All-inclusives continue to remain all-exclusive says Tourism Concern

Tricia Barnett of Tourism Concern responds to Harold Goodwin.

It feels as though the debate on all-inclusives has slipped progress towards recognising local peoples’ rights in relation to the development of tourism back 20 years, and it is painful.

It reminds us of why Tourism Concern exists.

Clearly, there is market demand:  we all want holidays and we have an economic recession and all-inclusives offer us the opportunity to feel assured that we can afford such a holiday. (I am of course talking about all-inclusives that are popular mainstream hotels and not ones housed in remote rainforests).    When evaluated from the customers’ perspective  the guarantee of a known travel budget is key. By choosing all-inclusive travel packages, tourists know they are in safe hands and there will be a quality product for a manageable price.  Operators can enhance their control over the quality of the end product, and hotels can increase their efficiency and predictability of demand

But  I don’t think there’s much to support the argument that local people benefit from these holidays.  Why should all-inclusives deny people their opportunities as well as their rights?  And if they are really all OK and everyone is benefiting, I wonder why it took ODI and TUI more than a year to publish their research results.

Our arguments are simple:

1.      Tourism Concern has researched into labour conditions in mainstream all-inclusive hotels that are used by all the mainstream tour operators in five different popular destinations and we have published the results:  ‘Labour standards, social responsibility and tourism’ (2004).  The common results include failure to recognise workers’ rights to join a trade union; lack of training; being pressurised into working a considerable amount of unpaid overtime;  not earning a living wage.

2.      The power relations between local entrepreneurs and residents and the tour operators are, as is quite normal, unequal.   My own, albeit limited, research in Turkey in 2009 opened up a high level of anger, frustration and distress from mayors and hotel associations about how they had to succumb to the pressure of UK operators to transform their hotels into all-inclusives.  This is supplemented by a multitude of contributions from local entrepreneurs from Crete to Cyprus from The Gambia to Kenya and from St. Lucia to Jamaica who complain of being unable to run their businesses any longer because the footfall of tourists coming out of the all-inclusives is so low.

3.      Competition between the operators is so intense that margins are cut all down the supply chain.  How much are the companies paying for the rooms?  My hotel association contacts in Turkey told me that they get €20 a night for the whole package per person. How is this sustainable?

4.      The evidence that local linkages are positive and that entrepreneurs do benefit from tourism and that the workers had good opportunities and earned a living wage was maintained by GTZ research in the Dominican Republic several years ago now, but it has never been published.

It is true that all forms of tourism can be made more socially, economically and environmentally responsible. But these efforts need to start with the rights of workers and communities in destinations. This requires key industry players to undertake human rights due diligence throughout their supply chains and address the negative impacts of the all-inclusives power play and race to the bottom that it entails.

Details of the Sustainable Tourism Report Suite:  HERE