What goes for cruises goes for most of the travel industry. For decades, a small number of environmentally minded reformists in the sector have tried to develop sustainable tourism that creates enduring employment while minimising the damage it does. But most hotel groups, tour operators and national tourism authorities – whatever their stated commitment to sustainable tourism – continue to prioritise the economies of scale that inevitably lead to more tourists paying less money and heaping more pressure on those same assets. Before the pandemic, industry experts were forecasting that international arrivals would rise by between 3% and 4% in 2020. Chinese travellers, the largest and fastest-growing cohort in world tourism, were expected to make 160m trips abroad, a 27% increase on the 2015 figure. [...]
Coronavirus has also revealed the danger of overreliance on tourism, demonstrating in brutal fashion what happens when the industry supporting an entire community, at the expense of any other more sustainable activity, collapses. On 7 May, the UN World Tourism Organisation estimated that earnings from international tourism might be down 80% this year against last year’s figure of $1.7tn, and that 120m jobs could be lost. Since tourism relies on the same human mobility that spreads disease, and will be subject to the most stringent and lasting restrictions, it is likely to suffer more than almost any other economic activity. [...]
According to the unapologetic elitism that informs the thinking of Van der Borg and other industry strategists, “high-impact, low-value” excursionists should be made less welcome than the affluent independent travellers who stay in a hotel, eat at neighbourhood restaurants and perhaps round off a day in the city’s lesser-known churches with a bellini at Harry’s Bar – like Truman Capote before them. At every step, runs this line of reasoning, “quality” tourists contribute to the city’s wellbeing through taxes, tips and human interaction. [...]
There is, of course, a financial cost to limiting tourism. As Fermín Villar, the president of the Friends of La Rambla, which represents the street’s residential and commercial interests, told the Guardian two years ago, “La Rambla is above all a business … every year more than 100 million people walk along this street. Imagine,” he enthused, “if each person spends only €1.” But mass tourism displaces other businesses, while the exodus of many creative and productive residents, as well as the stress placed on local infrastructure by visitors in such numbers, carry a cost of their own. Da Mosto told me that, in purely economic terms, Venice is a net loser from an industry that has set up shop on its premises and remits much of its revenues elsewhere. [...]
While in many places getting rid of tourists may be the only way to restore a healthy natural world, in countries where the tourist industry focuses on the environment, the opposite may be true. When I suggested to Karim Wissanji, Elewana’s CEO, that the best way to conserve Africa’s wildlife might be for human beings to migrate to the cities and leave them in peace, he retorted: “The future of our wildlife and their habitats are intrinsically linked to the future of the safari adventure industry.”
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