-----Tourism---- Human encounters towards a common humanity

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-----Tourism---- Human encounters towards a
common humanity
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• Our goalposts for this session
• Lets first scan the tourism arena.
• Next, we shall look at what the ideals of tourism
  are
• Then, we shall critique current policy and
  practice in tourism and its impacts on the
  countries of the South.
• Finally, we will examine options/strategies for
  the YMCA to pursue in promoting patterns of
  tourism that will promote true human encounters
  and advance the ideal of a world built on
  mutuality, understanding, peace and justice for
  all.

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Asia is the world's largest and most populous
continent. 3.879 billion people (60 of the
Worlds Peoples) live in Asia plus an estimated
35,426,995 people in Oceania in 2011

• A welcoming attitude, food, breathtaking
  landscape, heritage sites, multiple religious and
  cultural expressions make Asia and the Pacific
  region a viable and attractive tourism region

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204 million tourist arrivals in Asia-Pacific in
2010.

• TOP TEN DESTINATIONS
• 1China55.67 million
• 2Malaysia24.58 million
• 3Hong Kong, China20.09 million
• 4Thailand15.84 million
• 5Macau, China11.93 million
• 6Singapore9.16 million
• 7South Korea8.80 million
• 8Japan8.61 million
• 9Indonesia5.91 million
• 10Australia5.89 million

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50 popular destinations in Asia
Pattaya Lahore Delhi Boracay Island Ko
Samui Melaka Karachi Bangalore Jaipur Islamabad Gu
angzhou Chiang Mai Kyoto Kolkata (Calcutta) New
Delhi Phnom Penh Hat Yai
Kathmandu Hyderabad Taipei Pulau Langkawi Kota
Kinabalu Chennai (Madras) Osaka Johor Bahru Cebu
City Makati Agra Tagaytay Baguio Kuta Bali Xi'an K
rabi KuchingT

• Bangkok
• Singapore
• Kuala Lumpur
• Beijing
• Seoul
• Phuket
• Tokyo
• Manila
• Ho Chi Minh City
• Shanghai
• Mumbai
• Penang
• Goa
• Jakarta
• Hanoi

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Tourism is rapidly growing

• International tourism receipts are estimated to
  have reached US 919 billion worldwide (693
  billion euros), up from US 851 billion (610
  billion euros) in 2009, corresponding to an
  increase in real terms of 4.7.
• Asia-Pacific received more than 600 billion
  from tourism according to 2005 statistics. (Up
  from 2 billion in 1975) a quantum leap.
• Forecasts suggest that by 2020 some 500 or more
  million visitors will visit Asia.
• (Source UN-World Tourism organization)

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Phenomenal growth towards 2020
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Potentials of tourism to communities

• Tourism is one of the most effective ways of
  redistributing wealth, by moving money into local
  economies from other parts of the country and
  overseas. It brings income into a community that
  would otherwise not be earned.

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Tourism brings in jobs and spending

• Employment may be in services such as tour
  guides, managerial positions or in supporting
  industries like food production, street vending,
  or retail suppliers. Increased spending in the
  community generated from tourism businesses can
  directly and
• indirectly
• promote the
• viability of local
• businesses.

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Economic diversification is a by-product of
tourism
Economic diversification is, for many
communities, an insurance policy against hard
times. By offering an additional means of income,
tourism can support a community when a
traditional industry is under financial pressure,
particularly where that community relies heavily
on a single industry.
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Farmers markets

• The popularity of farmers markets is increasing.
  Visits to farms and farmers markets, fruit
  picking and agricultural farm accommodation are
  important activities that prompt development in
  rural areas.
• Farmers markets showcase local produce and
  products
• Encourage visitors from other areas, provide
  distribution opportunities for small businesses
• Economic development as money is spent locally

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Tourism has added value

• Infrastructure including roads, parks, and other
  public spaces can be developed and improved both
  for visitors and local residents through
  increased tourism.

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Social benefits

• Social benefits
• Community identity and pride can be generated
  through tourism. A positive sense of community
  identity can be reinforced and tourism can
  encourage local communities to maintain their
  traditions and identity.

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Environmental consciousness through tourism

• Providing financial or
• in-kind support
• for the conservation
• of the local environment
• and natural resources
• will enhance the reputation
• of any tourism business.
• Authentic ecotourism, can
• place value on the conservation
• of natural resources through
• Recognition of their importance
• to visitor experiences and
• their economic value
• to the local community.

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Critiquing tourism practice

• Some questions
• Who benefits from Tourism?
• Are there negative impacts? Can these be
  reversed?
• Who are the most vulnerable sections when a
  tourism enterprise gets started?
• Is tourism smokeless!!?? Or, is it another
  pollutive industry?
• Is the sacred for sale?
• How can tourism promote prosperity while
  remaining sustainable?
• How can human, social, and cultural rights be
  protected?
• How can tourism serve the cause of promoting
  peace and prosperity?
• Is another tourism possible?

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Modern day tourism as the story of distorted
life-styles

• Lets dispassionately consider how
• Tourism is often about abused hospitality by
  travellers
• Tourism is often about unscrupulous
  people/profiteers whose only goal is to make
  profits
• Tourism is often about disregard for vulnerable
  women, young girls and boys forced into
  prostitution because the alternative may simply
  be poverty or hunger.
• Tourism is often the unconscionable invasion of
  nature reserves, protected areas, wild life
  habitats, rain forests, bird sanctuaries.

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Modern day tourism as the story of dehumanizing
others

• Tourism is often the story of people deceived by
  drugs, gambling, consumerism, unrestrained and
  ruthless competition, and the eventual sense of
  powerlessness of the victims.
• Tourism is often the venal displacement of
  farmers, fisher folk, indigenous persons only to
  make way for the arrival of a tourist enterprise
  which could take the form of a five-star hotel, a
  golf course, or a new amusement park.
• Tourism is often the question of overworked,
  underpaid workers.

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Why is tourism an important arena for the YMCA
mission?

• Shorter working hours are becoming the general
  rule everywhere and provide greater opportunities
  for large number of people. This leisure time
  must be properly employed to refresh the spirit
  and improve the health of mind and body...by
  means of travel to broaden and enrich peoples
  minds by learning from others.
• (Second Vatican Council)

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Seeking an ethics of leisure

• In 1969, at a World Consultation on Tourism.
  Professor James Glasse, called for Christians to
  address issues of tourism and posed the challenge
  of evolving an ethics of leisure and underlined
  how it was pertinent to draw up the parameters of
  a leisure ethic just as much as there is the
  demand for a work ethic. He asserted that all
  human energies exist to serve God and celebrate
  Gods gifts of life to humankind. Leisure
  activities including tourism must similarly be
  subject to Gods rules and ways.

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Another tourism is possible- Another tourism is
an imperative!!

• Tourism is like the sheep you see in this
  picture. It is as white as it is black!
• It is human beings who design and create the
  architecture of tourism.
• Transforming tourism is our responsibility.

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Responsible Tourism A question and arena for
mission??

• As a Christian Movement committed to
  transformatory processes that favour justice in
  social relations, the YMCA must act decisively,
  creatively, and urgently to bring in new patterns
  of tourism which seek the ideal of fostering
  global citizenship. Imagine a tourism that sets
  as its goal a one world-different people the
  celebration of diversity and uniqueness of the
  human community. Each with distinct gifts to
  offer to a common humanity.

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Responsible tourism is not only desirable but
possible when

• The traveller and the host meet on equal terms
  each valuing the others role with respect and
  mutuality
• The traveller sets out to understand and absorb
  positive facets of his/her hosts culture,
  religion, and traditions
• The traveller celebrates discovering the unknown
• The traveller shares resources (as in an
  authentic pro-poor tourism approach) which affirm
  that it is an unjust world and the poverty is
  often a result of affluence.
• Host communities shape the tourism product and
  benefit from the activity
• Responsible tourism applies standards and ethics
  that are reliably sustainable, and protective of
  peoples and community rights.

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The YMCA enters the arena of tourism with a
massive tally of social capital

• We are a global network and are inter-connected
  we do not need to go anywhere to make
  connections. They are there for the asking.
• Our members are travellers who can fairly easily
  be prompted to make the shift from
  self-satisfying leisure tourism to responsible
  tourism within the precincts or under the aegis
  of the YMCA.
• Many YMCAs have the infrastructure required for
  tour operations
• Most YMCAs possess the capacities to organize the
  tours less taken- creative encounter oriented
  alternative tours.
• YMCAs have access to grassroots communities and
  identify options which open up new/alternate
  spaces and ways of seeing and experiencing
  reality
• YMCAs, in general, can mobilize a wide array of
  stakeholders in the community to become involved
  in creating new spaces for a community-based,
  people-oriented experience
• YMCAs have a public image and a brand name that
  can compete in the market.

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Strategic Choices

• New Frontiers-New strategies!!
• Creating Alternatives-in-Tourism
• The YMCA should pattern a constructive and
  proactive profile of tourism through actively
  working to model tourism initiatives that are
  community based, just, participatory, culturally
  sensitive, gender just, child friendly,
  protective of human rights and ecologically
  sustainable.

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Being the mediator between the tourist with the
community

• The YMCAs strategy would depend on an appraisal
  on a SWOT analysis knowing what YMCAs
  strengths and possibilities are. The next step is
  to harness the social and institutional assets
  and
• Identify areas in which the YMCA can engage
• Develop capacities to ensure it handles the role
  in a professional manner.

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Re-gearing our options

• The mediatory role of the YMCA will need to have
  well defined goals/approaches
• To gain a comprehensive of ongoing practices in
  the tourist industry.
• To identify niche markets that give the YMCA a
  distinct identity in its own tourism
  initiatives.
• To identify and develop tourism products that are
  unique and special to what tourists offer.
• To prepare local communities to be hosts
  guides, food services, transportation services,
  etc.
• To develop marketing strategies that make the
  YMCA known as another player in the tourism
  arena.

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Knowing the market space

• The YMCA must carefully study the market spaces
  in tourism with a view to identify where it can
  intervene and make an impact.
• Hence it is a question of
• Knowing the terrain we want to enter and creating
  innovative packages that can be used with some
  degree of flexibility for the particular group of
  travellers a niche market.
• Creating and developing a narrative that is
  analytical and expressive of the truth and,
  moreover which is challenging and exciting.
• Developing the marketing tools and bringing into
  play the global network that the YMCA has.

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Option 1 YMCA as a Tourism Monitor

• The YMCA could serve as a Tourism Monitor in
  destinations where the negative impacts are
  mediated and those who are victimized by tourism
  impacts are assisted through solidarity actions.

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Option 2 YMCA as Alternative Information Centre

• YMCAs could serve as Information Centres where
  tourists can visit to be familiarised with and
  register for alternate tours.
• It could be a centre where tourists are
  introduced to a Code of Ethics which the APAY can
  develop as a common set of guidelines.
• It could be alternative information centre. It
  is important for the YMCA Centres to offer
  positive perspectives about the people and places
  they visit a location where the facts and myths
  about the destination are differentiated. Such a
  centre may carry cultural literature which would
  interest a tourist.

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Option 3 Community Based Tourism models.

• This becomes crucial because the industry has
  taken away the face of the local host. It is
  important to organize communities to be able to
  offer home stays, small businesses, transport and
  food outlets, handicraft locations (manufacturing
  and marketing), promotion of local
  vegetables-dairy-poultry products and every other
  economic area which will enhance the conditions
  of the host. Strengthening the economic
  conditions of host communities will render them
  less vulnerable.

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Option 4 Combating the evils of sex tourism

• Protection of womens and child rights are
  Challenge 21 mandates. So, we have an obligation
  to do our part
• Moreover, it is one organization which unites men
  and women in community service.
• When men assume responsibility to work in
  solidarity with women, the movement against sex
  tourism would gain ground. So, the YMCA can well
  be cutting edge on this issue.
• The YMCA can lobby to influence media images
  which reduce women and children to sex objects.
• YMCA can work to take pre-emptive action by
  working on economic projects in the very
  locations from where women are recruited to come
  (often innocently) into tourism spaces and become
  sex work
• The YMCA can lobby to influence media images
  which reduce women and children to sex objects.

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Option 5 Protecting children in tourism

• Protecting the child in tourism must emerge as
  a priority.
• Paedophilia has become an essential part of
  tourism and many travelers are in search of
  young girls and boys as sex partners.
• The struggle against paedophilia, for example,
  requires peoples participation and even
  internationalising the cases in cooperation
  with organizations like ECPAT.
• Fourth, the YMCA can lobby to influence
  media images which reduce women and children
  to sex objects.
• (The credentials of the YMCA are very suited to
  such work.)

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Option 6 Tourism and Ecology

• Tourism is recreational in nature and water
  sports are so commonly advertised. Golf courses,
  for example, eat into resources much needed for
  cultivation, and common use by residents of towns
  and villages that host tourists.
• 5-star hotel consumption standards are
  prohibitive and are always at the cost of local
  needs. Similarly, tourist rushes create
  heightened garbage problems and waste issues.
• Major hotels are the biggest violators of
  environmental standards in coastal areas they
  inconsiderately spill sewage into nearby fields
  and into the sea.
• In small islands and coastal areas, where ecology
  is extremely fragile, the mere spillage of solid
  and liquid waste can create higher seal levels
  over years and cause flooding and disasters.
• The YMCA must work in concert with competent
  organizations to campaign against environmental
  abuse in tourism.

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Roles of sending YMCAs
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Role of host/mediating YMCAs
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Advancing the tourism ideal

• Tourism can promote authentic human and social
  development, thanks to the growing opportunity
  that it offers for sharing of goods, for rich
  cultural exchanges, for approaching natural
  artistic beauty, and for an undertaking of
  different traditions.
• In order for this to be possible, a serious
  preparation is necessary - one that avoids
  improvisation and superficiality. It is important
  to develop a persuasive program of education for
  values of tourism in relation to and in defence
  of the communities and natural cultural goods of
  the hosts. Only then will the new marketplace of
  tourism and leisure become resource for true
  human enrichment for all.

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Wisdom from China

• The farmer hopes for rain, the traveller for
  fine weather!
• The man on horseback knows nothing of the toil of
  the traveller on foot.

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Thank you for your attention