Communities Are No Longer Spectators in Tourism’s Future
Photo Credit: Hawaii Tourism Authority CEO John De Fries said communities must be treated as the most important players in tourism – not as third parties. Flickr.com / Erik Cooper
Skift Take
How can the tourism industry strengthen its relationship with communities? Simple: it needs to embrace the fact that it's the communities who invite stakeholders in, and who give them a seat at the table, not the other way around.
For the travel industry at large to truly embrace sustainability, it must work alongside communities as stakeholders, and not as mere projects and beneficiaries of tourism.
Arguing against the short-sighted view that the community should merely have a seat at the table or be referred to as a third party, John De Fries, the first native Hawaiian to head the Hawaii Tourism Authority, told the Skift Destination and Sustainability Summit Wednesday, "I've concluded that the community is the table and the community issues the invites."
“The community walks in daily into every one of our tourism enterprises and makes every one of them operational — without them there is no tourism operation,�
