about the actual costs and benefits of tourism. The more limited economic benefits of large scale cruise and resort tourism, combined with their often negative environmental and social impacts, demonstrate that tourism planners need to put more emphasis on high value rather than high volume tourism.

Symposium & Sustainability Expo, July 9-11, 2014, in Grenada

St. Georges waterfront, Grenada. Photo: Jonathan Tourtellot

St. Georges waterfront, Grenada. Photo: Jonathan Tourtellot

Many coastal businesses and individuals are taking steps toward high value tourism through environmental, social, and economic innovation. CREST is partnering with the Caribbean Tourism Organization (CTO) and the island of Grenada to present the 3rd Innovators in Coastal Tourism Symposium & Sustainability Expo, July 9-11, 2014, in Grenada. This unique event will bring together 100 to 150 invited ‘green’ experts and practitioners, including real estate developers, operators, investors, and other businesses committed to (or considering) new sustainable models of marine, coastal, and island tourism development. These are the thought leaders who are breaking the mold of cookie-cutter resort development and mass-market cruise ships. In addition to business leaders, a select group of participants will be invited from key government agencies, NGOs, academia, community organizations, and international development organizations. Climate change and the need for responsible development has made these discussions all the more important, and we welcome all with an interest in sustainable coastal tourism to attend. Full updated Symposium details are available at: ctocrestsymposium.com.

This post adapted from my forthcoming book: Selling Sunshine: Coastal and Marine Tourism in the Americas, Island Press, 2015.

Challenging Hit-and-Run Tourism in Cultural Heritage Sites

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Cultural Heritage sites facing Hit-and-Run Tourism need to elaborate targeted strategies in order to balance tourism and heritage conservation, to define limits or find solutions in order to protect natural and cultural heritage and to mitigate negative impacts. In a paper by Engelbert Ruoss and Loredana Alfarè of the Global Regions Initiative, nine heritage sites in South East Europe are studied, including typical Hit-and-Run destinations such as Venice (I), Dubrovnik (HR), Hallstatt (A) and Aquileia (I), allowing four different types of Hit-and-Run sites to be distinguished. Continue reading →

Study Says Scenic Beauty Pays

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Minnesota’s Paul Bunyan Scenic Byway generates $21.6 million for local economy

Minnesota research demonstrates the tourism economic value of scenery and scenic routes, says Max Ashburn of Scenic America. For more such studies, go to Scenic America.

A recent study by the University of Minnesota Tourism Center found that the Paul Bunyan Scenic Byway is a major draw for travelers and has a significant positive impact on the local economy.pbscenicbyway The study found that in 2010 an estimated 23,800 travel parties visited the region specifically because of the byway.  These visitors spent a total of $21.6 million dollars while in the area including $14.6 million on locally produced goods and services.

Of course, Scenic Byways do more than just contribute to the local economy.  They also help preserve and promote the natural, historic and scenic character of a region and are a source of pride for local residents and businesses.MN_PaulBunyan map

The Paul Bunyan Scenic Byway is one of 150 designated roads in the National Scenic Byways Program administered by the U.S. Department of Transportation.

Cruise Numbers Overwhelm Small Ports

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Carnival’s latest crises have relatively little impact on destination quality, but their circumstances do. At this writing, Carnival’s third embarrassing malfunction of the year is underway in St. Martin, where the Carnival Dream is stuck with a bad generator. The company has to fly some 3,600 passengers home. (Picture how many aircraft that involves.)

Three cruise ships at the Philipsburg pier in St. Martin. Photo: Jonathan Tourtellot

Three cruise ships unload at the Philipsburg pier in St. Martin. Photo: Jonathan Tourtellot

It’s those four-digit passenger counts that can turn cruise ships into the strip mines of tourism when it comes to their impacts on small port cities. Continue reading →

Ski Industry Snow-Blind to Climate Change?

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Roger Millar of Smart Growth America relays this news report published in the Aspen Times: A University of New Hampshire study shows two low-snow years can cost ski destinations as much as a billion dollars. The lower the resort’s elevation or latitude, the shorter could be its lifespan.

Bizarrely, the U.S. ski industry’s response is ambivalent at best when it comes to the Continue reading →