Tourism Under Attack

Where’s the happiness, joy and relaxation in a 5 star gold-barred hotel where you know that your waiter’s family is starving writes Gordon Sillence

Anyone who still does not recognise that peace and security have moved to the top of the tourism sustainability agenda needs to take a good look at todays’ luxury tourism bonanza and see just where this current middle class, WTO/WTTC-driven economic model has taken us. 

Last weeks’ attacks on tourists in Egypt included fireworks and knives being used by desperate, disillusioned disadvantaged individuals from the majority world, currently under the thumb of oppressive dictators backed by the big western military powerhouses. 

The Middle East has become the deformed epicentre of attention, but the problem is as international as its causes. Acts of desperation by the few inflict further economic suffering on the many as tourism revenue streams dry up when tourists desert media-painted dodgy destinations for so-called safer havens.

With poverty driving more than half the world mad or sad, we can expect future international travellers to fear local populations, or feel bad or also sad about their hosts’ appalling living and working conditions. 

Where’s the happiness, joy and relaxation in turning up at a 5 star gold-barred hotel where you know that your waiter’s family is starving in some rural backwater and the food on your table comes at a deadly cost to unseen malnourished children, perhaps a stones’ throw away from your locked down, sealed up but still not totally secure beachfront resort which you fear to leave without an escort?

We have created the tourist-in-a-bubble model where those enjoying the cream of our current horrendously unequal overall economic system have made us put on cultural blinkers to avoid seeing the reality of global inequality, and put up concrete barriers to ensure the haves’ and have nots’ keep their physical and emotional distance. 

Whatever happened to the intercultural exchange, economic gains and environmental benefits those advocating Agenda 21-style developments have worked towards and hoped for over the last three decades? 

Sadly, the recent affirmation of the 2015 version of Millennium SD Goals glosses over the rotten core of our divided humanity, offering a token peace for those who can afford it, based on a security-first, markets-first world instead of the sustainability-first people, planet, prosperity vision that underpins these admirable goals.

The modern luxury-led mass tourism model has instead created envy, jealousy, greed and aspiration-turned-to-desperation. And that statement can be applied to both those at the top benefitting from tourism profit-making as well as those at the bottom suffering this post-colonial colonization of their homelands, heads and hearts. 

We have been locked into that development model as we helplessly bow before the forces of corporate globalization and nation-state competition. It’s hard to think that there is an alternative to this top-down, trickle-down thinking, especially when those holding the reigns occupy the restaurant seats and silk sheets of these five star paradises we all aspire to enjoy, but only a relative few of us experience in reality.

Until we find an alternative, we can expect the growth of repressive state apparatus to protect the status quo – more destination surveillance and security guards, police and military checks, segregation and separation of tourists from their hosts. 

This will keep the current development model on course for the expected 2 billion international arrivals by the year 2020, and therefore balance the books and line the bank accounts of the 1%, their bureaucratic beneficiaries and capitalist wannabees.  It will also fuel the disillusion; hate and rage that is fermenting in those very same destinations in which we wish to spend our stress-relieving, mentally stimulating, sacred holiday time.

Those in the tourism sector – its administrators, businesses and high end clientele – need to look very closely at how their actions stimulate the sickeningly inequitable conditions that escalate into these isolated but media high-lighted violent outbursts. When you turn on the news and see the next attack on a tourist target, ask which tourism stakeholders are investing in a real peace that comes from creating fair, just and prosperous conditions through education, resource access and cultural tolerance in the destinations in which the operate. 

We need to aim for quality tourism, not luxury tourism, and that difference is poorly understood by mind sets governed by celebrity excess and selfish gratification, and no CSR agenda is complete without that approach.

Gordon Sillence is an international sustainable development consultant currently working on tourism sustainability and implementation of the Olympic Truce during this years’ Rio 2016 Games details HERE

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