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ECOCLUB, Issue 92
Moving the ICRT to Leeds Metropolitan has provided a much stronger base from which to built its work and the inclusion of
Janet Cochrane and Xavier Font in the core team has given us a lot more capacity. Most of our students are mid-career or
wanting to move into some form of responsible tourism. Our alumni include people, who have gone on to work in consultancy,
to work in local government, for tour operators, in journalism, or wildlife tourism and national parks; some have established
successful businesses. ResponsbleTravel.com was born out of the ICRT course when Justin Francis was a student, and I co-
founded the company with him although I have since sold my shares and I am no longer involved. The ICRT is working with
the UK Federation of Tour Operators on a training programme for the industry.
Tourism and Responsible Tourism Academic institutions are increasingly getting involved in business research &
projects. Is there a downside with responsible tourism research quality and agenda being driven down by private sector
interests, rather than by higher ethics & responsibility, or is this simply a win-win process of "linking research supply to
industry research demand"?
As is often the case the reality lies somewhere between these two propositions, without mainstream commercial engagement we
are doing no more than rearrange the deck chairs on the Titanic. Academia has the responsibility to demonstrate what can be
done, to demonstrate what difference it makes and provide reliable information. Academia failed to do that for ecotourism and
for community-based tourism. Too many nice stories, too much blah, blah – too little objective measurement or reporting of
impacts. Academia is lagging behind the industry. At the ICRT we are pushing for properly researched examples of good
practice with quantifiable evidence.
Responsibility is a noble, hard to dispute principle, but how easy is responsible tourism to practice & attain? Is it
essentially getting tourists to follow willy-nilly a certain practical code of conduct, does it require a higher level of
education & ethics, does it involve costly adjustments and sacrifices by private tourism interests - higher salaries,
donations, lower profits - or does it also require deliberate state policies & planning?
Responsible Tourism is about all those involved – tourists, local government, hotels, tour operators in the destinations and the
originating markets, journalists and communities – taking responsibility for doing what they can to “make better places for
people to live in and better places for people to visit.” There may be additional costs, it may require that people improve their
knowledge and practise – it all depends how the responsibility is being exercised and what is being achieved. Very often it pays
off in a better product, a better experience, lower operating costs or better PR exposure. It is about changing the way tourism is
delivered in ways that provide a better experience for the tourists and a better environment and living conditions for local
people.
Are large tour operators guilty-until-proven-innocent? Is there genuine interest in responsible tourism in large ,
mainstream tour operators or are they simply wary (and tired sometimes) of being labelled irresponsible, and lose sales?
Are smaller outfits, by definition, or in practice, any more responsible?
One of the problems about this debate is that it is little more than name calling, It is not the scale of operation that makes the
difference, the questions is in what way is the business being responsible, in what ways is the business being irresponsible, what
are it impacts? There is a lot of mindless criticism of all inclusives, it all depends on how the all inclusive is run. Some are
goods, some are less good, some have serious negative consequences, and we need to be able to tell the difference and work to
make them all better.
Some journalists endlessly 'worry' that travellers, or 'consumers' as they prefer to call them, are getting 'confused' by
all the different brands of tourism and then they inadvertently oblige by trying to define these genres by themselves,
adding to any confusion. With the clout of a respected tourism academic, would you say that Responsible Tourism is
essentially different than Ethical Tourism, pro-poor Tourism, or Sustainable Tourism or even less successful terms such
as Geotourism? Is there a natural cause for the proliferation of 'Tourisms perhaps due to competition by underlying
organisations and interests - or could it be simply that the 'market' needs new 'Tourism brands' every few years. And if
so, should we be expecting the next brand soon?
I am often interviewed by journalists whose basic ignorance of these debates I find quite shocking. I think that we need to get
travel and tourism on to the agenda of other parts of the papers where there is often more awareness of the ethical and
responsible consumer debate. Travel journalists need to behave more responsibly about how they report and write – that said
there has been a dramatic improvement in the UK as research by Cathy Mack for her MSc at the ICRT demonstrated.
Responsible Tourism is about stakeholders taking responsibility for making the changes necessary to make tourism more ethical
and sustainable. Pro-Poor tourism is not a product – any form of tourism can increase the benefits which it creates for the poor,
pro-poor tourism is any form of tourism which creates net benefits for the poor. Full stop. It is that simple. Pro-poor Tourism is
one of the ways in which a business can increase its responsibility. My first work on tourism was a three year comparative study
on the impact of tourism at three national parks - two in Asia and one in Africa. What I learnt from that was that the good
practices of ecotourism operators had little impact at those three parks because the mainstream industry used the same places,
without making any significant contribution either to conservation or to the livelihoods of local communities. The reports are
What I took away from that work was the importance of
