A few days ago, the founder of Conscious Travel, Anna Pollock, wrote an article ‘Towards opening a sensible debate on tourism growth‘, which called on the industry to undertake an ‘honest, rigorous and fearlessly self-critical’ debate on its business model, a model that is based on the idea that the industry can simply keep on growing.
Anna’s article was itself a response to an article written by our editor Jeremy Smith for the WTM blog, in which he also asked for debate, expressing his concern at the disconnect that means that while communities from Bali to Barcelona are demanding limits on tourism to protect the integrity of where they live, the industry continues to extol absolute growth in numbers as the ultimate goal.
As Anna wrote, “It isn’t that individuals have not been asking this question for many years but, somehow, we’ve failed to kick start an industry-wide debate”. So, as part of this effort, we’ve created a Special Focus: Challenges to tourism & Growth“. From now on, this section of this site will be dedicated to exploring the implications of tourism’s ongoing growth and the many possible responses.
We welcome all contributions, comment and challenges. If you have written an article on your own blog or website that addresses this issue, we’d love you to tell us about it so we can republish it here. If you’ve a recording of a talk on this issue, or know of a report or paper, get in touch. And, of course, please contact us if you want to write about this issue for Travindy.
