Pacific Asia Travel Association (PATA) chief executive Martin Craigs calls for calm and celebration at the WTTC summit in Hainan. Craigs will speak in today’s panel session on travel, tourism and trade
Global travel leaders gather this week on China’s Hawaii, Hainan Island, for the WTTC’s much-anticipated 13th Global Summit, providing a chance to calmly reflect on the stunning growth and ambition of the Chinese travel and tourism sector and to celebrate recent aligned advocacy success in Europe.
It is, as the Summit headline proclaims from several hundred lamp-post welcome banners, a “Changing World ” with “New Perspectives”. Incidentally, the lamp-posts on Hainan’s flowering tourist boulevards are solar and wind powered – a counter-intuitive image to the one often shown by western media of polluted Chinese cities.
Back to the Summit: what’s bringing a smile to delegates’ faces? What’s casting a shadow over intended footprints? Is the glass half full or half empty in terms of the travel sector’s future?
In a world still regularly humbled by the power of nature and the fragility of human interaction, there are always two sides to every story and scenario.
I see it every day inside the PATA family and around the region on my regular travels and interactions. For travel and tourism in Pacific Asia, as we prefer to call it, the sunny side is clear- there is undisputed demand.
The bright shiny urge to travel has not been dimmed by the tragedies of 9/11 and SARS, nor will it be by the mystifying disappearance of MH370 or the shocking Korean ferry sinking.
The travelling public will not, past evidence suggests, be intimidated by these desperately sad but very rare incidents. Greater discretionary spending power, particularly in Asia, is driving a massive uplift in demand for travel and tourism services.
The glass half-empty set, sometimes called the worrying classes, will point out the potential for unbalanced growth and destructive development of natural and cultural environments. They have every right to, if presented alongside suggestions for practical, balanced solutions.
The glass half-full guys, sometimes called the growth-at-any-cost crew, need a little calming but not too much red tape, as they evidently create jobs faster and more cost effectively than any others.
Both sides can be strident and certain of their positions, as both sides are to some extent right. The magic is in finding a balance.
Constructive dialogue and appropriate benchmarking, backed by realistic and effectively policed and transparent regulation can help everyone.
For example, economist Paul Krugman wrote in an op-ed in last weekend’s New York Times that “environmental salvation comes cheap” – the price of solar panels has fallen 75% since 2008. Krugman concludes that the climate threat is solvable: “the science is solid, the technology is there, the economics far more favourable than expected.”
All that stands in the way, says Krugman, is “ignorance, prejudice and vested interests”. So there is a changing world and new perspectives to chew over in and around the WTTC Summit.
All travel advocates should recognise that diversity is our USP. Unlike many fast-commoditising commercial sectors we need to vigorously preserve the essence of authentic tourism – the diversity of climates, cultures and even cuisine.
My point is that constructive deliberation and debate should be a continuous activity, but with conviction politics, not NIMBYism (‘Not In My Back Yard’). The leaders and influencers gathered in fast-changing Sanya, Hainan, this week need to look for common ground, not common enemies.
Having called for calm, let me now call for celebration: the travel industry’s aligned advocacy efforts are clearly paying off. The clock stopped on the EU’s misguided emissions trading scheme (ETS) for airlines outside Europe in November 2012 and last month, after years of cooperative advocacy by Global Tourism Association Coalition (GTAC) members and others, the much-derided UK Air Passenger Duty ( APD) was reigned in to an encouraging initial degree.
GTAC has been co ordinated by the WTTC. PATA is a founding member along with ACI, Clia, Iata, the UNWTO and WEF.
In December last year ICAO joined this informal global group who streamline research and deliver aligned advocacy at no extra cost to their members. From April next year there will be only two, not four, APD distance-based tax bands – meaning it will cost the same in APD to fly from the UK to Dubai as to Beijing or Auckland.
The airlines will save over US$350 million a year. This change is important symbolically as well as financially. However, APD for a family of four visiting Britain from China will still be £284 from April 2015, hardly a welcome-mat message.
APD needs to be seen for what it is, a hypocritical, self harming stealth tax imposed by a lazy and exploitative UK Treasury which needs to tax more effectively the 21st Century ‘shell game’ economy, i.e. Amazon and Starbucks, and those ‘morally bankrupt’ bankers.
When that is done the Treasury can surely stop squeezing the goose that lays the golden eggs – i.e. economic and employment growth via travel, tourism and trade.
However, this week WTTC Summit participants should enjoy Hainan’s warm welcome and breeze, and calmly reflect on a successful search for balance to justify future celebrations.