An additional role for WTTC – an opinion from TravelMole Down Under!

I am becoming increasingly concerned regarding the apparent lack of understanding of the economic value of tourism by Governments throughout the world today.

WTTC does and excellent job in range of areas, which we applaud, but we earnestly request that WTTC considers taking on this critical role.

It is nothing new that Governments are under-investing in tourism, an industry not taken seriously by many Governments, some leading nations not even having a specific department for the largest earner of foreign exchange to that country and often the largest employer, yet one would have thought that things would have changed by now!

I believe that WTTC is the one global organisation that can work on governments throughout the world to get them to seriously recognise the total economic benefit of tourism and what national and global economic life would be without it.  

WTTC could be the catalyst for the production of a global dossier of the full economic benefits of tourism to and in some of the world’s leading destinations, by going to those destinations and saying to them: –

This is what you have now, but if you measured tourism effectively, this is what you could have.  In addition, with serious marketing and development funding, this is the volume of business you could have.   We need you to take a serious step forward by funding tourism development and marketing appropriately as you would any and do any other key industry.

It is only then that the true economic benefit will emerge.
 
Currently there is a plethora of tourism impact fragmented economic information that needs to pulled into one source incorporating all sectors impacted by tourism, e.g. construction, manufacturing, retail, employment transport, etc, etc, i.e. what appears not to be tourism, but without tourism or with a downturn in tourism, these would all be badly affected.   This information needs to be extracted and brought into one tourism economic location and database.
 
Not even the big destinations like the UK do this properly and neither do they fund tourism properly even though it is critical to their economy.
 
So, if WTTC could convince some key destinations to extract this information, enter into a central database run by WTTC and start a world tourism total economic benefit portfolio and get them to move forward, the others will follow.
 
As part of this work, the real potential effect of disasters on tourism and the real economic impact that they may have on economies generally could be looked at, not just in terms of how the numbers of visitors and their spend that would be impacted, but all the other factors and industries and sectors that would be devastated with an assessment of the real economic impact – tourism is the key affected industry in most of these diasters, yet there is no real comprehensive economic assessment, unless I have missed it! 
 
Now is the time to do it and for example if we looked at bird flu having been discovered in the UK, what is the real and total potential effect on the economy of the UK, from a tourism perspective?  We know it will devastate agriculture, as did foot and mouth, but the impact on the tourism industry and subsequently, on rural and urban economies and then the national economy means the potential collapse of the UK economy and the collapse of tourism is the biggest player in that.

TravelMole wishes to offer its services to become the official media outlet for this information globally, releasing the information to the industry and possibly linking to the data source.

John Alwyn-Jones

Chairman and Co-Editor

TravelMole Australia and New Zealand