By Martin Owen
Ask any woodsman, farmer or gardener if they leave the forest, farm, or garden to just grow, and they’d all laugh. To have any piece of land completely unattended and you’d soon have chaos. The wrong sort of trees would start to grow, possibly forcing out native species. The land would be become exhausted if crops were not rotated and land fertilized. Gardens would be choked with weeds; grass would die off without the correct watering and pests and bugs would decimate crops. The essential part of farming, forestry, and gardening is land management. It doesn’t mean that nature cannot be left to its own devices, but Mother Nature does need a helping hand sometimes.
What’s this got to do with tourism? It’s exactly the same principle. Left to its own, tourism just happens. Visitors are attracted to an area and flood in. To cater for those visitors, hotels spring up with high rises blocking the view. Roads become inadequate to handle the traffic, resulting in gridlock. Beaches become garbage dumps if they are not cleaned and groomed. Without planning, airports either become too small or grow enormously. The result will be disgruntled residents and disillusioned tourists. Before long, there is no tourist industry and the economy of the region suffers along with jobs and quality of life.
We’ve all seen this in too many places. Venice is overwhelmed by tourists from cruise ships. Machu Picchu is clogged with tourist destroying the delicate ecosystem and even Mount Everest becomes a garbage dump. Locally we’ve seen resorts overburdened with high rise condo blocks and roads blocked with traffic during ‘the season’.
Tourism management is vital to the long-term success of an area. Sustainability of visitation is essential if the local area is to benefit from the economic bounty of tourism, and quality of life for the locals suffers if we don’t actively intervene.
This can be as simple as restricting building heights so that nothing is allowed to be built that’s taller than a palm tree, but in essence it’s much more involved than that. It requires a great number of people to work together. It also means that compromises are made between the various stakeholders. Airlines, cruise companies and hoteliers are all profit-making businesses and they wish to bring as many visitors as they can to maximize revenue. The need for profit is understandable and that is what business is about. On the other hand, those who live in tourist areas want to be able to live their lives enjoyably, although discouraging tourists can lose jobs and see economies falter.
In some areas, the damage has been done and management of the tourism industry requires creative decisions by CVBs, tourist boards, local government and businesses. Rather than just ‘let the tourist come’ it’s important to attract the sort of visitors you really want. Ideally, we all wish for relatively few, high spending, responsible and sympathetic visitors. Guests like you and me! Seriously, it’s a major task to identify who are the right customers for our product. Where they come from and what means they use to get here. How they behave and what activities they engage in when they’re with us. The amount of research needed to be engaged in by tourism organizations is immense. The resulting cooperation that is required between local government, other stakeholders and the resident population is considerable. It will mean compromise by all parties to bring the best results for everyone.
Perhaps of the next few months we can examine how this process can be made to work?