That was then. Fortunately, a new kind of travel is in vogue now. Savvier tourists are abandoning the mock-European high-rises for more authentic experiences, like horseback riding through the bush. On the wild coast of eastern South Africa, young Germans gallop on pristine beaches and thread their way through hills carpeted by subtropical vegetation. Huddled by the fire at night after a typical dinner of meat stew, pumpkin leaves and wild spinach, they listen to the local Xhosa people tell folk stories. This experience is offered not by a multinational tour operator but by the Xhosa themselves, through a small, locally run firm called Amadiba Adventures. The money earned will provide the Xhosa tour guides with incomes two and a half times the average local wage.
In many ways, this off-the-beaten-path vacation represents the future of global tourism–an industry on the verge of tremendous growth and change. Despite a tumultuous year, international and domestic tourism is expected to boom over the next two decades. While a global recession and the terrorist attacks of 9-11 pushed down tourist numbers in 2001 for the first time since 1982, the impact was less than many had feared. Longer-term trends–including a rise in global wealth, improving transport technology, liberalization of international airspace, cheaper flights and the use of the Internet as a travel tool–will make it possible for more people around the world to travel than ever before. Last year there were 693 million international tourist arrivals. The World Tourism Organization expects that number to increase to more than 1 billion by 2010. Tomorrow’s tourists will come from new places; the number of Asian, and particularly Chinese, tourists is predicted to explode as that region becomes more integrated into the global economy.
Future tourists will also want to do different things. While sun-and-sea tourism still dominates, overcrowding and time pressures mean that the standard two-week beach vacation is becoming less popular. Rather than staking another umbrella into the sand, workaholic Americans–and, increasingly, Europeans–are taking shorter yet more diverse trips, fueling the growth of adventure travel, ecotourism, cultural tours, spa holidays, cruises and sport vacations in ever more far-flung places: China, the Maldives, Botswana, Vanuatu. Authenticity is the new buzzword; wealthier Western travelers who’ve “been there and done that” are eschewing package tours for more exotic, individualized experiences. Local governments and entrepreneurs are trying hard to cater to this new demand, which offers them the opportunity to keep more tourism revenue within their borders.
That’s good news, especially considering that in recent years, many of the world’s most popular destinations have begun to crack under the pressure of mass tourism and business travel. Airports like London’s Heathrow are at the breaking point. Many Southeast Asian cities are packed with too many hotels and not enough roads to funnel tourists to more remote areas. Governments around the world are closing off popular sites and launching marketing campaigns to divert tourists to less populated regions. Experts say that over the next two decades, tourism will be defined by the search for time and space.
Indeed, the industry is undergoing a seismic shift. “There are a lot of experienced travelers out there, and they are demanding more in terms of service, but often want to pay less,” says George Morgan-Grenville, managing director of the British-based tour operator Abercrombie & Kent. Cheap European airlines like Ryanair and easyJet have forced incumbents like British Airways to slash fares, while others, like Sabena and Swissair, have gone out of business altogether. Internet travel sites specializing in cut rates are booming; Travelocity and Expedia are now among the 10 largest U.S. distributors of travel products. Europe’s largest online travel agency, ebookers.com, recorded sales of £180 million in 2001, up from £15.4 million in 1999. Technology has also made it easier for people to research and plan their own trips, putting tour operators and travel agents under extreme pressure.
Today’s savvier travelers are seeking not the familiar but the unknown. They would be dismayed to find the restaurants in a favorite Aegean beach town hawking reheated pasta alongside the traditional spinach-and-feta pastries, and would quickly relocate to a refurbished Ottoman mansion turned boutique hotel in Istanbul. Or a windsurfing camp in Cape Verde. Or a Masai-owned lodge in Kenya. While these types of vacations currently represent a relatively small cut of global tourism, their share is likely to grow exponentially. The World Tourism Organization ranks sport-and-scuba vacations, cultural and rural tourism and nature-based travel in pristine parts of Africa and Asia among the hottest growth areas over the next two decades. Even when tourists do take beach vacations (still the biggest slice of the market), the WTO says they are switching from established areas like the Caribbean, Hawaii and the Mediterranean to more exotic destinations like the Indian Ocean and Southeast Asia.
Experts say that consumer desire to find the undiscovered country will ultimately take some of the pressure off the world’s more overcrowded tourist sites. But governments aren’t taking any chances. Tourism generates about 10 percent of total world GDP, and in an effort to protect the long-term cultural and economic value of popular sites, some countries have begun limiting visitors, especially at environmentally fragile destinations. Only a tiny fraction of Australia’s Great Barrier Reef is open to visitors. Stonehenge was closed to the public for 15 years, and very few people can view the Lascaux Cave in Dordogne, France (site of some of the world’s finest Paleolithic cave paintings). The Ordesa National Park in Spain has been closed to car traffic. Some countries with overstressed infrastructure have tried to market tourists away from hot spots to less trodden regions; this year Britain launched a £40 million campaign to publicize sites outside London, in places like Wales, Windsor and Glasgow. Others have taken a more controversial approach. Some Italian towns have begun a kind of tourist profiling, giving preferential access to those who can afford first-class accommodations. During a water shortage in Capri a few years ago, day-trippers were turned away so that the island could continue to cater to its five-star-hotel tourists; a similar plan is being considered this year. “I realize it looks like a despicable measure,” said Mayor Constantino Federico at the time, “but I certainly cannot damage our five-star hotels, which host tourists who spend millions of lire each day.”
Tourists can be just as harmful to native residents. In the south of France, 17 million second-home owners are pricing many locals out of their own villages. In Britain’s Exmoor National Park, where second homes make up as much as 40 percent of residences, locals have taken action, drafting proposed legislation that would limit the number of properties that could be used as vacation homes. Even more worrisome is the problem of tourism “leakage” in poor countries. When large multinational travel companies open up new tourist destinations, they tend to buy things like food, building materials and labor from established sources outside the host country. (Caribbean resorts have been known to import bananas.) That means that locals are mostly denied the benefits of tourism revenues. A recent U.N. report on tourism in least-developed countries notes that, on average, 55 percent of tourism expenditures remain outside the host countries.
Concern over the human cost of tourism is now front and center. “There’s a growing understanding that sustainable tourism isn’t just about saving turtles, or monitoring how often hotels wash their sheets,” says Sue Wheat of Tourism Concern, a British-based nonprofit that lobbies for fair trade in tourism. Tourism Concern and other NGOs encourage travelers to patronize smaller, locally run travel companies, which tend to limit leakages. But multinationals aren’t all bad–especially when they help develop new markets and transfer valuable tourism skills to locals. In the Maldives, where major luxury resorts have been running for two decades, joint public-private initiatives have ensured that a high percentage of locals are employed as managers, creating a base for future entrepreneurship.
While travelers to poorer areas won’t necessarily expect the upscale amenities already available in places like the Maldives, they will demand well-organized vacations and competent staff. That’s why the most proactive developing countries are launching massive campaigns to increase tourism training. Tourism is an integral part of a Pan-African development program that has become the continent’s own Marshall Plan. South Africa’s booming industry, which contributes more than $2 billion to yearly GDP, has become the model. Experts say tourism has the potential to create one new job for every eight to 12 visitors. Consequently, conservation colleges are springing up, and tourism-marketing and-training programs are rife. A new multimillion-dollar government entrepreneurship project aims to train 15,000 new workers over the next four years.
In the best-case scenario, tourism can deliver not only jobs but also peace. In countries like Turkey, tourism revenue has provided a powerful incentive for stability. Conversely, places such as Zimbabwe, Liberia and Sierra Leone have become cautionary examples of how quickly tourism-related wealth disappears in the face of chaos and conflict. There is no doubt that tourism holds the promise of prosperity for the world’s poor. Tourism in least-developed countries is growing faster than the world average, and the industry is already the leading service export sector in 24 of the world’s 49 poorest countries.
The challenge now is to build tourism sectors that are truly local, and sustainable. On the pristine coast of eastern South Africa, the fledgling success of companies such as Amadiba Adventures has proved that this is possible. Several hundred visitors book tours annually, up from zero two years ago. Perhaps more important, more than half the locals involved in Amadiba have gone on to start other ventures, seeding new areas of the economy. Already plans are underway to start more companies like this along the South African coast, with help from the European Union. As the hordes of holiday-makers disembark this summer, they’ll be bringing not only sunscreen and spending money, but also hope.
title: “Getting Off The Beaten Track” ShowToc: true date: “2023-01-22” author: “Joseph Katz”
That was then. A new kind of travel is in vogue now. Savvy tourists are abandoning Eurostyle high-rises for more authentic holidays. On the wild coast of eastern South Africa, for example, young Europeans gallop on pristine beaches and thread their way through hills carpeted by subtropical vegetation. At night, they make camp with the native Xhosa people; huddled by the fire after a typical dinner of meat stew, pumpkin leaves, wild spinach and a dumpling called vetkoek, they listen to tribal folk tales. The experience is offered not by a multinational tour operator but by the Xhosa themselves, through a small, locally run firm called Amadiba Adventures. Their pay: income two and a half times the average local wage.
Departure from the beaten path may represent the future of global tourism–an industry on the verge of both growth and change. While last year’s global recession and the terrorist attacks of September 11 pushed tourist numbers down for the first time since 1982, the impact was less than many had feared. Longer-term trends–including a rise in global wealth, improving transport technology, liberalization of international airspace, cheaper flights and the use of the Internet as a travel tool–will enable more people around the world to travel than ever before. Last year there were 693 million tourist arrivals between nations. The World Tourism Organization expects that number to increase to more than 1 billion by 2010. Tomorrow’s tourists will come from new places; the number of Asian, and particularly Chinese, tourists should explode as that region is integrated into the global economy. The new tourists will want different things. The sun-and-surf standard is giving way to adventure travel, ecotourism, cultural tours and sport vacations in ever more far-flung places: China, the Maldives, Botswana, Vanuatu. The new buzzword: authenticity.
At the same time, tourists are getting pickier. “There are a lot of experienced travelers, and they are demanding more in terms of service, but often want to pay less,” says George Morgan-Grenville, managing director of the high-end British-based tour operator Abercrombie & Kent. And that they do. Budget European airlines like Ryanair and easyJet have forced high-cost incumbents like British Airways to slash fares, while others, like Belgium’s Sabena, have gone out of business altogether. Internet travel sites are adding their own rate cuts to the chaos; Travelocity and Expedia are now among the 10 largest U.S. distributors of travel products. Europe’s largest online travel agency, ebookers.com, recorded sales of $280 million in 2001, up from $24 million in 1999. Recent research by the marketing firm of Yesawich, Peppardine and Brown showed that almost four in 10 Americans seek a discount of 50 percent to motivate them to take a trip.
Technology has also made it easier for people to research and plan their own trips, putting tour operators and travel agents under extreme pressure. “Everyone is looking for a niche,” says Richard Tobias, chief executive of the British Incoming Tour Operators Association. “The smaller operators who can offer specialized tours are doing well, and the largest companies are trying to capitalize on economies of scale to offer the best deals.”
The new travelers seek the unknown–the Ottoman mansion turned boutique hotel in Istanbul, the windsurfing camp in Cape Verde, the Masai-owned lodge in Kenya. The World Tourism Organization ranks sport-and-scuba vacations, cultural and rural tourism and nature-based travel in pristine parts of Africa and Asia among the hottest growth areas over the next two decades. Even when tourists do take beach vacations (still the biggest slice of the market), the WTO says they are switching from established areas like the Caribbean and Hawaii to more exotic destinations like the Indian Ocean and Southeast Asia.
This may yield unexpected benefits. Many traditionally popular sites are overburdened. Some countries have even begun limiting tourism at environmentally fragile destinations. Only a tiny fraction of Australia’s Great Barrier Reef is open to the public. Stonehenge was closed for 15 years, and very few people can view the Lascaux Cave in Dordogne, France, the site of some of the world’s finest Paleolithic cave paintings. The Ordesa National Park in Spain has been closed to car traffic. This year, Britain launched a $62 million campaign to publicize sites outside much-trodden London–in places like Glasgow and Wales.
There’s a new concern about how much tourist money flows back into local communities. “Sustainable tourism isn’t just about saving turtles, or monitoring how often hotels wash their sheets,” says Sue Wheat of Tourism Concern, a British-based nonprofit that lobbies for fair trade in tourism. It’s also about local jobs: Hong Kong boutiques and Australian tour operators alike are snapping up Mandarin-speaking employees in order to cater to a growing number of tourists from the Chinese mainland.
While travelers to poorer areas won’t necessarily expect the amenities of Hong Kong or Shanghai, they will demand well-organized vacations and competent staff. That’s why many developing countries are increasing tourism training. Tourism is an integral part of a Pan-African development program that has become the continent’s own Marshall Plan. South Africa’s booming industry, which contributes more than $2 billion to yearly GDP, has become the model. Tourism there has grown since September 11; travelers see its beaches as relatively safe vacation spots. Experts say tourism has the potential to create one new job for every eight to 12 visitors. Both the government and private sector are working to meet demand. Conservation colleges have become commonplace, as have tourism-marketing and -training programs. A new multimillion-dollar government entrepreneurship project aims to train 15,000 new workers over the next four years.
In the best-case scenario, tourism delivers not only jobs but also peace. In Turkey, tourism revenue has provided a powerful incentive for stability. Conversely, places like Zimbabwe, Liberia and Sierra Leone are cautionary examples of how quickly tourism-related wealth disappears in the face of chaos and conflict. There is no doubt that tourism holds out a promise of prosperity for the world’s poor. Tourism in least-developed countries is growing faster than the world average, and the industry is already the leading service export sector in 24 of the world’s 49 poorest countries.
The challenge now is to build tourism sectors that are truly local and sustainable. On the pristine coast of eastern South Africa, the fledgling success of companies such as Amadiba Adventures has proved that this is possible. Several hundred visitors book tours annually, up from zero two years ago. Perhaps more important, more than half the locals involved in Amadiba have gone on to start other ventures, seeding new areas of the economy. Already, plans are underway to start more companies like this along the South African coast, with help from the European Union. As South African Environmental Affairs and Tourism Minister Mohamed Valli Moosa put it recently, “Tourism offers us a chance to feed millions of our people who go to bed hungry, and a chance to heal the wounds of years of conflict in our continent.” As the hordes of holidaymakers disembark this summer, they’ll be bringing not only sunscreen and spending money, but also hope.
