It should not come as a surprise to anyone that the Covid-19 pandemic has halted the tourism industry around the world. For many tourism organisations this has made it difficult for them to stay open, and some have not been able to do so. Now that there are vaccines in production and some of them have been authorised for use we are hopefully starting to visualise the end of this pandemic. And that leaves us with the question of how does the tourism industry recover from it.
Up until now, humans have not lived in a sustainable way, and the tourism industry has not done much to fight agains it. Rather the tourism industry has tried to capitalise on it by creating new fields within the tourism industry. For example ‘Extinction Tourism’ which focuses on selling tours to areas that have been impacted, for example by climate change, and encourages people to visit before it is to late (Fletcher, 2018). Another one is ‘Disaster Tourism’ which focuses on selling tours post-disaster sites, either human-induced disaster or natural disaster (Fletcher, 2018). These two fields are categorized under ecotourism.
Ecotourism has been defined by Page and Dowling (2002) as having five core principles: being nature-based, ecologically sustainable, environmentally friendly, locally beneficial and generate tourist attraction (Cater & Cater, 2015). The two types of ecotourism mentioned above do not fill these five principles and they continue to consume the limited resources that nature has to offer and therefor increase the opportunity for itself. As Fletcher (2018) writes:
This irony of this dynamic is increased when one considers the role of the tourism industry itself in helping to fuel the climate change causing the diminution subsequently harnessed as a source of enhanced value. A more perfect circle of disaster capitalism would be difficult to imagine.
The term ecotourism in its essence should be great if the five principles are followed. However, the term has increasingly been used to promote the tourism industry and locations but not to build up an industry that focuses on the environment and is ecologically sustainable. I believe that now is the perfect time to change the tourism industry. As we are reaching the end of the Covid-19 pandemic and tourism organizations start to operate again it provides the perfect opportunity to reconsider the path they are on and try to operate in a more sustainable way, keeping the five principles of ecotourism in mind, and start working towards giving the tourism industry the opportunity to be strong over the coming decades and centuries.
References
Cater, C., & Cater, E. (2015). Ecotourism. 6, 105-109.
Fletcher, R. (2018, Aug 03). Ecotourism after nature: Anthropocene tourism as a new capitalist “fix”. Journal of Sustainable Tourism, 27(4), 522-535. doi:10.1080/09669582.2018.1471084
