Herb Hiller helped lead the modern cruise industry in Miami, taught
ecotravel at Florida International University and launched the Florida
state bicycling movement. He writes The Climate Traveler blog. His
memoir is due out in 2025.
The private-sector-driven Brand USA, partially funded by government-collected visa waiver fees, measures its effectiveness by growth in international arrivals and visitor expenditures. The Department of Commerce deputy assistant secretary for travel and tourism will be judged by hitting a goal of attracting 90 million international visitors a year by 2027.
I believe it's time to alter the composition of destination marketing organizations (DMO) to take into account important travel-related issues that impact communities and the planet. Specifically, I am calling for the appointment to tourist boards of experts who have the credentials to weigh in on the existential crisis of climate change.
Climate change is killing us. Its challenge looms, nightmarishly. There is no vaccine.
In today's hothouse of American politics, we cannot count on federal action, and global warming does not stop and start as if by sorcery at state lines. Canada has a robust national program for fighting climate change in communities across the country, but even though its parliament funds the private sector Tourism Industry Association of Canada (TIAC) with $720 million annually, the TIAC website says nothing about the potential impact of global warming and travel's potential role in hastening or slowing it.
This disconnect must stop. Much of the travel trade seems to regard climate change as an annoyance fixed by sending clients to cooler summer places or destination dupes, where they won't be squirted with water by residents riled up by tourists who crowd locals' favorite restaurants.
Think local
Am I suggesting that we have to give up travel to avoid the fires, heat, storms, flooding, drought, starvation, climate migration and all else that's upheaving normal? No. But growing numbers of travelers want to avoid elevating the greenhouse gas emissions caused by long-distance air travel, and it seems evident that a powerful way to lessen carbon in the atmosphere is to travel closer to home.
We're learning that we can also take fewer trips but perhaps stay longer where we go. In fact, a major travel trend that McKinsey & Co. identified in May is the move toward more domestic and intraregional travel.
If the trend grows, it will still reward travel advisors, particularly those who charge fees for their services. So many places depend on tourism for jobs and earnings to lift populations up from poverty; fortunately, that's equally true in places that are relatively nearby. A focus on regional tourism can also translate into limitless new experiences, and travel advisors can develop expertise in identifying attractions nearer their clients.
The Cornell SC Johnson College of Business Nolan School last year introduced a Climate Finance Course that teaches how to overcome the disconnect between tourism and climate action, but even the noted hospitality school Lausanne's EHL and the aspirational goals of UN Tourism lack transformational guidance. Only The Travel Foundation (TFF) in August this year has published a guide to preparing tourism climate action plans.
Yet the unmet challenge is to persuade governments to revise the qualifications for who sits on DMO boards. Spinning a sustainability story where there is none will backfire; greenwashing is an unforced error.
To truly address the issues that need to be addressed, the trade needs to embrace not only climatologists but find a role in DMOs for humanists, water and land conservationists, educators, social scientists, public health officials and foundations and nonprofits who both understand the benefits of travel and the dangers of ignorance. Going forward, these people will be indispensable for determining how destinations position themselves for people who want to travel and who also want to avoid climate anxieties.
The good news: Where climate policies for tourism do exist, DMOs can make an asset of those policies to attract visitors who are conscious of the perils of global warming.
Unfortunately, organizations that are taking this path are too few and far between today. Hoteliers are learning. So are online tour operators.
Experts needed
The most respected experts about climate change need to sit on DMOs -- no longer as advisors, but as a majority that might imbed responsible travel practices into the travel trade. I believe that DMOs as think tanks representing necessary expertise can help us reach our climate goals. Meanwhile, hospitality schools must produce graduates skilled in destination management based on scientific realities.
I fear the foot-dragging will continue unless we organize one or more regional roundtables to bring together this new mix of DMO membership candidates.
I'm not alone in calling for this. At the outset of Covid, the nonprofit think tank and marketing entity World Travel & Tourism Council declared that destination stewardship required that we learn to include in our measurements of success the minimization of negative local impacts.
The Council called for "nerve centre[s] that reflect real-world needs" by introducing experts to the DMO table, rather than limit their membership to hoteliers, tour operators, venues, transportation companies and attractions.
Three years later, the imagined "nerve centres" haven't appeared, but TTF, also based in the U.K., has been firing on all cylinders everywhere with experienced partners that include the WTTC, Expedia, the Caribbean Tourism Organization, the Organization of Eastern Caribbean States, British Columbia, Amsterdam, the Destination Stewardship Center, Better Destinations and others.
The Expedia program virtual, free and global, educates DMOs to become Destination Climate Champions by creating locally specific Climate Action Plans that include outreach to travelers about what to expect from places that integrate climate policy with the ecoconscious travelers they market to.
This can still fall short in execution, so I was happy to have TTF CEO Jeremy Sampson call when I reached out. He immediately understood what I was talking about. I said he could decide where such a roundtable should be held.
I had proposed the Bahamas. Prime minister Philip Davis has said his country is "burning" and that Bahamian islanders could become "climate refugees." Davis would "get it."
Sampson said he prefers to connect the roundtable with a cross-border initiative that TTF has doing in the Pacific Northwest. He quickly added, "We should do both. . . In British Columbia, science is represented."
Meanwhile, TTF has published its "Blueprint for Tourism Action Plans; A Guide for Regional Authorities and Destination Management Organizations." It's utterly step-by-step but was prepared before my talk with Sampson. I'm still hopeful that we'll see serious movement toward introducing a majority science cohort into DMO decision-making.