Is Tourism a Force for Good in Communities?

Question: Is tourism a force for
good in communities?
September 30, 2015

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

TOURISM AS A FORCE FOR GOOD
COMMUNITY IMPACT:
THE ‘PRO’ SIDE OF THE DEBATE
SEPTEMBER 30th 2015

IN 2014
Presn © A Mendiratta 2015

Per Day

RD
BIGGEST
SECTOR
Behind
Automotive
& Banking
SOURCE: WTTC

268 MILLION /
1:11 JOBS
SOURCE: WTTC

9% GDP

9% INVESTMENT

“The last 40 years have seen
tourism grow from 189 million
people travelling the planet to one
billion.
This number is set to reach
1.8 billion by 2030.
A true revolution.”
DR TALEB RIFAI
Secretary
General
UNWTO

ALL DESPITE…

AND…

AND DESPITE…

AND NOW…

BECAUSE ULTIMATELY…

IT’S ABOUT THE AWE

…AND THE BRAG

AND THE HUG IS ALWAYS WORTH
THE TRIP!
…AND THE HUG

WHY?

NATIONAL
IDENTITY

CULTURES

TRADITIONS

THE ENVIRONMENT

WILDLIFE

CHILDREN

NATIONAL
COMPETITIVENESS

COMMUNITIES

#1 CREATING
OPPORTUNITY

#2 SUSTAINING
EARNING

#3 CELEBRATING
IDENTITY

#4 PRESERVING FAMILY
STRUCTURES Presn © A Mendiratta 2015

#5 PROTECTING
LEARNING

BUT THE RISKS ARE REAL

HOW DO WE MOVE
FORWARD?

TOURISTS PLAYING A PART

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 “sex is good!” and another guy on the other side would
respond, “Sex is evil!” And back and forth: “Sex is good!” “Sex is evil!”
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, I’m the sex-is-evil guy.
----- Meeting Notes (9/28/15 17:33) -----
1

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 don’t want to be the sex-is-evil guy, I’m going to turn the
virtual lectern here over to my friend…
2

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.
We’re also right off the coastal highway, so we get a lot of tourists.
3

And I’m not so sure they are doing us very much good. We’re bits and
piece of mass tourism now, and it’s changing who we are.
4

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 aren’t 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.
5

These day-trippers all want to photograph themselves in front of
Lovelyport’s landmark church—Our Lady of Wayward Intentions.
When there’s 3 tour buses in, you have to fight your way through the
crowd, and risk getting a selfie stick in your ear.
6

7
A couple of years ago, this fella from WTTC—whatever that is—suggested
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?

It’s already happening. This what a summer day looks like in Florence,
Italy. A lot of those people are hit-and-run tourists—day-trippers.
16 million last year, 1 million bussed in from cruise ships calling at
Livorno.
We don’t want to look like this!
8

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 brother’s an
optician and he had to move his shop, Skepticle Spectacles, out to the
strip mall. (Not very pretty out there is it? You’d think the tourism folks
would want to clean that up, but, well, they don’t seem to be interested.)
9

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! “They’ll recognize it!” he said.
10

Then he knocked down two of our historic wooden boathouses for the
parking lot.
My aunt Ruth-Leslie, that’s Ruth-Leslie Skepticle, she and her friends
used to make paintings of those boathouses and sell them to tourists.
No more.
11

Jewelry stores and T-shirt shops have taken over, catering to the cruise
bus tours. We don’t own any of the shops; they’ve got some kind of
deal with the cruise lines. The jewelry shop sells tanzanite. That’s a
gemstone from Tanzania. We ain’t in Tanzania.
And those T-shirts? They say Lovelyport on the front, but I’ve checked
them out. The labels say “Made is Mexico”,
in Honduras, in Pakistan, for Pete’s sake! Our tourism is supporting the
economy of Pakistan?
As for the souvenir mugs and crockery? Made in China. We ain’t in
China, either.
Where’s the stuff made by our people, in our region?
12

If it’s not cheap souvenir shops, then it’s expensive antiques and sleek
fashions. Armani? Gucci? In Lovelyport?
None of these shops are for us. They aren’t Lovelyport. We don’t want
‘em, we can’t afford ‘em, or both.
Tourism is taking over our town.
13

14
Now, a lot of the richer tourists, they decide they want a summer home
here. They’ve been buying up the north side of town.
Their vacation houses take up most of the coast. We’re losing
ownership of our own seashore.
Sure, you say tourism puts money into the economy, but who get’s this
money? What good does it do me?

It’s not like this town in Montana where my cousin Leslie lives. That’s
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.
That’s a benefit he can see!
But not here in Lovelyport.
15

16
Now, as for the tourists who do stay overnight—the developers, they
think hotels like these, out by the Interstate, are the way to go. Heck,
you could be anywhere! They don’t bring evening people into
Lovelyport, and they don’t look like Lovelyport.
They’ve got gift shops in those hotels, but are they selling local arts and
crafts, like Ruth-Leslie’s watercolors? Nope. “Lovelyport” 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 there’s 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.

This is what they’ve 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.
17

Now we have a problem in our pretty countryside that tourists like to
explore. That’s 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 naïve 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 wouldn’t have to sell their farms, and their taxes
wouldn’t go up.
Well, you know who put the kibosh on that idea? I’m 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. It’s as if Rich Isgood down
at the fish market spent all his money on advertisin and nothing on keeping the
fish cold. (That’s not—what’s the word?—sustainable.)
18

19
Whenever you see a place advertising itself as “unspoiled,” it usually
means there’s a place nearby that isn’t.
We don’t want to be the spoiled place.

When it comes to tourism, it’s not just a matter of economics. I think it
needs to be smart economics.
So let’s say we’ve a tourism revenue stream of $100,000 a day in
Lovelyport. We can do it the way it’s 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.
20

21
But why not gives preference and incentives to tourists who are sincerely
curious about our nature and culture and history, with varying incomes?

Maybe this is a better way: A reasonable number of tourists, with a
reasonable spread of incomes—some wealthy, some middle, and some
young people, who’ll 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 don’t want to be a look-alike tourist trap full of
lookalike franchises and souvenirs made in some other country.
22

23
So please, protect the tourism product: The place!
That’s us. That’s 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.
That’s what tourism is for, isn’t it?
Thank you for letting me have my say, Jonathan.

[Back to a normal voice:]
And thank you, Frank.
It’s clear from Frank’s description that Lovelyport doesn’t take very good
care of itself. So it’s 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. I’ve 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
24

So we’re at the point where that “M” 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.
25

That’s 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 won’t agree to be the sex-is-evil guy anymore. Thanks.
26

Maximizing the positive forces of tourism
while minimizing the negative
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Is Tourism a Force for Good in Communities?

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