Responsible tourism – An overview from different actors

Sustainable tourism is a key contributor for sustainable development in developing countries. Our panellists shared their opinions on the tourism industry and about the responsibility that each stakeholder has to play in minimising the negative social, economic and environmental impacts in order to ensure that tourism continues to play its role for job creation and promotion of local culture and products.

Key takeaways

We should be clear and understand that responsible tourism is long term and not short term. However, long term also has a cost and is not always perceived as being profitable due to market and government uncertainties.

• Our panellists mentioned that we need a framework to ascertain that each stakeholder plays its role. The SDGs already give us a nice framework to start with and we need to adapt them to our tourism sector.
• The question remains how and should be responsible to bear the cost or taxes of being sustainable – is it the travellers, airlines hotels or governments? Or is about carbon footprints?
• The responsibility relies on each everyone namely the travellers, airlines, governments, private and public sectors and most importantly the local community.
• Develop a set of principles on which all parties will agree and move forward toward actionable solutions.