A Question of Control?
The rarely articulated problem of these small scale tours, albeit apparently considered as low-impact tourism, is that they attract the attention of the major TOs; well illustrated by Whinner (1996). His discourse is based on the Alternative Travel Group (ATG), founded in 1979, on principles now articulated as the basis of sustainable tourism, and draws on their early experience of two early tours to parts of Turkey that had hardly seen a tourist before. They were very successful and as word spread so too others followed ‘Tourism began to grow insidiously’ (Whinner, 1996, p. 223). Conflict arose between locals and tourist companies and the ATG pulled out completely and learnt well from the experience, subsequently improving staff training and establishing standards; all with the aim of managing their customers in these ‘foreign’ environments. Such ‘insidious growth’ is equally applicable to many popular destinations whether discussing the cold-water seaside resorts of the 19–20th centuries of northern Europe or the USA, or their equivalents in Cuba, the Caribbean or the Mediterranean of the 1950s. As Holzner well identified, ‘Even monster resorts like Benidorm and Ibiza were once sleepy villages, frequented by a privileged few who thought they were in on a secret.’ (Holzner, 2011, p. 13), a secret that is never kept, as so well conveyed in Alex Garland’s novel The Beach. In most cases such expansion is incremental and subtle, well exemplified in the case of Ayia Napa in southern Cyprus, a process Prosser (1992, p. 45) rather aptly termed ‘penetrative tourism’, or Kuta on Bali which morphed from a 1960s backpackers’ stopover to mass tourism by the 1990s, so too Goa, now a popular resort, with Europeans greatly facilitated by TOs though also by hotel companies in the region. Local communities may well object to such encroachment (see Pleumarom, 2012) and as more tourists seek to escape from the crowds and penetrate what could be considered the private areas ‘behind the scenes’, which brings its own concomitant impacts and in turn coping measures by locals (see Boissevain, 1995).
The foregoing examples might suggest these problems arise today in those destinations which are long haul from their traditional main markets, e.g. Europe and the Americas, but this is not so, as Atkins (2010, p. 3) argued that ‘Trinis and Bahamians do things very differently but they certainly feel more in control of their tourism industry than the Cornish.’ (See also Pleumarom, 2012). Whilst these examples are comparatively new there is no doubting that the equivalent situation arose in many of the destinations of the past, whether the spa resorts of the 18th century, seaside resorts of northern Europe from the mid-19th century or, as previously noted, the popular resorts of southern Europe or south-east America. The major difference between all these is more the fact of just how quickly emerging destinations can become substantial. This is equally applicable to the drawing power of renowned environments. This is well illustrated in Liggett et al.’s (2010) research, a rare longitudinal study in the tourism field, based on the Antarctic, and tourism demand and development. They identified a substantial increase in visitor activity over the last three decades with increased air links, a developing tourism infrastructure and substantial growth in visitation by cruise liners which has given rise to concerns amongst stakeholders leading to clearer calls for a stronger conservation ethic to prevail. Their study captures well how incremental growth goes largely unnoticed and even more so unreported until it is potentially too late to address the resultant negative impacts, by which time tourism development has become substantial; and this in spite of calls for limiting numbers and an effective management plan for the area in the early 1990s and curbs planned on limiting tourists to Antarctica in the late 2000s (Gray, 2009).
These findings further indicate the ineffectiveness of policy and codes of conduct, and beg the question of whether the adoption of SSCM would make a real difference. The guidelines for SSCM and attention to social responsibility raises an interesting conundrum in that should TOs and national/international tourism companies invest in new developments that demonstrate inequity in the planning process, for example the Kalpitiya Tourism project in Sri Lanka. According to Noble (2011), Kalpitiya, a coastal area in the western province known for its diversity of marine habitats and which encompasses 14 islands, is the location for a major tourism development which lacks community participation, involves the displacement of local people and appears to show little consideration for opportunity costs of land use and impact on traditional economic activities. To be successful requires substantial investment, the achievement of which rather indicates, once again, a government’s prioritizing of the economic at the cost to the social and environmental dimensions of sustainability. Thus decisions of potential external stakeholders to invest also raises ethical questions. By way of contrast there is the sustainable tourism development project at Mata de Sesimbra, southern Portugal, that is spread over 5200 hectares and involves a combination of conservation, cork oak forest restoration and a 500-hectare tourism development. This is a joint initiative between the WWF and BioRegional (see www.bioregional.com) at a cost of Ç1billion.
The Matter of Influence
The foregoing discussion, whilst establishing that TOs are indeed major role-players in destination development, rather casts them in a poor light. Yet many examples of good practice by various and varied TOs are readily found, as previously noted and also in a range of research papers and publications (see Tepelus, 2005; also the Green Hotelier journal). We should also not lose sight of the fact that through their operations they are providing direct and indirect employment opportunities and generating revenues for other tourism enterprises. Furthermore, their operations and influence in the main require the development of supporting facilities, infrastructure and other suppliers, this could not happen without the support of government. However, they do have direct control over their own business enterprise(s) and some degree of influence over those enterprises with which they work. It is within this context that SSCM comes to the fore. Certainly there are examples of good SSCM practice from research (albeit limited) into this area in the early 2000s but they were limited to a minority of operators (Tapper and Font, 2004). Hence it is not surprising to find Scheyvens (2002, p. 231) arguing that ‘Tour companies will need more encouragement to implement socially and environmentally responsible initiatives.’ To what extent TOs were encouraged in these early years of the 2000s is debatable, though the advocacy of SSCM and CSR will certainly have helped as later research by Wijk and Persoon (2006) into the environmental performance of TOs demonstrates. They established that, in contrast to hotels, there was no evident bias in the EP of TOs to the larger enterprises and more significant to this context they did perform better on SSCM issues.
Early leaders in SSCM were identified to be TOs based in Germany and the UK whilst Dutch firms were considered ‘laggards’. Since then there has been substantial progress in the Dutch based companies (Mosselaer et al., 2012). But the latter are comparatively significantly smaller companies and whilst the smaller operators may well perform better based on sustainability criteria, it is the big firms that have the substantial influence on development and supply issues; without them on board little wider effect can be achieved. Whilst their study affirms that the larger companies are more likely to be more attentive to social responsibility, this is partly, if not wholly, attributable to the fact that ‘firms remain tuned to their home country in terms of business and social mores’ (Leslie, 2012a, p. 30). What is particularly notable from Mosselaer et al.’s findings is that overall TOs performed generally weakly, including the top companies (based on turnover) but there were marked variances between them across all areas of EP except for SSCM. Secondly, in comparison with other research in this area, mainly international/national hotel companies in the hotel sector, it was not the case that it was predominantly the larger enterprises which performed better; albeit TUI was identified as achieving the highest performance but even then little above average. Even so this is progress, albeit:
the principal driver behind broad-scale acknowledgement and action towards chain responsibility