Good news in tourism December 8 – 14, 2019

Wel­come to The “Good Tour­ism” Blog’s almost fam­ous sum­mary of a week of good news and quirk­i­ness — from vil­lages to nations — in the world of travel & tour­ism. Pub­lished on Sunday to be ready on Monday, it’s the per­fect pos­it­ively-spun start to a work­ing week wherever you are! Share it with your colleagues.

In no par­tic­u­lar order: 

Be proud! Tour­ism has been partly cred­ited with the near halv­ing of poverty rates in the land­locked south­ern Afric­an nation of Bot­swana.

The Anda­m­an and Nico­bar Islands uni­on ter­rit­ory of India has ambi­tious plans to enhance its tour­ism industry. Accord­ing to Chief Sec­ret­ary Chet­an B Sanghi in this inter­view, it is intro­du­cing elec­tric vehicles; com­pel­ling all ship­ping ser­vices to run on green energy; con­vert­ing all exist­ing boats to elec­tric; con­vert­ing Port Blair’s 93% dies­el-driv­en power gen­er­at­ing plant to run on “green energy resources”; and enfor­cing a ban on plastics!

Kumarakom, a vil­lage nestled in the back­wa­ters of Kot­tayam, is set to become the first plastic-free tour­ism des­tin­a­tion in Ker­ala, India, in a pilot pro­ject that seeks to unite tour­ism stake­hold­ers, includ­ing res­id­ents, against single-use plastics.

Community-based tourism

Demo­cracy. With Moray Spey­side Tour­ism being defun­ded, bal­lot papers have been issued to 420 “eli­gible com­pan­ies” in Moray, a dis­trict in the north­east of Scot­land. The vote is to determ­ine wheth­er a Tour­ism Busi­ness Improve­ment Dis­trict should be cre­ated to which busi­nesses would con­trib­ute an annu­al levy and have a say in how it is spent. This fund­ing mod­el would be prefer­able to a “tour­ist tax”, say supporters.

Nice prob­lem to have. Boom­ing rev­en­ues from a lodging tax in the city of McMin­nville, Ore­gon, USA has promp­ted the coun­cil to vote to rene­go­ti­ate its alloc­a­tion. Cur­rently 70% of the tax revienue must be alloc­ated to tour­ism pro­mo­tion and infra­struc­ture. How­ever the whole 70% has been going to Vis­it McMin­nville for pro­mo­tion when there are “crit­ic­al infra­struc­ture fail­ings no amount of pro­mo­tion can hide”.

Tour­ism was one of four main ideas that “fell togeth­er organ­ic­ally” dur­ing com­munity con­sulta­tion under­taken by Morden and Dis­trict Cham­ber of Com­merce in Canada’s Man­itoba province. The oth­er three were eco­nom­ic devel­op­ment, com­munity, and trans­port­a­tion. And to think that tour­ism is often con­sidered a juni­or min­istry in government!

Less organ­ic­ally, per­haps, Viet­nam Prime Min­is­ter Nguy­en Xuan Phuc said Ca Mau province in the Mekong Delta should tap into respons­ible, eco- and com­munity-based tour­ism prin­ciples.

In Thai­l­and’s eager­ness to cre­ate 300,000 “smart farm­ers” by 2023 — and more “com­munity tour­ism” — “Deputy Prime Min­is­ter Somkid Jatus­rip­itak has ordered the Bank for Agri­cul­ture and Agri­cul­tur­al Cooper­at­ives (BAAC) to team up with the Indus­tri­al Pro­mo­tion Depart­ment and the Tour­ism Author­ity of Thai­l­and (TAT)”.

Culture & heritage

Cul­tur­al tour­ism in Rus­sia is a win­ner dur­ing the present “golden moment” in rela­tions between China and Rus­sia, how­ever the Rus­si­an Deputy Cul­ture Min­is­ter has appar­ently warned of a “red danger level” as Chinese tour­ists crowd out oth­ers at pop­u­lar sites.

“One city, three belts, one dis­trict and one circle”, whatever that means, is Beijing, China’s route to a world-class cul­tur­al tour­ism exper­i­ence. Appar­ently it requires tech­no­logy such as 5G, arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence, and big data among 26 measures.

Japan’s former cap­it­al Kyoto, host city for a UNWTO and UNESCO talk­fest last week and a des­tin­a­tion deal­ing with over­tour­ism, “has cracked down on illeg­al min­paku, a type of private lodging ser­vice, and under­taken a cam­paign to edu­cate for­eign tour­ists in par­tic­u­lar on Kyoto’s man­ners and cus­toms. It has, for example, cre­ated signs ask­ing them to be polite when ask­ing maiko (appren­tice geisha) for photos.”

The climb­ing ban at Uluru, the icon­ic rock in the red centre of Aus­tralia, has cre­ated new oppor­tun­it­ies for the loc­al Anan­gu com­munity. So we can expect more cul­tur­al tour­ism exper­i­ences in Uluru-Kata Tjuta Nation­al Park, plus new Indi­gen­ous-owned accommodation. 

In an effort to man­age the growth of her­it­age tour­ism in its his­tor­ic areas, Char­le­ston, South Car­o­lina, USA has amended its hotel ordinance.The revised ordin­ance requires, among oth­er things, that new devel­op­ments con­trib­ute to afford­able hous­ing for Char­le­ston locals.

Bil­lions of tour­ist dol­lars every year are thanks to the 30-year-old Pennsylvania Her­it­age Areas Pro­gram, an eco­nom­ic devel­op­ment pro­gram rooted in the rich nat­ur­al, cul­tur­al, and indus­tri­al his­tory of the USA state.

In pre-empt­ing research he thinks is required to bet­ter devel­op and pro­mote tour­ism, Nepal’s Min­is­ter for Cul­ture, Tour­ism and Civil Avi­ation Yogesh Bhat­tarai has iden­ti­fied the need to devel­op a cul­tur­al and reli­gious cir­cuit.

A newly refur­bished medi­ev­al church in the small mar­ket town of Llan­r­wst in Con­wy County Bor­ough, Wales has hired a busi­ness devel­op­ment officer with a “pas­sion for tour­ism, her­it­age, and faith”. Jon Rich­mond, who once worked for North Wales Tour­ism, says he is look­ing for­ward to work­ing with the com­munity to show off the town’s her­it­age.

Ecotourism & wildlife

The Tas­mani­an state gov­ern­ment in Aus­tralia has engaged con­sult­ants to study the eco­nom­ic value of nature-based tour­ism with the goal of mak­ing Tas­mania “the eco­tour­ism cap­it­al of the world”.

An aging cara­van park in West­ern Aus­tralia’s coastal Nin­ga­loo World Her­it­age area will be turned into a lux­ury eco­tour­ism resort by min­ing bil­lion­aire Andrew “Ziggy” For­rest who will mar­ket both the resort and tours of his cattle sta­tion (ranch) to Asi­an tour­ists. He also plans to spend mil­lions on mar­ine research.

Wild­life tourism’s increas­ing pop­ular­ity is encour­aging because it facil­it­ates con­ser­va­tion activ­it­ies, accord­ing to Rajn­ish Singh from the Mad­hya Pra­desh Forest Depart­ment in India.

Pull on your boots. Columbia’s Gor­gona island, formerly home to a max­im­um-secur­ity pris­on and still home to its infam­ous venom­ous snakes, is a new eco­tour­ism des­tin­a­tion.

Reopen­ing. The eco­tour­ism reserve of “El Corchito” in Yucatán, Mex­ico reopened Decem­ber 9. It had closed for two months due to an “increase in the sea level that caused the recre­ation­al areas and cor­ridors to flood”.

What does eco­tour­ism in a major city like Lon­don, UK look like?

Odds & ends

Newsy bits that don’t eas­ily fit into this week’s arbit­rary clusters:

Bar­ba­dos Min­is­ter of Tour­ism Ker­rie Sym­monds has hin­ted that accom­mod­a­tion pro­viders in the Carib­bean island nation may soon be required to make their products fully access­ible.

At the inter­sec­tion of com­munity-based tour­ism, cul­tur­al & reli­gious tour­ism, and eco­tour­ism, this tid­bit: vil­la­gers in the state of Odisha in India are call­ing for the devel­op­ment of tour­ism on Barnei moun­tain. A sage once lived on the for­es­ted moun­tain, where there are two water­falls and lots of bana­nas and man­goes to eat, but if you bring fruit from the top of the moun­tain to the bot­tom it (or you?) will turn to stone. The stream water is believed to be medi­cin­al. And there is a nat­ur­ally-aris­en Shiva Lingam, appar­ently. Put it on your buck­et list!

Fea­tured image: Bow Fiddle Rock, Portknock­ie, Moray, Scot­land. By Markus Tri­en­ke (CC BY-SA 2.0) via Wiki­me­dia. “GT” cropped it. 

P.S. None of these items have been fact-checked. Please com­ment below if you know there has been rub­bish pos­ted here, but be nice about it. The linked sources might get offen­ded (“GT” won’t). And there’s no need to harsh the vibe by being nasty.