Skift Take
After a year that stripped bare the inadequacy of tourism’s success metrics, how will the industry measure “building back better”? Before it answers that question, there needs to be an industrywide reckoning of tourism's root problem.
Since Covid, platitudes on greening and reinventing tourism have echoed globally across the industry. A general consensus exists among destinations and tourism businesses that the industry must “build back better.”
It’s not a novel debate. It rings that way now because of the pandemic’s brutal impact on travel. But let’s take at face value — once more — this industry-wide clamor to make travel more sustainable. How will tourism determine “building back better” on the other side of recovery? Surely it cannot continue pretending that its success lies in arrival numbers and contributions to gross domestic product?
Yet as vaccine distribution accelerates and consumer confidence rises, governments are already back to projecting visitor numbers and counting tourism jobs recovered, while comparing performance levels to 2019.
“There is still the challenge of rethinking the measurement of tourism,” said Judy Kepher-Gona, founder of Kenya-based Sustainable Travel & Tourism Agenda, noting that “mega data'' from international organizations obscures the reality on the ground. “We will not move forward unless these lead organizations change the way they communicate, because they influence governments, and governments influence their destination management organizations.”
Tourism desperately needs new performance metrics if it is to transform into a more climate-smart, socially sustainable and equitable industry across its supply chain. Is it
