Chinese tourists: when will we learn?
Mass commodity tourism as beneficial to local economies as hedge funds
The latest calls from VisitBritain et al for Britain to get its (potentially massive) share of Chinese tourists may be rather mistaken.
Of course it’s great to welcome more tourists, even millions more tourists. But it’s also worthwhile working out what the benefits may be.
What every destination wants is real tourism and real value, not the smoke and mirrors images of big tourist numbers. What they want is real people who take time to enjoy a destination, engage with it, understand and pay a reasonable fee for doing so. The happy tourists then go home relishing a superb experience and tell their nice friends all about it.
Is that what will happen with Xmillion tourists from China or wherever?
International tourism is set to increase to 1billion passengers pa this year – that will throw about a trillion dollars of revenue into the international tourism revenue pot – and it will be practically all commodity tourism.
Commodity tourism is about as good for local communities as hedge funds – simply because the financial benefits don’t trickle down to local communities. Much more often they don’t even touch the sides before they find their way back to the big players.
So why is that? Commodity tourism works in its own neatly sealed environmental system out of which very little of value escapes. Tourists pay prior to travel in their local currency, travel on international carriers, stay in internationally-owned and run hotels, eat at MacDonalds & co and buy from globally-branded outlets.
Yes, of course local people get to work in the shops and hotels and pay taxes on their wages. Which then surprisingly go to pay for the upkeep of the roads etc which tourists use for free.
And that’s forgetting about the emission impacts of long haul air tourism where apart from the airline cash handout of the EUETS (surprising that the airlines have stopped shouting – they’re now too busy counting the cash) – tourists don’t pay. But of course everybody does pay – a massive subsidy from the poor to the rich in higher food and water prices.
It would be nice to think that all these tourists may well deposit a big wodge of money in little community tourism destinations, small shops, local businesses – SMEs, SMMEs but, apart from the gesture politics of the big players, it won’t happen.
All the movements on the mass tourism trail are pretty well managed…in favour of the source market.
Well, why not? They are, after all their tourists. Their tourists with their wallets and their purses.
There may be another way. Destinations, after all, are the reason that tourists travel. Whereas the big operators may own the tourists, the communities own the destinations.
Now we’re getting towards a massive new expansion in global tourism, isn’t it time to look at tourism in a different way?
Valere Tjolle
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