Many people are not confused about leisure travel. In recent postings, I’ve echoed the observations of commentators who find would-be travelers confused about travel as a partial response to climate change.
Let’s be clear. Not confused would be those cruisegoers whose most preferred “ports of call” are the islands colonized by their ships where local communities have been removed, or other travelers who still book resort hotels on beaches where trinket higglers have replaced fisherfolk. Just the way they want it!
Also not confused are the rising numbers of travelers with clear awareness of the action that climate change demands, and who no longer expect leadership from a travel industry that obscures its green intentions from its guests in small print to satisfy PR and legal advisers.
It’s not simply that climate travelers trust the doomsday numbers forecast by climate science. It’s deeper. We feel this more intuitively, more as part of a shift in once universal truths.
Why doesn’t tourism care when we do?
We all experience the droughts and sunny-day flooding, the tornadoes that have dislocated many more than fictional Dorothy and her farm pals from Kansas to Oz, the wildfires, and hurricanes. What we don’t experience
directly, we read about and Tweet about in this wide-flung world where our extended families live or among friends we’ve made through travel.
When we think about it, we’re uncomfortable that none of the dominant sectors of tourism speaks forthrightly for travel as learning that aligns our travel with climate action.
Why doesn’t tourism care when we do?
If we’ve become world smart, why hasn’t tourism? Isn’t travel a world industry?
The cruise fleets, the airlines and chain hotels promise to meet zero net emissions by 2050. But if we were serious, major airports around the world
would set reasonable targets for airlines to reconfigure or design new jets with sustainable aviation fuel or face curtailed landing rights, the way that a growing number of states are phasing in the manufacture and use of only e-powered automobiles and rental fleets. But as Travel Weekly’s Arnie Weissmann emails me, limiting flights isn’t in their interest.
Okay, but if words meant something, wouldn’t C-suite jobs also be filled by scientists and others knowledgeable about sustainability? Wouldn’t we have scientists on the advisory boards of the National Travel Council or the World Travel & Tourism Council?
Why wouldn’t climate action top agendas at conferences everywhere that travel insiders congregate? Why wouldn’t a top-rated TV channel want to devote an ongoing program to travel and climate action? If travel is the right of all people that tourism wants us to believe, who wouldn’t watch? Advertisers would have to meet peer-reviewed standards.
What’s to be afraid of?
What brings this up now?
It isn’t merely the accumulating evidence that people want leadership, but we want it from a particular source. Not necessarily science. Science has been slow to pay attention to tourism. With fewest exceptions, overtourism has become standard travel issue when organized by airlines, online tour operators, hotel chains, and too many destinations.
That’s precisely why tourism needs to be studied but isn’t sufficiently. Is its practice so degraded that any Ph.D. candidate might feel that its close study would conjure a sully effect, best left to the narrow analyses of those monkishly parsing their polls and metrics?
Nor can we look to the Biden Administration to budget for tourism as climate action with its new cabinet-level position for tourism placed inside the Department of Commerce instead of outdoors in the Department of the Interior, where it belongs.
We have to consider that tourism is an amalgam of different and often competing mobility and lodging components. As an industry, tourism has also become largely about facilitation, bloated with middlemen, for whom each of us has become an accounting integer instead of the explorer we have always imagined ourselves on Planet Earth.
The insider Bob Palloni of Skyway Hospitality Solutions is right when he says that “The sudden sense of social and environmental responsibility exhibited by travelers today should come as no surprise; after all, the hospitality industry is notorious for its substantial carbon footprint.” He is also right when he concludes that “With the right offering, the right people, and an all-in-one cloud-based technology, hotels have everything they need to meet and exceed guest expectations in 2023 and beyond.”
Eric Jones for The Vacationer makes plain that the cost of travel is a factor that should drive more travelers to affordable hotel options, but greater affordability, nice as that would be, is not what we’re looking for. As Palloni says it’s leadership. We want the industry to tackle climate action so that we can go on traveling at all. “Today’s — and tomorrow’s — workers and travelers are among the most powerful and influential consumers ever, and increasingly, they are purpose-driven.”
People who do travel most of all need places to stay. So, I read about hotel holding companies’ intentions — Marriott’s initiative, Accor’s, that I want to believe in, and Hilton’s, that I trust less — that I will discuss in a subsequent posting. Most, I trust people like Weissmann, the arch travel insider, who is careful not to blow out industry leaders with overt criticisms but only with thoughtful nudges, while also writing about honorable leaders in addressing climate change like The Travel Foundation and The Future of Tourism Coalition.
Here’s the dilemma
Editor-in-chief Bob Guccione Jr. of WonderlustTravel.com lately told an annual gathering of top consumer travel editors “it’s going to be up to the industry to make people want to travel.” At his home page, he says “Everything we publish will have the high-end traveler in mind — we will be a manual on how to better enjoy the planet.”
What does “enjoy the planet” mean?
Later in the editors gathering he describes his dream vacation as “Lying on a beach in St Martin. Doing nothing. Unless you count raising a rum-limped arm to order another rum punch as ‘activity’. Which, come to think of it, I do.”
This man is not confused, and I do not believe that we will trust his misleading and his industry to lead us.
NOTES
Also see comments of Cluster Director for Americas at Meeting Select Travel and Tour World by Rachel Havas, that call for more attention to sustainability by business travel planners, at https://www.travelandtourworld.com/news/article/meetings-industry-focuses-on-sustinablity-as-a-business-strategy/
https://www.thetravelfoundation.org.uk/; https://www.futureoftourism.org/
https://wonderlusttravel.com/about-us/; https://www.travelweekly.com/Agent-Issues/Consumer-Travel-Editors-Roundtable-2023/355181
