Are there needs, wants, and desires common to all (or most) individuals within your community? How might travel & tourism serve them? In this “Good Tourism” Insight, K Michael Haywood explores the challenge all destinations face if they wish to create ‘community shared value’.
Made up of 62 tourism enterprises, from cheesemongers to carbon-neutral hotels, the Burren Ecotourism Network works to conserve the area through training, initiatives and a code of sustainable practices. The Network has now been awarded the ‘Green Light’ award for sustainability from Independent.ie.
The Covid pandemic has hit African tourism and the wildlife conservation it supports extremely hard. But Indigenous-managed projects, such as the Il Ngwesi eco-lodge and conservancy run by Maasai in Kenya, have benefited from local people’s stewardship of their lands.
Macaws, jaguars, tapirs and woolly monkeys are just a few of the critically endangered species being reintroduced as part of Latin America’s rewilding drive. In Colombia, the government recently passed into law wide-reaching sustainable tourism policies under the banner 'Together With Nature'.
Adventure tourists have thrown the remotest mountain region of the country an economic lifeline – but at what cost to ancient traditions and customs? The gains of tourism by way of new jobs and economic growth are tinged with the knowledge that part of their cultural heritage will be lost as the transactional nature of tourism is at odds with the hospitality for which Georgia is famed.