TravelMole Interview: Sue Hurdle, director, Travel Foundation

Ahead of TravelMole’s debate on sustainable tourism next week, Sue Hurdle tells TravelMole that mass tourism shouldn’t be the sole focus of the debate about sustainable tourism.

“There is an opinion that mass tourism is better for a destination than eco-tourism because you take people into a controlled environment. But if you take people off the beaten track those people could end up unintentionally disturbing plants or animals in a delicate environment.”

Ms Hurdle says although this isn’t the opinion of the Travel Foundation, it is something worth considering, and it is the reason why the Foundation aims to undertake projects in all kinds of tourist destinations, both mainstream and “off the beaten track”.

“We try to work with all kinds of operators, we are just starting with the mainstream operators because many smaller operators either have an eco-tourism or are aware of the issues because it is integral to their business,” says Ms Hurdle.

“Ultimately we want this to become the way all companies do business, so there aren’t companies singled out as being ‘sustainable’, it just becomes part of the way people do business.”

She said that projects undertaken by the Travel Foundation would continue to be across the board in terms of destinations. Ms Hurdle didn’t rule out projects in the Spanish Costas, for example, where the principle aim would be to repair damage done by mass tourism and retain the appeal of the destination.

She told TravelMole: “If we don’t look after destinations we just end up consuming them – gobbling up the destination and moving onto the next place when it is exhausted. This is just not sustainable.”

Ms Hurdle said that one of the ideas currently being discussed at the Foundation was to produce an objective system for modelling the impact of tourism at a destination. If it were possible to incorporate all the variables attached to the effect of tourists visiting an area, the model could be used by tourism suppliers to determine the “capacity” of a destination in terms of numbers of tourists and intensity of tourism.

Apart from encouraging participation from the industry, The Foundation also has a role to educate consumers and encourage them to donate as well as showing them where there money is going. While operators have been the focus of the Foundation to date, Ms Hurdle says agents could take a big role in helping to educate consumers. The Foundation is already talking to the CTTG concerning ideas about how to educate agents about sustainable tourism and get them to pass this knowledge onto consumers.

“Agents haven’t been significantly targeted but we do want them to get involved. It is not just operators that have a responsibility – the whole industry needs to get involved.”

Ms Hurdle says that in the future the Foundation hopes to work with agents, as well as suppliers like car hire companies, hotels and airlines.

Other ideas to improve consumer awareness and participation is to sell scratch cards on charter flights which offer prizes donated by travel companies. The money from selling the cards would go to the Foundation.

Ms Hurdle says that consumer donations will be the key area for funding for the Foundation in the future. A number of operators have signed up to the schemes to ask for a donation per booking, including First Choice, but Sue says the problem for many operators is a technical one – adapting their system to incorporate the donation.

The Foundation clearly has a huge job to do, but already has big ambitions for the future. Ms Hurdle says the key message she wants to get to the industry at the moment is to be patient and manage expectations, “don’t expect to see changes overnight”, she says.