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What Will Tourism 2023 Look Like?
Monday, 25 Nov, 2009
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The Tourism 2023 project report has been launched and is now available online to help the UK outbound travel and tourism industry understand the challenges it faces and plan for a sustainable future.
Climate change, population growth, shortages of oil and other resources will have dramatic impacts on how, where, when – and even if – people travel, and will reshape the industry over time.
Factors like these could lead to very different worlds in 2023, each holding very different futures for the industry. We worked with more than 100 tourism experts – including business leaders, academics, legislators, campaigners and commentators – to create four vivid scenarios, and then generate a vision of the sustainable future the industry wants for itself.
Major companies and organisations have now pledged to collaborate to create a commercially sustainable tourism industry by the year 2023 which benefits communities in tourist destinations and protects the environment.
The scenarios, vision and a strategy to implement the commitments were launched at the ABTA Travel Convention in Barcelona on October 8th, 2009. More than 100 people with expertise in different facets of the industry – including business leaders, academics, legislators, campaigners and commentators – have been involved in creating them.
The Tourism 2023 scenario explore critical uncertainties facing the UK outbound industry, such as the impact of growing domestic demand, climate change, resource scarcity, legislation and increasing travel from emerging economies.
Vivid details bring the world of each scenario to life and are designed to provoke debate. Will mass tourism, swollen by the Chinese and Indian middle classes, cause huge overcrowding in popular destinations? Will soaring oil prices make air travel so expensive that families have to save for years to fly abroad? Will we see “Doomsday tourism”, with visitors rushing to see glaciers and coral reefs before they’re gone for good? Or will household “carbon quotas” see Britons go back to holidaying at home?
The scenarios have been illustrated in four short animations created by students from Goldsmiths College, London. See the box in the right-hand column.
Signatories to the Tourism 2023 Vision commit to taking action individually and as an industry group to achieve a sustainable industry by 2023. It is based on six principles: protecting the environment; developing employees; providing customers with mainstream sustainable products; ensuring that destinations benefit from tourism; innovating to create sustainable transport and resorts; and developing a business which is environmentally, socially and financially sustainable.
The project identified three potential work streams on issues which require urgent industry collaboration: demonstrating that tourism delivers real socio-economic benefit to tourist destinations; making tourism a low-carbon, low-impact industry; and encouraging demand from customers for sustainable tourism.
Download the report or view short, vivid animations of each of the scenarios here: www.forumforthefuture.org/projects/tourism-2023
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