After revenge travel, what is the next trend everyone in tourism should be conscious about? How do we sustain our tourist destinations? Who will help us maintain our beaches, our trekking paths and just about anything related to tourist destinations? We should start not now, but yesterday, on getting tourist sites listed, staff trained and management involved in sustainable practices for tourism.
I am very happy to have met a group of sustainability advocates during my first visit in Coron, Palawan some 10 years ago. We supported The Coron Initiative, a humble project supported by the UNEP (United Nations Environment Program) and a group called SSTDI or Society of Sustainable Tourism. Back then, before ESG became every corporation’s mantra, we were already preaching about Sustainable Consumption and Production, Life Below Water and other UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Simple suggestions of less plastic, natural farming and reducing carbon footprint became our take aways. And look where Coron is now. It can now produce its own vegetables, it has reusable glass water bottles in most hotels and it has pretty much preserved its tourist sites.
When I was invited to sit as a director of SSTDI, we went to as far as Mati, Davao Oriental to preach about sustainable tourism and the local government unit (LGU) was very excited to follow our suggestions. Look at Mati now. It’s in the list of 100 Green Destinations, along with Sagay and Bago City of Negros or Western Visayas. We also met up in Boracay a week before its closure in 2018, and saw with our own eyes the filth and damage “over carrying capacity” did to a tourist spot. The closure of Boracay for a few months cost a lot (employee layoffs, for example) but on the positive side, it allowed other destinations to share the tourist traffic and made other places level up to accept the diverted tourist groups.
I am a tourist myself, being a frequent traveler to many unusual destinations like Iran and Africa, and I know what a tourist looks for, if one is a sustainability advocate. We check water bottles if they are plastic or reusable glass. We check what is served at buffet breakfasts if they are locally-sourced or they come from miles away. So we vote in booking.com surveys if a hotel is practicing green or sustainable initiatives.
During the pandemic, my ECHOstore partners and I decided to go back to the roots of our mission, which is the production site or what we now call our ECHOfarms. Jeannie Javelosa opened a similar tourist destination in Mount Banahaw, where she was quarantined during the lockdowns, but with a good purpose. She started meeting the local farmers and established a green and good tourist destination. Her Mount Banahaw Circle Retreat will soon be part of the Good Travel program as ECHOfarms Cavite is. We went to work making our tourist destinations the testament of our mission in sustainable tourism.
After the pandemic, tourist establishments must rethink their priorities – is it just financial profit or is it sustainability? This is why our group is helping out cities and towns to become sustainable destinations. If the local government is composed of progressive thinking leaders, like Sagay and Bago City in Negros Occidental, we may just have more places that will make it to lists of the world’s greenest places or cities. You can nominate your town or city and probably make it to the short list in international events in ITB Berlin, for example.
But it has to start from the top, like corporate social responsibility (CSR) which was our battle cry in the 2000s, we now move to preach about ESG – Environment, Sustainablity and Governance. These are today’s formula or recipe for sustainability. But every move towards this starts from the top – the management, the town or city mayor, the owners and management of tourist destinations. If the leadership is not ready, the people will not follow.
We enjoin the leaders in our Department of Tourism and its regional directors to think: sustainable tourism, not just number of travelers and not just dollars generated per tourist. The measure should probably be: how many tourist towns or cities are green? How many establishments can be listed by Booking.com as green and sustainable?
Yes, booking.com can give us almost free advertising as a country if we start to think about rewarding our tourist sites with third party certifications that we have green and sustainable establishments. We will also be promoting our towns and cities which practice sustainable ways.
The Good Travel program rewards establishments like our very own Club Paradise. The Green Destinations lists cities and towns like Bago City and Sagay.
Both programs can help us maintain, develop and discover more places to spread the tourist traffic and make every town know its ‘carrying capacity’ so we do not have to repeat a Boracay closure but discover new sites.
Already I nominate Isabela City in Basilan as well as Claveria in Misamis Oriental. These are “not the usual” tourist destinations but are local secrets we are willing to share. We have over 7,100 islands and possibilities, which is why I am sure we can easily list 100 such towns.
And to support green-minded establishments, nominate your favorite place and let them join the ranks of the 100 greenest places in the world. Am sure we would be thrilled to see them in tourist “go to” sites like Booking.com.
As a consumer and a tourist as well, everyone has a role to play whenever we visit places other than our hometowns. Demand for or bring reusable bottles for water. Ask that they use less or no plastics (imagine all the shampoo containers that go to landfills). Ask for locally-grown produce rather than ingredients that come from a hundred miles away. Eat fresh food instead of processed. Support the local farmers and artisans. Be a conscious traveler.
Being a green destination starts with us. If we ask for it, they will comply.