Destinations urged to heed ‘volume is vanity’ mantra

Destinations have been urged to remember “volume is vanity” and encouraged to collect more data to support responsible tourism.

Professor Xavier Font, an expert in sustainable tourism from the University of Surrey, said destinations should focus on attracting visitor expenditure that benefits the local environment, rather than simply aiming for greater arrival figures.

“Volume is vanity; profit is sanity,” he said. “Every time you hear a politician talking about volume, that’s a vanity number.”

Font called on the industry to collect more data relevant to sustainability, adding: “I think there are a lot of things we should be measuring that we’re not measuring right now.”

Giving an example, he said less than 5% of European destinations are measuring the carbon footprint of visitors.

He also questioned the success of eco-certification schemes, arguing certification is difficult for smaller hotels to achieve.

“There’s currently a situation where small businesses will be penalised for not having the budget to prove to the world something they’re already doing,” he said.

He cited research suggesting there is “zero correlation” between a traveller’s satisfaction with the eco-friendliness of a hotel and the hotel’s actual sustainability performance.

“I want certification to work but the way we’re doing it now is taking us down a dead end,” he said.

He said the public sector’s purchasing choices can have a significant impact on the tourism sector’s sustainability efforts.

If the public sector supports environmentally-conscious suppliers, he said, hotels are more likely to use those suppliers too.

Font also encouraged destinations to continue trying to spread visitors across more geographic areas, while also seeking longer-staying visitors, repeat visitors and travellers who behave in a considerate way.

“Repeat visitors behave differently from first-time visitors,” he said. “Why don’t we have campaigns that focus more on the repeat market? Spain does this beautifully with the repeat market from the UK.”

He added: “If tourists look like locals and act like locals, we don’t have what we call in sociology and tourism ‘the demonstration effect’.”