Outside The Walls Of Your 5 Star Resort

Picture this: you are at a resort, lying on a beautiful beach, crystal clear water lapping at the shore. There is a piña colada in your hand, an umbrella over your head, and not a cloud in the sky. Sounds perfect, right? But how often do we realize that our stay at a resort can make a significant difference in the development going on in the community outside of the walls of the hotel?

Tourism in developing countries has often been criticized for exploiting impoverished locals, as well having negative environmental effects–from stressing natural resources to increasing pollution. Local people have often been subjected to displacement in order to prepare land for resorts, uprooting entire communities, and can strike even deeper—in places such as Hawaii, resorts have even been erected on excavated burial grounds and other sacred sites. The preservation of local culture is not only an important part of the tourism industry, as it creates a more authentic experience for the guests, but should extend to include the overall desires of the indigenous peoples.

That said, tourism could potentially work positively, beyond solely economic benefits: socially, it offers opportunities for infrastructure, jobs, and raising global awareness. A new trend in the industry called green travel is changing the way tourists execute their trips by encouraging visitors to take an economically, environmentally and socially conscious approach to their stay. Green travelling is growing in popularity as people become more aware of the repercussions that their presence can have on local sustainability. In the best-case scenario, green travel will encourage tourists to invest in the local economies, discouraging money from leaking out to international, privately owned companies, all the while reducing environmental impact.

Here is presented a sample of a dilemma that can be found when analyzing tourism: would it be better to build a resort and give jobs to a few hundred people, or to encourage travelers to stay at smaller locally owned hotels? Which produces more money for the community? Which pays its workers better? In many places tourism is seasonal, depending on factors such as climate and events, meaning that jobs available to the community will be limited to those seasons. These are just a few things to consider about the industry, and the response to whether tourism is positive or negative is full of mixed opinions.

As one of the world’s largest industries (forecasted to contribute 10% of global GPD by the end of 2015) it has an opportunity to become a profitable sector in some of the world’s developing countries. The catch lies exploring how this multibillion-dollar industry can be used to create a system that generates sustainable income to benefit the community long-term, while being considerate any ramifications that it may potentially have.