The Trouble With Travel
In response to Geographical’s special issue on the future of travel, Pat Thomas, editor of the Ecologist, pulls no punches as she offers her assessment of exactly what’s wrong with the global tourism industry.
Another travel company bites the dust, thousands are stranded overseas. Some are stuck at home with no prospect of that dream holiday or romantic wedding abroad this year. For the mainstream press, of course, this is pay dirt. Lots of poignant human-interest stories, plenty of expert commentary to call on, column inches aplenty to be generated on what this means, and what we all should be doing about it.
The travel industry’s response is, of course, unanimous: we should all keep travelling. Book your holiday with confidence but don’t forget to take out a new class of insurance that protects you if your holiday company goes bust. Take advantage of the price wars that are ensuing between those companies still in business to get the cheapest deals available.
The not-so-subtle message is clear: it’s the public’s fiscal responsibility to save an industry from which it has derived so much. And if we wish to continue to gain intercultural experiences, consciousness-expanding horizons, access to exotica and the warm fuzziness that comes from knowing, as Walt Disney once said, it’s a small world after all, then we must keep investing in travel. And those companies that remain are rubbing their hands with glee: more businesses going down the pan means a bigger slice of the travel pie for those remaining.
And that bottom line really is the bottom line. According to the World Travel and Tourism Council in March of last year, the global travel industry was on target to generate sales of US$8trillion in 2008–and that in a year of slow growth–and the prediction, in spite of the economic slowdown, is for sales to increase annually by 4.4 per cent between now and 2018. It’s a staggering figure, but one wonders whether perhaps those predictions are now being quietly revised, given that some 26 travel companies and airlines went bust in the past year.
In spite of all the predicted revenue generation, you still have to wonder: is the travel industry worth saving?
Tourist trapped
In the days before an airport in every city and a travel voucher in every newspaper, travel may well have been about exploration, exposing yourself to the unknown, absorbing new ideas and cultures, and seeing how the other half of the world lives and reflecting on what this means to the way you live.
There’s a quote by Mark Twain, favoured by those travel writers who are still enamoured with that idea:
‘Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness …’, it begins. These days, it could be argued that this notion is deep-fried hogwash.
Most of us aren’t travellers at all–we’re tourists, as vulnerable to the process of commodification as the places we visit. A homogenous group of dopey beasts who take cattle-class flights at 3am, organise stag nights in Prague, and demand egg and chips and a beer whose name we can easily pronounce on a sunny beach in Spain. The smaller the world gets, the more we seem to want it to be as much like home as possible (but with cleaner sheets and towels and without the washing up).
Last year, a survey for Halifax Travel Insurance revealed the extent of the cultural experience of the average British holidaymaker. Not so much culture vultures as poolside potatoes, of the more than 2,000 holidaymakers questioned, most spent no more than eight hours away from their hotels during a week’s holiday. Three quarters never attempted to learn the local language and 70 per cent never visited a local attraction. Most never took a meal outside the hotel restaurant.
It hardly seems worth the 64billion [pounds sterling] Britons spend on holidays every year–around 80 per cent of which is paid for by credit cards and, according to a survey by Alliance & Leicester in 2007, a significant proportion of which hasn’t been paid off by the time we book our next holiday.
Eco no-no
But travel, we are told, is good for us. Its good for the places we visit, good for generating foreign income and investment, for providing jobs and preserving culture. And if most of us can do so much ‘good’ just sitting by a pool for a week where’s the harm?
According to the United Nations tourism is the world biggest industry, employing an estimated 220 million people worldwide. But according to Tourism Concern’s report ‘Sun, Sand, Sea and Sweatshops’ working conditions in the tourism industry are notoriously exploitative. Many employees do not earn a living wage, cannot join trade unions, suffer stress and poor working conditions work long hours and are not paid for overtime.
In prime tourist destinations, governments are often more interested in maintaining tourist economies rather than ecosystems even if it means displacement, cultural conflicts and unacceptable working practices. Which begs certain the questions: Where is the evidence that tourism helps developing countries and communities over the long term? What cultural foundations and skills for survival will we have left them with when the entire focus of their economies, of their livelihoods, has for decades been to cater to the whims of foreigners? How will they survive when the oil supplies dry up and tourists are forced to take their leisure closer to their homes?
Aware of these issues, and the bad press that has arisen from them over the years, the travel industry has reinvented itself as ‘sustainable’. More and more it claims to be pursuing the eco-travel agenda. You can barely open a newspaper these days without seeing companies trumpeting their social responsibility policies, offering offset schemes so you can fly guilt-free, or glossy articles focusing a select menu of green resorts for the environmentally conscious traveller.
But do try this before you fly: define eco-travel. If you can’t do it you are not alone. The travel industry can’t either. Groups like the World Tourism Organisation and Sustainable Travel International struggle to get their own definitions writ into the language of travel, and the United Nations World Tourism Organization (UNWTO) has just announced a voluntary set of criteria for sustainable tourism, but there is no Fairtrade mark or organic certification scheme for the package tour.
The fact that no one is regulating the game works to industry’s favour. Companies can engage in a back-slapping green free-for-all which allows them to develop their own standards not according to what is good for the environment or for local culture but according to what is good for business.
An ‘eco-holiday’ could easily mean you’ll be helping to build mud huts in an African village or it could be bungee jumping in an area of outstanding natural beauty, before retiring to your concrete and glass hotel with 24 hour air conditioning and a waste pipe that leads straight out into the sea.
In truth eco-tourism sits in the same specialised place as other niche travel opportunities like golf tourism, transplant tourism, sex tourism, cosmetic surgery tourism, death tourism. And maybe you could forgive a multinational company for doing what it is supposed to – i.e. trying to sell you something – if it weren’t for the fact that the pretty lies hide a dirty secret: eco-tourism can be just a environmentally damaging as regular tourism. In fact, wherever people go everything from dolphins to dingoes, penguins to polar bears, suffers.
Not long ago the Wall Street Journal reported that the boom in eco-tourism to places like the Galapagos was having a devastating effect on wildlife there. Unsustainable development, an influx of workers from the mainland and introduced species were, it said, putting endemic biodiversity and habitats at risk. Even in less exotic places such as the forests of California, scientists have found that hiking, wildlife watching and similar ‘low impact’ activities can interfere with the mating habits of carnivores such as bobcats and coyotes. Where the eco-tourists went there was a five-fold reduction in numbers of these animals, whereas after banning the tourists the animals’ numbers rose again. Our sense of the fragility and interconnectedness of the planet’s natural systems is still it seems, as shallow as ever and our sense of stewardship non-existent.
Of course such effects don’t even begin address the totality of travel’s impact. For instance, most of us will take a plane to our eco-destinations and no matter which way the industry tries to spin it there is no such thing as green flying.
According to the EU, aviation accounts for 3 per cent of Europe’s CO2 emissions. In the UK, the figure is higher at about 6 per cent. But these figures are misleading because every country has its own way of collecting data and often this doesn’t include emissions from charter flights or some international routes. The real figures are apt to be substantially higher.
While the fuel efficiency of planes has increased steadily, at around 1.2 per cent a year, this needs to be viewed in the context of an industry that is growing at a rate of 8 per cent every year, and which is predicted to quadruple in size between 1990 and 2050.
The growth of the aviation industry is in direct conflict with the need to reduce CO2 emissions by 80 per cent by 2050 in order to avoid irreversible climate change.
In fact, according to the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research if we were to accept an 80 per cent reduction target, and if aviation continues to grow as predicted, it will require the whole of the rest of UK to be zero carbon, simply to allow us to continue flying.
None of this even begins to take into the account of the damage caused by contrails, those pretty white lines that trace the path of a jet across the sky. Contrails consist of toxic emissions of soot and sulphur dioxide. They are high, thin, man-made clouds that seed other types high, thin clouds known as cirrus clouds. These in turn are known to increase the temperature down here on earth. According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) the climate changing potential of contrails is nearly three times that of CO2.
So perhaps, if we want to keep travelling we should all embrace slow travel ideal of the cruise ship. Nope. Cruise ships are even bigger polluters than airplanes generating 1611 g of CO2 per passenger kilometre, compared to 201g for a long haul flight. In addition, in one week a cruise large cruise ship generates 210,000 gallons of human sewage, a million gallons of greywater (dirty water from sinks, baths etc), 25,000 gallons of oily bilge water, 11,550 gallons of sewage sludge and more than 130 gallons of hazardous wastes. They contaminate shellfish beds and seafood, and are a threat to pristine marine ecosystems.
Trains and coaches are much less damaging, but making better use of them requires a government commitment to improving infrastructure and consumers to break their addiction to speed and distance, which doesn’t look like happening anytime soon.
What about offsetting? Sorry, it is largely a myth and almost completely unregulated. The Tyndall Centre calls it ‘a dangerous delaying tactic’. New trees planted in the name of air travel (and other eco-sins) are depending on geography and climate notoriously variable in their ability to act as net carbon sinks, and some carbon offsetting schemes in the US and elsewhere are being used to finance coal plants and gasworks.
So this is where we are. In the things that matter most now, the travel industry is insubstantial, unreliable and contributes so little to making the world a better pace. Perhaps it is time to consider razing it to the ground. That’s where it’s going to end up anyway. Eventually. If you want to make the world a better place, start with your own place. These days we simply can’t afford to keep investing in a global business that wilfully destroys what the late astronomer Carl Sagan poignantly described as “the only home we’ve ever known”.
Pat Thomas is the Editor of the Ecologist magazine.
- This article appeared in the February 2009 edition of Geographical. Not available online.
