It's time to have a look on another innovative solution towards more sustainable future of the industry.
This time we will dive into EUHT StPOL and their ideas for Dimension 3: Hospitality Tomorrow.
The Hospitality industry is a double-edged sword. It can generate large amounts of profit for some privileged people while ruining many others. The power of tourism trends focused on specific destinations anywhere in the world not only cause overcrowding in the destinations – “mass tourism”, but also has a harmful effect on those destinations which by not receiving tourist influxes suffer the exodus of their population as a consequence (Múñoz, 2004).
The lack of tourism plans based on sustainable policies during recent decades have caused negative impacts that secondly have sown what we can call “weeds”. We are firmly convinced that a change of attitude and paradigm is needed from all shareholders in hospitality. If we do not act against the lack of control and the negative consequences that mass and low-cost tourism sometimes generate, the present and future effects could be devastating (EARTH, 2013). Bearing in mind that the current world structure is based on pillars such as globalisation and the continuous development of new technologies - and that this is something we cannot dismantle -, we strongly believe that we must take advantage of the usefulness of these pillars to build a future that maintains the profitability of the sector while respecting and caring for the environment. The tourist resources that the planet brings us in the form of human beings are our best asset. It is time to react. And we, both our generation and hospitality, have the power to create change in our hands.
This is how our project came about. Our idea is to lay the foundations of a strategic plan that can give any country the tools it needs to create a new form of sustainable travel. The underlying aim of this plan would be to uproot the negative vices - the “weeds” we mentioned before - that exist in tourism today and to plant the seeds of a sustainable and future-oriented model of hospitality. As it would be counterproductive to cover the whole spectrum of problems raised in the SHC Dimension 3, our plan focuses on action against over tourism, the lack of community inclusion, the disparity of minorities and the hospitality footprint. To this end, we propose measures to encourage a new form of tourism that would be respectful to the planet and would promote a better world in which to travel. Furthermore, it would promote the concept of doing things right and that destinations could recover the capacity to choose the limits of their visitors' behaviour.
In this project we would act as a consultantcy group which would provide administrative and operational support to the public entity that may request its implementation. This tool is made up of two parts: the first one, which is the “seven commandments” and the second one, which consists of a range of steps to be followed. The consequence would be a personalized strategic tourism plan for specific destinations within all the patterns mentioned in this summary.
