ECOCLUB Blogs™

If you want self- guided ecotourists to stay longer in your community you need to educate them on your special features. What do you do if you don’t have the budget to hire real people to provide interpretation services or you find that your visitors’ schedules don’t match your planned activities? Writing on The Stone Provincial Park in western Canada (http://gateway.cd.gov.ab.ca/siteinformation.asp?id=177) has a great self-guided interpretative hike that could be adapted by almost any community. A dozen numbered signs are posted along the trail. At the trailhead there is a mailbox with a paper booklet offering interpretive information that corresponds to the sign numbers. Come around the corner and find some unusual brown matter in the rocks? Open the interpretative booklet and find out that you are looking at the middens of the nocturnal wood rats! It’s like having an interpreter in your backpack. Using this interpretative tool turned a 30 minute walk for me into a 2 hour voyage of discovery. For a relatively modest cost, self-guided tools such as this can keep visitors in the area longer and create stories that get shared among visitors. This is a formula many communities can copy with success! 

A lot of museum exhibits can seem rather static to visitors. One facility has come up with a great way to get their visitors involved. The Titanic exhibition at the Royal B.C. Museum http://www.royalbcmuseum.bc.ca/temporary_e...ts/titanic.aspx has come up with a fresh idea to improve interaction with their visitors and it doesn't cost a fortune.As people enter the exhibit they are given a boarding pass with the name of an actual passenger that was on the Titanic. The last exhibit the visitor sees is a list of the names of survivors and those who were not so fortunate. Seeing whether the name of the person on the random ticket you received 'made it' is sobering. By giving people a personal connection to the exhibit, the Museum has come up with a way to bring their story alive. I wonder if other tourism attractions could use similar techniques to generate interest in their static exhibits?Carol

Members of Ecoclub are marketing their ecotourism businesses, but it is harder to find regions or entire countries marketing themselves as ecotourism destinations. An exciting development in my mind is the lead Ireland is taking to offer a wide range of greener travel products and services. Several communities and businesses have gotten together to develop an integrated ecotourism destination. With a few mouse clicks at http://www.greenbox.ie/ you can find some great suggestions for trip activities, transportation with lower impact, and intimate inns in which to lay your head at the end of the evening.They’ve also come up with a pretty good method of setting standards to ensure those people using their Green Box label are walking the talk when it comes to ecotourism. You can read more about their standards process on their website.It would be great to see other communities follow their lead.Carol

Small is beautiful even in interpretation programs offered by tourism operators. The Alberta Birds of Prey Centre (www.albertabirds.com) in Coaldale, Alberta, Canada takes a different approach to interpretation and it pays big dividends. Rather than posting set times for interpretative talks or flying demonstrations, the staff watches the ebb and flow of visitors and offer activities accordingly. Someone have a few minutes between weighing birds? A staff member will offer to let someone hold an owl. If several families with children are gathered around the displays, a staff member will personally invite people to come to the flying field and see one of the birds exercised as part of their rehabilitation program.I have worked with facilities that offer more formalized programs and they work well, but the less structured approach offers more meaningful contact and the memories that lead to long term relationships. During my recent visit to the Birds of Prey Centre I saw several people asking question after question during interpretative programs, probably due to the intimate nature of the setting. People were wearing out their camera batteries taking pictures of themselves and the birds. Myself, I spent a lot more time than I planned at the facility because...

Orbitz recently announced the results of a study that showed that Americans are taking fewer long holidays and more shorter vacations. Ernst Flach of the Canadian Tourism Commission points to this as a possible opportunity for Canadian tourism operators due to their geographic proximity. Two years ago, I would have agreed, but increased awareness of the climate impacts of air travel have me reconsidering. It may be an opportunity for Canada, but is it an opportunity or a threat to the planet's health?Many countries are seeing an explosion in cheap airfares, a development ideally suited to people with only a few days off and a desire to get from it all. However some people are starting to question whether air travel is a responsible environmental choice at all - witness the highly visible protest over the expansion of Heathrow airport recently. Are travelers on a collision course with the planet's health? I've heard debate for decades over the pros and cons of tourism, but the recent debates calling for an end to all air travel rings alarm bells for me.Our travel patterns are leading to more environmental degradation yet asking people to stay closer to home can create a real hardship...