INTRODUCTION
Welcome to the inaugural post of the Mindful Wayfarer website.
We are thrilled to kick off this journey with an insightful Q&A with Dr. Harold Goodwin,
who is often called the father of responsible tourism. His extensive experience and passion for responsible travel make him an ideal first guest for our blog.
We’re grateful he took the time to share his thoughts and expertise, setting a strong foundation for our discussions on how we can all contribute to making tourism more responsible and impactful.
UNDERSTANDING RESPONSIBLE TOURISM – Q & A WITH DR. HAROLD GOODWIN
Note: The following responses have been edited for brevity while preserving their original intent.
1. WHAT IS RESPONSIBLE TOURISM?
Dr. Goodwin, thanks for taking the time to share your insights! So the first question is: What is responsible tourism?
The easiest definition of responsible tourism is that it’s any form of travel that makes places better for people to live in, and better for people to visit, in that order. In other words, it puts the interests of the local community, their environment, and their culture first.
Now that doesn’t mean that you ignore the interests of the traveler, clearly. But you accept that, as they say in the old Tourism Concern campaign, ‘We take our holidays in other people’s homes’. And so we aspire to travel as guests and behave as guests.
With that said, any kind of tourism can be more responsible. It means you’re going to take responsibility for the decisions that you make about your travel, and think about whether you’re having a positive or negative impact through what you’re doing.
2. COMMON MISCONCEPTIONS ABOUT RESPONSIBLE TOURISM
What are some common misconceptions that people have about responsible tourism?
One is that it’s more expensive. Sometimes it is, but very often it isn’t.
But also: if you talk to Justin Francis about why [the company that he and Goodwin co-founded] ResponsibleTravel.com has been so successful, one of the things he says is that there’s a big difference between [the way you experience] responsible travel and [how you experience] something like fairly-traded coffee.
Because neither Justin nor I can taste the difference between fairly traded coffee and non-fairly-traded coffee. But you should be able to tell the difference in the experience when you’re traveling responsibly. If it isn’t different in the way you experience it, it’s almost certainly not responsible travel.
That’s what ResponsibleTravel.com has demonstrated. People find a great trip and then they come back to ResponsibleTravel.com because they’re looking for other great trips, great experiences.
And the other thing I’d say is that the more you are looking for an experience, and the closer you want to be to the local community in having that experience, the more you need to be looking for responsible experiences. Because that’s when you’re most likely to be having an impact on people’s lives.
3. CORE PRINCIPLES OF RESPONSIBLE TRAVEL
What are the core principles of responsible travel that travelers should be aware of?
Just to travel as a guest. Don’t think you own the destination because you bought a holiday. Strive to minimize your negative impacts on the environment, culture and local economy, and maximize your positive impacts. It’s not difficult.
4. HOW RESPONSIBLE TRAVEL HAS CHANGED SINCE COVID
With global events like the COVID 19 pandemic, how has the concept and awareness of responsible travel changed in the last few years?
I think there’s two things which have changed in the last five years. One is that we’ve seen a big growth in experiential consumption. And travel is just a form of consumption, the difference is that we do it away from home. So not surprisingly, there’s more focus on experience in travel as well. So that’s one big change, but that’s nothing to do with COVID.
The big change that COVID brought was suddenly people who lived in overtouristed destinations were reminded of what it used to be like before the tourists arrived. And that’s not the only thing that’s caused the overtourism backlash, but it is one of the things. Suddenly, people remembered what Venice was like before the hordes of tourists, because they weren’t there during COVID.
5. THE OVERTOURISM BACKLASH
I’ve seen the overtourism backlash, for example in Spain, with banners protesting overtourism.
You know why that’s happening? The biggest single driver of the overtourism backlash is what’s happening to housing prices.
With the rise of Airbnb and all of the short-term rental companies, suddenly homes have been commoditized. People buy them as long-term investments, to get capital growth and to get a revenue from. And they get the highest capital growth and the highest revenue if they turn them into short-term lets for tourists.
That’s what’s driving the backlash now. It’s true there was a campaign against overtourism before. The first one, in Barcelona, was about crowding, and was driven just by the impact of tourists in the public spaces. But the strength of the current campaigns is a consequence of what’s happened with housing.
6. WHY TRAVEL RESPONSIBLY?
This might be a bit of a leading question, but why should travelers care about traveling responsibly?
Most people don’t want to make the world a worse place. Yes, there are some people who think that they have more license when they’re abroad, and behave irresponsibly. But that’s not most people.
If you look at somewhere like Magaluf or Ibiza, yes, irresponsible behavior happens there, but it happens in a very small part of those places. It’s not the whole island. It’s just one small strip, but that becomes the reputation of the place. Most people don’t want to do that. If they do harm it’s by accident, not deliberately.
7. HOW TO ASSESS YOUR IMPACT
So for the traveler who’s interested in learning to travel more responsibly, how can they assess the impact of their actions on local communities and ecosystems?
Let’s start with accommodation. You can deliberately choose to stay in small, locally-owned accommodation, a small boutique hotel or a homestay.
If you’re in a homestay, the chances are it’s owned by the people you’ll be staying with in a bed-and-breakfast situation.
If you book a short term rental, the chances are it’s owned by somebody who doesn’t live there. And it’s also quite possible that you’ll be renting something that’s owned by a small group, who own a lot of these things.
In terms of hotels: when you get into the hotel, you can tell if the hotel is being run sustainably or not.
I’ll give you an example that happened to me. This particular example is from Morocco. I didn’t choose the hotel, because I work abroad a lot. I’m booked into an apparently highly-rated sustainable hotel. It’s 34°C [93°F] outside. I go to my room. All the lights are on, the air conditioning is set at 15°C [59°F] and the TV is on telling me who I am.
I don’t need to be told my name. If I come into a room that’s 15°C degrees when the temperature outside is 34°C, I will get the flu. And I can manage to turn the lights on for myself.
So: I turn the lights off, I turn the TV off, and I put the air conditioning up to about 24°C [75°F] degrees, which I think is comfortable for sleeping.
I go out for supper. When I come back, once again, the TV’s on, telling me who I am. The lights are all on and again, and the air conditioning is back down at 15°C.
And that sort of thing is quite common. I’ll talk to people and they’ll tell me they often go into their hotel room and they’ll find that the hotel’s left an extra key card or a piece of cardboard stuck in the slot so they can leave the air conditioning on when they leave the room.
But the point is: that’s not a sustainably-run hotel. Despite the fact it’s got a certificate. The certificate alone doesn’t mean it’s being run in a sustainable way.
Which is why I think checking the user-generated content in the reviews and comments is so important.
But back to other things travelers can do: You can ask whether the shower is aerated or not. [an aerated shower head saves water. It mixes the water with air to form larger droplets. This makes it feel like there is more water flowing than there actually is. So you can have the experience of a full shower while using up to 50% less water.]
You can think about your food choices, and choose things which have been grown locally, not imported. And you can ask the waiters and the kitchen about it.
In terms of souvenirs, instead of buying from the hotel shop, you can go find the craftspeople working in the market, and buy them directly from the person who made it.
And all these things you can do to travel more responsibly, in my view, enhance the experience. They’re not a penalty. They make for a better holiday.
8. CASE STUDIES IN RESPONSIBLE TRAVEL: KERALA AND DUBROVNIK
Can you discuss any case studies where responsible travel has had a positive impact on the destination as a whole? Just one or two. And In particular, Kerala?
What’s happened in Kerala is because the Keralan government has adopted responsible travel, not just the tourism industry. It was the government which promoted that form of tourism and won the support of the industry and the community for it. So government, industry and communities came together to make that happen.
One of the best memories of my professional tourism work is being with a group from the Association of Independent Tour Operators, and the then secretary of tourism in Kerala literally bounding into the room to come up to the lectern and say, ‘I’m proud to announce that we’ve just cancelled the last charter flight from the UK into Kerala’.
They completely changed the tourism model and moved from mass tourism arriving on charter flights to encouraging individuals to visit and stay in small hotels and resorts throughout Kerala.
Another example, again led by government, but with the support of the local industry and communities, is Dubrovnik, where as it happens the mayor has control over the number of ships which can berth there. And the mayor has restricted the number of ships that can dock on any day to three, and restricted the maximum size of ships that can dock at Dubrovnik.
That has taken a lot of tourism pressure off. And they’ve restricted the ways in which the local cafes and restaurants can use the public space outside of their establishments. So you can walk down the street in Dubrovnik.
Basically, what happens is that you get a kind of tripartite partnership going, of the government working with the community and engaging the travel industry. This partnership is a bit rocky at various stages, but over a period of time, it changes the way tourism works.
But it’s a tripartite activity, and clearly the only organization that can lead on that is government. So the level of local democracy in that place is fundamental to whether you can make it work or not. And that’s why both the Cape Town Declaration in 2002 and the 2022 [Responsible Tourism] Charter talk about the importance of engaging local communities in how tourism is run in their destination.
9. EFFECTS OF THE RESPONSIBLE TRAVEL EFFORTS IN KERALA AND DUBROVNIK
In these two case studies of Kerala and Dubrovnik, what are the changes that you can see when comparing before vs. after this government intervention?
In Dubrovnik, what has happened is that the absolute mass of tourists turning up during the day has been reduced, which makes it attractive for people who come and stay overnight.
And obviously a guest who stays overnight is making a bigger contribution to the local economy than a day tripper who’s coming off a boat might buy a beer, buy an ice cream, use the loo and take some photographs and then get back on the boat. So the economic contribution a day tripper brings is significantly less than one who books into a local hotel for four or five nights.
In terms of Kerala, the transformation has been really significant because they’ve moved over to having tourists who stay in local communities, in small hotels, in small resorts and in home stays throughout Kerala, living alongside the community and enjoying those experiences, and the village life experience films that you can see on the Kerala tourism website really give a flavor of that.
10. THE FUTURE OF RESPONSIBLE TRAVEL
What do you envision the future of responsible travel being, or how do you imagine it evolving in the next decade?
The honest answer is I’ve got no idea.
I’ll put this in context for you. In 1972, I was a second year undergraduate studying politics at the University of York, and the Club of Rome report came out that year. It basically produced some forecasts of what would happen if we carried on with business as usual. And I read that report in 1972 and thought, ‘We’ll never make that mistake.’
Guess what? We made that mistake. So it’s very hard for me to be optimistic about the future.
Having said that, what I would say is that to win a Responsible Tourism Award now, applicants have got to be probably 10 times better than the equivalent businesses who won in 2004. So if you wanted to measure progress in that sense, there has demonstrably been progress.
What will continue to happen? I really don’t know. And I don’t know because a lot of the really big geopolitical stuff that’s happening around us makes the future really uncertain.
On the other hand, I would say that places like India are really motoring ahead and doing very interesting things around sustainability. And although it’s unfashionable to say this, so is China. And South Africa is doing more and more. So if you look beyond Europe, it’s much easier to be optimistic than it is inside Europe. Which isn’t to say that good things aren’t still happening in Europe. They are.
And it’s also true if you look at the proper commercial research done by companies like Expedia, Booking.com, Google, when they look at motivation and travel preferences, there is a clear increase in the number of people who want to have great experiences. And great experiences mean you don’t feel guilty afterwards. Otherwise, what’s the point?
So there’s a bit of me that stays optimistic. But I also have to recognize that the context in which we’re all operating is going to be very difficult. So to answer your question, I don’t know how it will evolve, but I’m still optimistic, because I see improvement year-on-year.
11. DR. GOODWIN’S HOPES FOR THE FUTURE OF RESPONSIBLE TRAVEL
But in an ideal world, what about your hopes for the future of responsible tourism?
I think there’d just be more of it. The thing I always tell people about responsible travel is: don’t allow the pursuit of the perfect to drive out the good. The important thing is to decide what matters locally, and to do those things.
About Dr. Goodwin:
Dr. Harold Goodwin is a globally recognized expert in responsible tourism with decades of impactful work in the industry. His accomplishments include:
- Co-founding Responsible Travel with Justin Francis, OBE, an activist travel company promoting ethical travel experiences.
- Founding the International Centre for Responsible Tourism (ICRT), an organization dedicated to advancing sustainable tourism practices worldwide.
- Founding ICRT Global, which connects various International Centres for Responsible Tourism worldwide to share knowledge and best practices.
- Chairing the Responsible Tourism Awards* since their inception in 2004, celebrating innovative and impactful contributions to responsible tourism.
- Authoring numerous influential publications and reports on sustainable tourism, helping to shape policies and practices within the industry.
- Serving as a consultant for various international organizations, including the United Nations World Tourism Organization (UNWTO), to promote responsible tourism initiatives globally.
- Drafting the 2002 Cape Town Declaration on Responsible Tourism and writing the 2022 Responsible Tourism Charter
- Leading educational programs and workshops that empower tourism professionals to adopt sustainable practices and foster community engagement.
- Being inducted into the Global Travel Hall of Fame in November 2023 for his significant contributions to responsible tourism.
- Sharing insights on responsible tourism through the Responsible Tourism Partnership YouTube channel, which features a variety of educational videos.
Dr. Goodwin is also a Professor Emeritus at Manchester Metropolitan University and continues to inspire change through his advocacy and academic work.
*The Responsible Tourism Awards are open to businesses, destinations, and individuals striving to make tourism more sustainable, providing an excellent opportunity to gain recognition for their efforts.
