#TravelEnjoyRespect video: “Beyond the great horizon”

The 3.5‑minute music video (embed­ded below) was the concept of Pacific Asia Tour­ism Man­aging Dir­ect­or Steve Noakes and Dr Ong Hong Peng, former Sec­ret­ary Gen­er­al of the Min­istry of Tour­ism & Cul­ture Malaysia.

In his new role as Chair­man of ASWARA, Dr Ong was able to draw upon the cre­at­ive and tech­nic­al skills of the Kuala Lum­pur-based academy.

The music video is tar­geted at “any­one inter­ested in what tour­ism can do to assist achiev­ing SDGs”, Mr Noakes told the “GT” Blog.

“Hope­fully it is use­ful in con­fer­ences, work­shops, sem­inars, train­ing etc to help set the scene for tour­ism & sus­tain­able devel­op­ment. I used it last week at an Aus­trali­an AID sup­por­ted tour­ism work­shop in Sulawesi and this week will use it at an ASEAN tour­ism meet­ing in Yogyakarta.”

The idea for the music video evolved from the 11th UNWTO Asia Pacific Exec­ut­ive Train­ing Pro­gramme on Tour­ism Policy and Strategy, which took place March 20 – 23 in Port Moresby, Pap­ua New Guinea.

“I got the idea after Dr Ong and I led the [Pro­gramme],” Mr Noakes said. “There is a short song called ‘We love the SDGs’ but we thought let’s do a tour­ism one with an Asia pacific angle.”

Themed “Sus­tain­able Tour­ism for Devel­op­ment” in sup­port of the Inter­na­tion­al Year of Sus­tain­able Tour­ism for Devel­op­ment (#IY2017), the four-day train­ing work­shop involved seni­or exec­ut­ives from 18 Asia Pacific nations.

Progress towards sustainable, clean, low-carbon tourism

“While in some key parts of the travel and tour­ism industry pro­gress has been made towards more sus­tain­able, clean­er and low car­bon devel­op­ment of the sec­tor with­in its com­plex sup­ply chains, there remains much more to accom­plish,” Mr Noakes said.

He reck­ons that there needs to be a wider under­stand­ing and uptake of more sus­tain­able approaches in plan­ning, policy and imple­ment­a­tion in tour­ism design and operations.

“There’s also the oppor­tun­ity to engage con­sumers in act­ively pro­mot­ing the shift towards more sus­tain­able con­sump­tion and pro­duc­tion pat­terns,” Noakes added.

The UNW­TO’s new Travel Enjoy Respect (#TravelEn­joyRe­spect) cam­paign is some­what tar­geted at con­sumers. In UNW­TO’s words its object­ive is to “raise aware­ness of the value and con­tri­bu­tion that sus­tain­able tour­ism can make towards devel­op­ment and engage all stake­hold­ers in mak­ing the sec­tor a cata­lyst for pos­it­ive change”.

Pic­tured L‑R: Dr Ong Hong Peng, Harry Hwang (UNWTO), Jerry Argus (PNG Tour­ism Author­ity), Steve Noakes