- Email: [email protected]
Sustainable Tourism: A Marketing Perspective
PUBLICATIONS IN REVIEW
255
Annals of Tourism Research, Vol. 28, No. 1, pp. 255±256, 2001 Printed in Great Britain 0160-7383/00/$20.00
Sustainable Tourism: A Marketing Perspective By Victor T. C. Middleton with Rebecca Hawkins. Butterworth± Heinemann (Linacre House, Jordon Hill, Oxford OX2, UK) 1998, xvii+265 pp (index, tables, ®gures, bibliography) £20.00 Pbk. ISBN 0750623853 Ralf Buckley Griffith University, Australia The senior author of this book, Victor Middleton, was the founding Director of the World Travel & Tourism Environmental Research Center (WTTERC) at Oxford Brookes University, United Kingdom. His coauthor, Rebecca Hawkins, was its Deputy Director. The center was subsequently absorbed into the World Travel and Tourism Council's Green Globe initiative. This book, incorporating the two directors' experience at the center, is another valuable product of their collaboration and commitment to sustainable tourism. The authors base their book on two premises. One, while laws and regulatory frameworks do evolve to re¯ect changing public concerns about global environmental issues, the time lag is so long that human society and economy will reach the limits to planetary growth before the regulatory system catches up. If tourism development is to become sustainable, markets, not laws, must drive change. Two, while tourism certainly does have environmental impacts, it can also be a major social tool in sustainable development, with environmental bene®ts outweighing costs. This will happen, though, only if the industry adopts best-practice environmental management. While tourism is often touted as the world's biggest industry, Middleton argues it is better understood not as an industry at all but as ``literally hundreds of separate international and domestic market segments, mostly with little in common, but usually lumped together for convenience.'' Accordingly, he argues (p. 82) that a bottom-up approach to sustainability at the destination level is likely to be as or more effective than top-down approaches spanning the entire industry. He quotes Lipman, former President of the Council, from a 1994 report, saying that ``environmental practices will become a decisive factor in tourism purchases'' (p. 106). Tourism businesses, Middleton continues, ``bear a heightened responsibility . . . recognizing that they are often operating in areas selected for business purposes precisely because they are attractive and environmentally sensitive'' (p. 90). The book presents a wide range of examples, referring to both natural and human environments. Up-market tourists in the Mediterranean, for instance, use over six times as much water per capita as rural residents in the same areas. But ®ve thousand nuns at a 5-day religious meeting are likely to cause much less environmental impact than 100 teenage bikies visiting for a few hours.
256
PUBLICATIONS IN REVIEW
As the authors emphasize repeatedly, modern tourism businesses have a range of very pragmatic commercial reasons to improve environmental management practices. Figure 9.1 of the book lists ten such reasons, which can be summarized as more business, lower costs, and less risk. In chapter 11, the authors expand the conventional ``reduce, re-use, recycle'' paradigm to the ``Ten Rs criteria for environmental good practice in tourism business operations: recognize, refuse, replace, reduce, re-use, recycle, reengineer, retrain, reward and re-educate''. The ®rst of these is particularly signi®cant. As Middleton so rightly points out, ``[i]f there is no systematic recognition of environmental impact, there is little realistic prospect of achieving sustainable progress'' (p. 135). Yet, how many tourism businesses and associations still refuse to acknowledge that tourism produces impacts, and shy away from any suggestion of systematic monitoring? In this respect the industry is still remarkably immature, contrasting sharply with mining and manufacturing where impacts are acknowledged, measured, minimized where possible, and managed as a routine part of day-to-day operations. With World Travel and Tourism Council credentials and a marketing message, Middleton and Hawkins may perhaps put industry readers in a more receptive frame of mind than an academic or environmental scientist could hope for. If their book achieves only the ®rst of their ten Rs, let alone all ten, it will have done much. This book is not dif®cult, novel, or technical, and it is well presented, relatively inexpensive, and easy-to-read. The book should be studied not only by tourism researchers, but shared with their industry colleagues, too.& Ralf Buckley: International Center for Ecotourism Research, Grif®th University, Southport, Qld 4215, Australia. Email < [email protected] >. Assigned 12 January 2000. Submitted 18 February 2000. Accepted 21 February 2000. PII: S0160-7383(00)00016-5
Annals of Tourism Research, Vol. 28, No. 1, pp. 256±258, 2001 Printed in Great Britain 0160-7383/00/$20.00
Ecotourism: An Introduction By David A Fennell. Routledge (West 35th Street, New York NY 10001, USA) 1999, xx+315 pp (index, tables, ®gures) $34.99. ISBN 0415 20168-3 Ralf Buckley Griffith University, Australia Fennell notes at the beginning of this book that his goal is to provide a philosophical analysis of ecotourism, a review of its literature, and an
255
Annals of Tourism Research, Vol. 28, No. 1, pp. 255±256, 2001 Printed in Great Britain 0160-7383/00/$20.00
Sustainable Tourism: A Marketing Perspective By Victor T. C. Middleton with Rebecca Hawkins. Butterworth± Heinemann (Linacre House, Jordon Hill, Oxford OX2, UK) 1998, xvii+265 pp (index, tables, ®gures, bibliography) £20.00 Pbk. ISBN 0750623853 Ralf Buckley Griffith University, Australia The senior author of this book, Victor Middleton, was the founding Director of the World Travel & Tourism Environmental Research Center (WTTERC) at Oxford Brookes University, United Kingdom. His coauthor, Rebecca Hawkins, was its Deputy Director. The center was subsequently absorbed into the World Travel and Tourism Council's Green Globe initiative. This book, incorporating the two directors' experience at the center, is another valuable product of their collaboration and commitment to sustainable tourism. The authors base their book on two premises. One, while laws and regulatory frameworks do evolve to re¯ect changing public concerns about global environmental issues, the time lag is so long that human society and economy will reach the limits to planetary growth before the regulatory system catches up. If tourism development is to become sustainable, markets, not laws, must drive change. Two, while tourism certainly does have environmental impacts, it can also be a major social tool in sustainable development, with environmental bene®ts outweighing costs. This will happen, though, only if the industry adopts best-practice environmental management. While tourism is often touted as the world's biggest industry, Middleton argues it is better understood not as an industry at all but as ``literally hundreds of separate international and domestic market segments, mostly with little in common, but usually lumped together for convenience.'' Accordingly, he argues (p. 82) that a bottom-up approach to sustainability at the destination level is likely to be as or more effective than top-down approaches spanning the entire industry. He quotes Lipman, former President of the Council, from a 1994 report, saying that ``environmental practices will become a decisive factor in tourism purchases'' (p. 106). Tourism businesses, Middleton continues, ``bear a heightened responsibility . . . recognizing that they are often operating in areas selected for business purposes precisely because they are attractive and environmentally sensitive'' (p. 90). The book presents a wide range of examples, referring to both natural and human environments. Up-market tourists in the Mediterranean, for instance, use over six times as much water per capita as rural residents in the same areas. But ®ve thousand nuns at a 5-day religious meeting are likely to cause much less environmental impact than 100 teenage bikies visiting for a few hours.
256
PUBLICATIONS IN REVIEW
As the authors emphasize repeatedly, modern tourism businesses have a range of very pragmatic commercial reasons to improve environmental management practices. Figure 9.1 of the book lists ten such reasons, which can be summarized as more business, lower costs, and less risk. In chapter 11, the authors expand the conventional ``reduce, re-use, recycle'' paradigm to the ``Ten Rs criteria for environmental good practice in tourism business operations: recognize, refuse, replace, reduce, re-use, recycle, reengineer, retrain, reward and re-educate''. The ®rst of these is particularly signi®cant. As Middleton so rightly points out, ``[i]f there is no systematic recognition of environmental impact, there is little realistic prospect of achieving sustainable progress'' (p. 135). Yet, how many tourism businesses and associations still refuse to acknowledge that tourism produces impacts, and shy away from any suggestion of systematic monitoring? In this respect the industry is still remarkably immature, contrasting sharply with mining and manufacturing where impacts are acknowledged, measured, minimized where possible, and managed as a routine part of day-to-day operations. With World Travel and Tourism Council credentials and a marketing message, Middleton and Hawkins may perhaps put industry readers in a more receptive frame of mind than an academic or environmental scientist could hope for. If their book achieves only the ®rst of their ten Rs, let alone all ten, it will have done much. This book is not dif®cult, novel, or technical, and it is well presented, relatively inexpensive, and easy-to-read. The book should be studied not only by tourism researchers, but shared with their industry colleagues, too.& Ralf Buckley: International Center for Ecotourism Research, Grif®th University, Southport, Qld 4215, Australia. Email < [email protected] >. Assigned 12 January 2000. Submitted 18 February 2000. Accepted 21 February 2000. PII: S0160-7383(00)00016-5
Annals of Tourism Research, Vol. 28, No. 1, pp. 256±258, 2001 Printed in Great Britain 0160-7383/00/$20.00
Ecotourism: An Introduction By David A Fennell. Routledge (West 35th Street, New York NY 10001, USA) 1999, xx+315 pp (index, tables, ®gures) $34.99. ISBN 0415 20168-3 Ralf Buckley Griffith University, Australia Fennell notes at the beginning of this book that his goal is to provide a philosophical analysis of ecotourism, a review of its literature, and an