Why Not Let Tourism Concern Die?
Saturday, 29 Nov, 2009
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SEE WHY Helena Kennedy thinks Tourism Concern should stay in business:www.travelmole.tv/watch_vdo.php
Tourism Concern has been on the financial ropes for years. They’ve never managed to get any reasonable core funding to support their activities. Their membership (the only sustainable revenue they have) is stagnating. Their project funding is drying up. Their latest accounts show that they had just £16,616 of assets, £8,400 down from last year. They’re doing a half-price fire sale. It’s pretty easy to do the maths, isn’t it?
In this penury, they are still questioning, and putting the brakes on, successful concepts like ‘All Inclusives’, Burma Tourism, Tsunami reconstruction, Voluntourism, low wages etc etc.
And they pick fights with big, powerful organizations like Hilton, TUI and anybody else, big, that gets in their way. In brief, Tourism Concern is an annoying boil on the heel of mass tourism development.
In the words of one person commenting on a recent travelmole story: “Maybe, if Tourism Concern spent less of their time pursuing their one-sided, politically motivated, and ill-informed campaign against travel to Burma, then they might not find themselves in such a financial pickle. Perhaps Lonely Planet will help out”
In another life, perhaps.
So why don’t we let them die?
And, by ‘we’ I don’t mean the behemoths and bigwigs of the industry. I mean ‘us’, the millions of people who work at every level of the business, selling holidays, operating holidays, carrying holidaymakers, entertaining holidaymakers.
Because WE, and our night’s sleep, need them more than anyone else.
Where is there another independent, qualified, experienced, connected, investigative, fiery agency that will tell us what happens in destinations – warts ‘n all?
We want to organize holidays with a clean conscience, to give our clients experiences of a lifetime and we want to go home at night and sleep, in the knowledge that nobody is being deprived, humiliated, dispossessed and impoverished because of our work. Don’t we?
How can we do that without Tourism Concern finding fault in destinations, investigating the issues and screaming about them?
Yes, of course, there are other agencies that do the same sort of work. The Travel Foundation has developed absolutely fantastic projects and is gradually making the tourism industry more sustainable.
But it’s not an aggressive, unreconstructed bunch like Tourism Concern. After all it’s sponsored by the well-meaning ‘Great and Good’ of the travel industry so it can’t forget its manners like Tourism Concern can, and weigh in with an aggressive press release, TV or radio broadcast when it feels like it.
And, with all this colourful campaigning, it’s easy to forget the steady work that Tourism Concern has done over the last 20 years.
- Did you remember that Tourism Concern material is used by 75% of our secondary schools?
- Did you remember that it was Tourism Concern that started the CSR movement in the travel industry with its seminal work ‘Corporate Futures: Consultation on good practice; social responsibility in the tourism industry’.
- Did you remember that Tourism Concern maintains the Best Travel Library Anywhere – FREE
But at its heart Tourism Concern is a passionate, no holds barred, erudite, articulate campaigning organization, independently delivering the travel industry’s conscience.
And no-one that gets their pay in the travel industry can operate without their conscience, can they? However annoying it may be.
A donation or membership fee of a few quid, dollars or Euros will help them stay alive. It’s worth it for a night’s sleep, isn’t it?
Log on and dosh up!
Valere Tjolle
Valere
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