The changing face of tourism

There has been not only a considerable change in the products and patterns of tourism across the globe over the past decade, but also an increasing concern with how it might contribute towards sustainable livelihoods, particularly of the world’s poor and how the considerable environmental impacts can be managed and mitigated. This article looks at the changing face of tourism in developing countries and the UK.

Ideas for teaching about the changing face of tourism

• Access the websites of some of the top UK tour operators such as Thomson Holidays, My Travel and First Choice to see how many developing country destinations are on offer. While you do this, think about the language and images that are used to sell these holidays and who and what are left out?
• Again, using the web, compare the experiences offered by: a beach resort at Mombasa; a safari camp in the Masai Mara; and an ecotourism venture in Kenya. Which has the worst impacts on the local people and why? Which benefits the local population most and in what ways? Does it have to be true that only small-scale tourism benefits the poor? What changes can be made to mass tourism to ensure a fairer distribution of earnings from tourism?
• The sheer scale of UK tourism activity makes it an excellent topic for geographical study. There are significant tourism sites in all localities of the UK and tourism includes day and local visits as well as international trips. There is now good information (see below) available on the web concerning tourism attractions in all regions and countries of the UK that allows teachers and pupils to identify possible local sites for study. Local festivals, country fairs and outdoor concerts also provide good opportunities for local tourism study.
• While there are plenty of school pupils who will not take regular holidays, many pupils will have direct experience of travel within the UK and internationally. Tourism topics will allow them to study issues relating to their own experiences. It is also possible to address issues of social exclusion by considering who does not get to travel (often the young and the old – see the government’s 1999 tourism policy ‘Tomorrow’s tourism’ for more details on tourism and social exclusion).
• Visits to local tourism sites allow teachers and pupils to consider one of the key debates in contemporary human geography, namely how public spaces are shaped by the complex interactions between structural processes and the actions of individuals and groups of people. In public space, humans through their actions and imaginations often inadvertently resist and alter the effects of structural processes.
• Background information drawn from the web, local publicity and discussion in class can be used to consider how structural processes such as global tourism trends and the policies of national and local government shape the built environment, attractions on offer and public spaces at tourism sites. It is then relatively easy to devise simple observational and pedestrian count methods (perhaps easier than questionnaires?) to examine how visitors (for example by age and gender?) to these sites actually use and change the nature of public space at different times of the day. Often visitors behave in ways that the managers and authorities in charge of sites had not expected. Also observation can be used to consider who is excluded or does not make use of particular tourism sites. Many local tourism sites can exclude particular social groups whose needs or interests are not addressed. These exercises can be used in many busy locations such as local seafronts, city squares, country parks or local festivals and outdoor events.
• Tourism attractions, festivals and outdoor events throughout the UK provide many excellent examples of environmental challenges and management issues arising from tourism activity. Some commentators argue that it is important to look carefully at tourism attractions claiming to be environmentally sustainable as so often tourism involves practices, such as air travel, that are far from sustainable. In 2002 the government issued guidance on how to measure sustainable tourism at the local level www.culture.gov.uk/tourism, the appendices to this government report provide information and indicators that could be used to develop an environmental audit framework for analysing a local site or major event.
• There are many sources of information concerning tourism that allow pupils to develop their experience of geographical statistical and mapping techniques using data that is topical and relevant to their lives.
• All regions of the UK now have regional and local airports that offer air flights throughout Europe. By logging into the booking systems for the airlines that operate from these airports it is possible for pupils quickly to build up data on how the price of travel varies by destination, distance, time and date of travel. This can be used for diagrammatic and statistical exercises examining the role of destinations and other processes that shape travel patterns and the cost of travel. Such data can also form the basis for a discussion about travel costs and social exclusion. The online train booking services can also be used to obtain data on the cost of rail travel.
• The most recent national ‘Travel trends’ survey based on the International Passenger Survey provides a wealth of geographical data on travellers into the UK and UK tourists abroad. To access the survey, search for ‘Travel trends’ on www.statistics.gov.uk.
• For example there is raw data for overseas visitors on spend, length of stay and purpose of visit to the UK broken down into 40 categories that indicate their country/region of residence. This provides plenty of mapping opportunities as does the data for every country in England, Wales and Scotland on overseas visitors in 2003, along with the data on individual countries visited by UK residents.
• The rich data in ‘Travel trends’ on UK residents’ visits abroad can be used to explore sustainability issues relating to changing travel patterns with the reduction in sea travel for journeys to Europe and the rise of air travel.
• The ‘Travel trends’ also provides excellent time series data, some of it back to 1983, which can be used to examine changes in tourism patterns. In particular the 1999–2003 data can be used to look at the dramatic tourism impacts of 9/11, foot and mouth and the Iraq War.
  

Useful sources of information

The pro-poor tourism partnership website, www.propoortourism.org.uk, has a number of useful, up-to-date information sheets as well as more detailed working papers.

Tourism Concern, a UK-based non-governmental organisation (http://tourismconcern.org.uk), has a special interest in drawing attention to the impacts of tourism in developing countries and is active in campaigning for fairly traded and ethical tourism.

The World Tourism Organisation (WTO) (www.world-tourism.org), together with the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) launched the Sustainable Tourism-Eliminating Poverty (ST-EP) initiative in 2002, which focuses on encouraging sustainable tourism – social, economic and ecological – and specifically addresses poverty.
The very useful ‘Travel trends’ survey is available at www.statistics.gov.uk with other statistical data on tourism.

The most detailed tourism statistics for the UK are available at the Star UK website, www.staruk.org (statistics on tourism and research UK). This contains information for each region of the UK. For those planning to teach UK tourism, this is a website that is worth exploring and the search function can be used to bring up many of the useful documents in the website archive.

The Department for Culture, Media and Sport website, www.culture.gov.uk, sets out the government policy on tourism and also contains details of museums, galleries and the art.