1 billion travelers, more than 1 billion opportunities... For World Tourism Day 2015, we debate this statement by the UNWTO with Anita Mendiratta and Jonathan Tourtellot.
Indeed while tourism can have profoundly positive impacts, ill-managed tourism can bring about many negative effects for residents and the local environment. At the center of this: the DMO, who shares in the evolution of tourism everywhere.
Guest speakers:
Anita Mendiratta, Founder and Managing Director, CACHET CONSULTING
Jonathan Tourtellot, President, Focus on Places LLC, Founder, National Geographic Centre for Sustainable Destinations
2. Our speakers today
PRO
Anita Mendiratta
Founder and Managing Director
CACHET CONSULTING
CON
Jonathan Tourtellot
President, Focus on Places LLC
Founder, National Geographic Centre for
Sustainable Destinations
3. TOURISM AS A FORCE FOR GOOD
COMMUNITY IMPACT:
THE âPROâ SIDE OF THE DEBATE
SEPTEMBER 30th 2015
49. This debate assignment reminds me of a running joke from my college
days--long, so long ago. Whenever the student body was gathered
waiting for an event to start, some guy on one side of the auditorium
would call out âsex is good!â and another guy on the other side would
respond, âSex is evil!â And back and forth: âSex is good!â âSex is evil!â
The joke, this being a liberal-arts college, was that everyone knew of
course that the sex is-evil guy was wrong.
Well, with this audience today, Iâm the sex-is-evil guy.
----- Meeting Notes (9/28/15 17:33) -----
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50. In my workshops, I usually discuss both pros and cons of tourism, and
how to maximize the pros and minimize the cons.
Anita has already covered the benefits, leaving me with the downside.
So, since I donât want to be the sex-is-evil guy, Iâm going to turn the
virtual lectern here over to my friendâŠ
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51. Mr. Frank Lee Skepticle. Of Lovelyport, USA.
[Adopts an outrageously bad Maine accent:]
Thank you for the opportunity, Jonathan, and good aftahnoon, folks.
My name is Frank Lee Skepticle. Historic Lovelyport, where I live, has a
population of 8,000 or so. We do indeed have a lovely harbor, and nice
rolling farm country inland.
Weâre also right off the coastal highway, so we get a lot of tourists.
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52. And Iâm not so sure they are doing us very much good. Weâre bits and
piece of mass tourism now, and itâs changing who we are.
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53. One issue we have is those cruise ships that call at Awfulport, down the
coast. They put a lot of those passengers on day bus tours that come
up here.
And some of these folks arenât the sharpest axes in the woodshed.
One woman asked me last week where to see the penguins?
I said, Go down to the the shore there. And swim out about 10,000
miles south.
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54. These day-trippers all want to photograph themselves in front of
Lovelyportâs landmark churchâOur Lady of Wayward Intentions.
When thereâs 3 tour buses in, you have to fight your way through the
crowd, and risk getting a selfie stick in your ear.
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55. 7
A couple of years ago, this fella from WTTCâwhatever that isâsuggested
there could be 3 billion tourists by 2050.
Where, where are we going to put all these people? Build a couple of brand
new, historic Lovelyports?
56. Itâs already happening. This what a summer day looks like in Florence,
Italy. A lot of those people are hit-and-run touristsâday-trippers.
16 million last year, 1 million bussed in from cruise ships calling at
Livorno.
We donât want to look like this!
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57. For a lot of us, tourism means out-of-state license plates in OUR
parking spaces.
All the touristy shops drive up the rents downtown. My brotherâs an
optician and he had to move his shop, Skepticle Spectacles, out to the
strip mall. (Not very pretty out there is it? Youâd think the tourism folks
would want to clean that up, but, well, they donât seem to be interested.)
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58. Then some outsider bought our old village seafood restaurant, the
Moister Oyster. Figured he could make more money off those
daytrippers with this: an Olive Garden! âTheyâll recognize it!â he said.
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59. Then he knocked down two of our historic wooden boathouses for the
parking lot.
My aunt Ruth-Leslie, thatâs Ruth-Leslie Skepticle, she and her friends
used to make paintings of those boathouses and sell them to tourists.
No more.
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60. Jewelry stores and T-shirt shops have taken over, catering to the cruise
bus tours. We donât own any of the shops; theyâve got some kind of
deal with the cruise lines. The jewelry shop sells tanzanite. Thatâs a
gemstone from Tanzania. We ainât in Tanzania.
And those T-shirts? They say Lovelyport on the front, but Iâve checked
them out. The labels say âMade is Mexicoâ,
in Honduras, in Pakistan, for Peteâs sake! Our tourism is supporting the
economy of Pakistan?
As for the souvenir mugs and crockery? Made in China. We ainât in
China, either.
Whereâs the stuff made by our people, in our region?
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61. If itâs not cheap souvenir shops, then itâs expensive antiques and sleek
fashions. Armani? Gucci? In Lovelyport?
None of these shops are for us. They arenât Lovelyport. We donât want
âem, we canât afford âem, or both.
Tourism is taking over our town.
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62. 14
Now, a lot of the richer tourists, they decide they want a summer home
here. Theyâve been buying up the north side of town.
Their vacation houses take up most of the coast. Weâre losing
ownership of our own seashore.
Sure, you say tourism puts money into the economy, but who getâs this
money? What good does it do me?
63. Itâs not like this town in Montana where my cousin Leslie lives. Thatâs
Les Skepticle. He says when he gets his local tax bill, it tells him he
owes $1200, and that tourist taxes have saved him another $300.
Thatâs a benefit he can see!
But not here in Lovelyport.
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64. 16
Now, as for the tourists who do stay overnightâthe developers, they
think hotels like these, out by the Interstate, are the way to go. Heck,
you could be anywhere! They donât bring evening people into
Lovelyport, and they donât look like Lovelyport.
Theyâve got gift shops in those hotels, but are they selling local arts and
crafts, like Ruth-Leslieâs watercolors? Nope. âLovelyportâ mugs, made in
China.
Then the last mayor got this notion that it would be great to have a
casino there, too. A casino! We are a scenic, historic port town. Why
would we need a casino? We voted him out.
We do have a few nice little B&Bs,
but the hotels lobby for regulations that make it tough for them to do
business.
And then thereâs Airbnb.
We kind of like Airbnb. After they take their cut, the tourist dollars go
straight to us. And when the host is present, the guest gets a personal
experience that no hotel can match.
65. This is what theyâve done to our beautiful scenery outside of town. One
of those billboards is for that Olive Garden. And farther along, around
that curve up ahead, the highway had a nice landscaped median divide.
So the county passed an ordinance that any trees on it had to be cut
down if they blocked the view of a billboard.
Seems tourism businesses are advertising themselves at the cost of the
scenic appeal they depend on.
That brings us to bed taxes. Much of which go to advertising for more
tourists.
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66. Now we have a problem in our pretty countryside that tourists like to
explore. Thatâs suburban sprawl spreading out from Awfulport. The
value of farm acreage goes up, and then the farmers have to sell just to
pay their taxes, and then all these mansions spring up where cows
used to graze.
So one county supervisor, maybe a slightly naĂŻve fella, he got the bright
idea to use the bed taxes to buy development rights from the farmers.
That way, the countryside would stay pretty for the tourists, and for us,
too. The farmers wouldnât have to sell their farms, and their taxes
wouldnât go up.
Well, you know who put the kibosh on that idea? Iâm sorry, but it was
some of you DMO folks and your members. They raised a howl. Bed
taxes are supposed to go for promotion, not preservation.
Well, that particular idea might have had its flaws, but I wonder whether
you spend your budgets just on promoting tourism. Itâs as if Rich Isgood down
at the fish market spent all his money on advertisin and nothing on keeping the
fish cold. (Thatâs notâwhatâs the word?âsustainable.)
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67. 19
Whenever you see a place advertising itself as âunspoiled,â it usually
means thereâs a place nearby that isnât.
We donât want to be the spoiled place.
68. When it comes to tourism, itâs not just a matter of economics. I think it
needs to be smart economics.
So letâs say weâve a tourism revenue stream of $100,000 a day in
Lovelyport. We can do it the way itâs been going, with more and more
mass tourism. Lots of crowds and tacky shops. They buy a souvenir
and get back in the bus.
Or we can go with the rich people who stay up in the ritzy Fogbound
Inn and then buy up the coast and the north side of town, making our
lovely place their own private property.
There we go: $100,000.
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69. 21
But why not gives preference and incentives to tourists who are sincerely
curious about our nature and culture and history, with varying incomes?
70. Maybe this is a better way: A reasonable number of tourists, with a
reasonable spread of incomesâsome wealthy, some middle, and some
young people, whoâll decide they like the place and want to come back
some day with their future families.
Same revenue flow. And enough wisdom to recognize when enough
tourists are enough.
Fewer tourists staying longer is a better than more tourists staying for a
couple of hours. We donât want to be a look-alike tourist trap full of
lookalike franchises and souvenirs made in some other country.
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71. 23
So please, protect the tourism product: The place!
Thatâs us. Thatâs our town as it should be, the kind of destination that began
attracting these tourists in the first place. Our shops, our historic buildings, our
shorelines and countryside, our seafood dishes and music traditions and
seafaring stories.
Thatâs what tourism is for, isnât it?
Thank you for letting me have my say, Jonathan.
72. [Back to a normal voice:]
And thank you, Frank.
Itâs clear from Frankâs description that Lovelyport doesnât take very good
care of itself. So itâs good that Lovelyport is fictitious. So is Frank, as
you can tell from a guy whose accent comes from somewhere on the
border between Maine and New Orleans.
But all the things he cites are grounded in reality. The tanzanite shops,
penguin incident, and hiked-up real estate are from Juneau; a
supervisor in Loudoun county, VA did propose buying development
rights with bed taxes; the policy of mandatory tree cutting for billboards
is from southern Florida; the proposed off-ramp casino was at
Gettysburg; Whitefish Montana has put tourist savings on local tax bills.
Meanwhile, the tourist crowds are everywhere, and growing. Iâve been
in China a couple of times this year, and the crush of people at world
heritage sites there gives a good idea of what is coming. This is the
walkway on the 10,000-foot-high Golden Summit of Emeishan on a
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73. So weâre at the point where that âMâ in DMO really needs to start
meaning what the UNWTO claims it means: Management. Not just
helping enable conventions, but helping with true stewardship of the
destination.
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74. Thatâs why I was so encouraged by the Destination Next program that I
showed this slide in China this month, at the meeting of the Global
Sustainable Tourism Council.
Sense of place,
responsibility and sustainability,
and DMOs that reach beyond the tourism industry to embrace the
stewards of their destinations.
This is the kind of program I would like to help with! And if it works, then
I wonât agree to be the sex-is-evil guy anymore. Thanks.
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75. Maximizing the positive forces of tourism
while minimizing the negative
Discussion & Questions