Why?
Finding the right balance with attention to the environment, economy and social welfare is high on the agenda of many organizations in our country. The tourism sector also often faces this complex challenge. De Reis Naar Morgen, which means ‘The Journey to Tomorrow’, supports both the public sector and social and tourism organizations in making the tourism sector more sustainable and in finding a balance between the environment, economy and social welfare.
The following three insights support why finding this balance is important.
1. Tourism is inextricably linked to the environment
The Corona crisis shows, more than ever, that tourism and recreation are inextricably linked to our living environment. In the past six months, companies have lost revenue due to the absence of visitors and major events were canceled. At the same time, we noticed that due to the decrease in the number of flights, the air began to clear up and various species, such as shoals of fish and swans in the canals of Venice, regained their habitat.
The relationship between tourism and the living environment is reciprocal. On the one hand, tourism hugely depends on the environment and its natural resources. For example, without protected nature, our National Parks have little to offer their visitors. Hotels cannot function without using drinking water and energy from that same environment. On the other hand, that same tourism has a major impact on our local, national, and global environment. For instance, think about the waste that is left behind in nature, or visitors that disrupt the natural habitat of animals when they do not respect designated pathways. The CO2 emissions that are inevitably the result of our travel behavior also contribute to this impact.
This reciprocal relationship also exists between tourism and the socio-cultural environment. Amsterdam, for example, has little to offer its visitors without it’s cultural heritage. This same cultural heritage, however, attracts large numbers of visitors, which in turn regularly causes irritation among residents.
That being said, it is important to understand that tourism does not only contribute to a negative impact on the living environment. Tourism can also serve as a means of strengthening the connection visitors can have with nature and culture. By enhancing tourism experiences and increasing their significance, visitors can be motivated to be more respectful to nature and culture, and even to protect it.
We believe that tourism is more than just a lucrative benefit. In policy and strategic decisions, more attention must be paid to guiding these relationships between the tourists and nature and culture.
2. The road to sustainable tourism is complex
The global pandemic offers a unique opportunity to restructure tourism to make it more sustainable. In other words: focus on the negative impacts of tourism on the living environment and the opportunities it offers to strengthen the relationship between tourists with nature and culture. Resilience in implementation is important: how can the tourism sector respond to growth, but also, to rapid declines of visitor flows?
Making tourism more sustainable is of course easier said than done. It is a complex process and goes beyond just a towel policy in a hotel alone. It confronts the sector with all kinds of dilemmas and conflicting interests, because sustainability affects all aspects of our society. In this difficult time, many entrepreneurs hope that the tide will turn and that the number of tourists will soon grow again. But that same growth could increase the chance of the coronavirus spreading.
The diversity of tourist and recreational providers also plays a role in the complexity of this issue. This complexity requires a well-considered strategy so that tourism is - and remains - an addition to society.
3. The tourism sector is large
The importance of sustainability in the tourism sector only really becomes clear when we look at the size of it. In recent years, the number of foreign tourists staying in the Netherlands has grown significantly. The NBTC calculated that a total of more than 20.1 million visitors arrived in the Netherlands in 2019. Together, these tourists contributed approximately 13.4 billion euros to the Dutch economy. Although the Corona crisis is hitting the tourism industry here quite hard, 6 million international tourists are still expected in 2020. In addition, at least 40% of the Dutch population went on a holiday within the Netherlands, which means that celebrating holidays in your own country has also become more popular, according to a fourth measurement after the crisis of the Holiday Monitor of NBTC and Royal Schiphol Group.
Although it is uncertain how these figures will develop in the near future, it is clear that the impact of these travel movements on our nature and culture cannot be ignored.
