GeoTourism Finalist: Context Travel’s Sustainable Travel Initiative
Monday, 01 Sep, 2009
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Context walking seminars are designed to include discussion of the impacts of tourism on monuments and the character of the city. Docents (our guides) are trained to advise our customers on the most sustainable way to visit the city after the tour, including patronizing small, locally-owned businesses and using alternative transport. Part of the proceeds from our walks and additional donations are routed through the Context Foundation for Sustainable Travel to cultural preservation projects in these cities, which materially benefit them. The project are often focused on sustaining the character of the city and its local residents rather than museums or monuments. Lastly, the Foundation also runs a travel scholarship for disadvantaged youths, broadening the reach of travel (and its ameliorative, educational effects) to a population that has little access to it.
Firstly, Context operates in cities, which often get overlooked in discussions of sustainable tourism. But large destination cities like Rome, Paris, and New York face serious issues with crowding, tourism management, and the stripping of character through mass tourism. Secondly, because we only work with small groups (our walks are capped at 6 people) we’re able to use the power of dialogue and discussion to allow our customers to critically engage with the issues of sustainability and geotourism. Thirdly, our foundation’s travel scholarship is completely innovative. It turns the focus of sustainable tourism around on itself. How sustainable is tourism if only the well-off are able to visit far-off lands and cultures? Are we bifurcating our societies into the travel haves and the travel have-nots, and if so does this mean that we’re only empowering part of our population with an appreciation and knowledge of other cultures? The travel scholarship seeks to address this and, in so doing, makes travel a truly sustainable (in a whole society sense) endeavor.
We began Context in 2002. Years previously I had written several articles about ecotourism for National Geographic Adventure, Landscape Architecture, and other magazines. Some of this work landed me on NG’s sustainable destinations panel. One day I woke up and realized that in addition to writing about sustainable travel and working on the topic for NG I was also running my own travel business. So, in 2006-7 we began to look critically at what we do and searching for ways to do it better.
We began with an internal discussion among the docents who lead our walks (nearly 200 scholars, at this point) and held a series of workshops on the issues facing our cities. Drawing on some outside research on the destinations and combining this with the expertise of our scholars—many of whom are preservationists, conservators, and others with specialized knowledge—and the institutional knowledge Context had of its programs and clients, we laid the groundwork for transforming ourselves into a more sustainable organization. Part of this entailed redesigning our programs. Part of it entailed establishing programs, mostly through a nonprofit foundation, to preserve the character of our cities.
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