Tourism Enterprise. David Leslie
the claim to be aiming to be a totally ‘sustainable tourism’ destination and what is meant by this term.
• Turkey’s growing popularity in the 1990s and beyond is credited as accounting for 30% of the country’s commodity revenues.
• Cancun, Mexico, was a poor area of perhaps 600 people but by 2000, again due to tourism, had substantially changed, with a population of some 600,000.
Other examples include:
• The Galapagos Islands, which by 2000 were considered to be the most affluent part of Ecuador due to the influx of tourism (Vidal, 2001). But as Vidal argues, the islands are overexploited leading to damage to this acclaimed environment and conflicts between those earning a living from tourism and conservationists.
• Further to these cases is the finding from Holzner’s (2007) study that countries with a comparatively high percentage of tourism in GDP terms evidenced higher economic growth and higher investment and also higher secondary school enrolments, but a common factor to all was that they were small island economies. Basically the development and expansion of many emerging tourist destinations is driven by TOs. It is therefore not surprising that ‘tour operators are increasingly expected to take their social responsibility within their daily operations, in managing their supply chain and in operating in holiday destinations’ (Mosselaer et al., 2012, p. 73). As noted, this will not change the situation overnight but could herald greater commitment towards the objectives of sustainability within tourist resorts and in this, as Pearce (1995; see also Laisch (2002)) argued, transnational companies may be more influential than local organizations. The caveat here is – but whose interests are being served?
Issues in SSCM
For much of this discussion on TOs so far the orientation has been to major TOs, but what of the comparatively small operators in niche markets, are they that different in their impact? For example, adventure tour companies are not without detractors as Seabrook (2007, p. 14) argued:
Adventure tourism scatters debris and waste in formerly inaccessible places on the earth; pristine mountain slopes, ice-floes and high plateau receive their quota of mementos from the unquiet visitations of people avid for sensation and novelty.
A point that might be equally applied to those enterprises promoting scuba diving on coral reefs, or cetacean watching or safari tours, for example, in Kenya or Natal. The latter may well bring into question the reality of SSCM on the part of the TOs involved:
Witness the safari camps provided in Africa to higher paying guests, where rates run upwards of 400 Euros a night and fine wines and gourmet meals are provided to ensure a comfortable eco/sustainable visit. (Butler, 2007, p. 21)
Two specific examples from Jackman and Rodgers (2005) of this are first a packaged safari in the Serengeti, Tanzania involving a mobile camping safari which is comparatively basic but even so the food is of high quality (£300 per night; package based on four people for eight nights from London all inclusive is approx. £2600). The other involves the Lebombo Lodge, Singita on the very edge of Kruger National Park and costs £600 per night. This is a boutique lodge offering luxury (including power shower) in each of the six rooms; as one customer said, ‘We were in a bubble of First World designer comfort surrounded by bush.’ (p. 3).
This raises issues of the operators involved regarding their supply chain and sustainability. Further, and perhaps implicit in SSCM, are the issues that arise in opening up new destinations in hitherto remote places of the globe, for example cruise ships now arriving in previously little known areas, e.g. Tasiilaq and ‘polar tourism’ in general (see Nuttall, 1997; Luck et al., 2010). As Hall and Johnston (1995) in their text on this subject identified, there is a clear need for enforceable codes of conduct which reach across the whole area and are applicable to all enterprises. During the 1990s certainly many codes/guides, whilst supporting tourism development, focused more on the physical environment with little attention to either enterprises or social responsibility. An approach that is based on the principle that by and large stakeholders adopt an ethic of conservation (Holden, 2003; see also Prosser, 1992; Bansal and Howard, 1997). In the case of TOs this may have been overly expectant given that ‘TOs are generally reluctant to accept responsibility for the environments their operations are based in’ (Hudson and Miller, 2005, p. 139) and as Blackstock et al. (2008) affirm, codes of conduct are predicated on the assumption that informing people (that is all those involved) will encourage responsible behaviour. Parsons and Woods-Ballard (2003) in their study into tourism enterprises involving cetacean watching found limited evidence that codes provide enough protection for the cetaceans amongst operators and argue that specific legislation such as that found in New Zealand to protect whales will be required. But as Font and Carey (2005) note, the implementation of such schemes is very limited, which as Cole (2006) argues, the difficulties are not only in implementing but also in the evaluation of the effectiveness of codes and notes the lack of research into their effectiveness. Despite or perhaps because of this, by the late 2000s environmental and social codes of conduct were widespread (Lawton and Weaver, 2009).
The need for such codes undoubtedly arises due to increasing visitor demand and thus opportunities for TOs and local tourism enterprises to capitalize. In the absence of government control and monitoring what control there is may often take the form of a code of practice or guidelines. For example, guidelines for enterprises in the NEAT category, such as Australia’s ‘Tread Lightly’ for off-road vehicles or ‘Leave-no-Trace’ in the USA, were considered to be most advanced in terms of best environmental practices (Buckley, 2000).
Codes of Conduct
It is inescapable that such codes of conduct are encompassed within SSCM. This is well illustrated in demand for hiking along the Inca Trail to Machu Picchu. The government introduced guidelines and a code of conduct for tour guides which included restricting visitor numbers, increasing visitor charges and that tourists should be gathered into groups, each with their own guide. But issues still arose, on the one hand concerns were raised over who was actually checking the numbers of visitors and also that some local TOs were more interested in making money than concern for the environment (Bedding, 2000). An alternative example, where tourism development has been managed and controlled with the assistance of a local supporting network is that of the Noel Kempff Mercado National Park (Holden, 2005). But what is it like today? Similarly ecotourism packages which were mostly to be found in less developed countries (Wight, 2002) but latterly there has been a growing number in the ‘western’ world (as Destination Management Organizations et al jump on the bandwagon), which partly accounts for Pratt’s (2011) analysis that ecotourism is growing six times faster than the sector (e.g. NEAT) average. But what has happened since to those small tourism enterprises which were developed in the early days of ecotourism destinations? For example, Belize was once renowned for ecotourism but has since developed more into mass tourism and Cancun arguably even more so. An outcome that is certainly raising concerns over the application of the basic principles on which ecotourism is based, namely ‘a natural setting, ecological sustainability and an environmentally educative or interpretative element’ (Page and Dowling, 2002, p. 58). To which one should also add, shows consideration for and, as appropriate to the setting; supports the community. Aspects which may also gain little recognition as Stern et al.’s (2003) study based on four communities living on the periphery of two National Parks – the Corcovado and Piedras Balancas in the Osa Conservation Area in the southeast of Costa Rica – found that the ecotourism developments involved actually achieved very little in regard to these four communities. Overall it is very unsafe to assume that ecotourism developments, and thus the enterprises involved, fit well with sustainability particularly in terms of sustainable consumption, as Redclift (2001) argues, when meaning and use are context dependent.
Such cases bring into question whether TOs and tourism enterprises in the early stages of destination development consider that they have some responsibility for the outcomes of their operations and certainly brings into contention SSCM in such instances. Partly in their defence is that planning and control are primarily the domain of government, though such a defence might well be considered no excuse, especially when considered in terms of sustainability and social