Passing Shots!

HAL Airport Bangalore

The Hindu Newspaper reports :

"Resource centre for Responsible Tourism planned". "We are trying to rope in one of the main advocates and promoters of Responsible Tourism, Harold Goodwin, for setting up the proposed centre," (read more here).

Now this is what I would call as a 'Passing Shot'!

It's truly amazing how people claim for things they haven't even attempted. Wonder why they waited until the last day in the office to make a statement that had no truth in it? All that happened was a lecture Dr. Goodwin gave for Kerala Tourism at the WTM 2005 in London and it was agreed upon by Kerala Tourism Department and some leading industry leaders that they will invite Dr Goodwin for the Kerala Travel Mart 2006 and even asked him to block his dates for the same!

Since then, there was no response from Government and didn't even care to acknowledge the emails asking if this was actually going to happen or not! I don't know if that was a great way of showing hospitality to a man who has changed the way on how people choose to travel.

It's been at least six months since we have been trying to convince the Kerala Tourism, that they should take Responsible Tourism as a way forward for the destination and not just continue doing the lip service. In the last one year, we have been hearing about Responsible Tourism and it reached a stage were one day we decided to visit senior bureaucrats in Trivandrum. The idea was to learn how serious they were about Responsible Tourism in destination.

We did ask this much. "How serious are you guys on RT?".

Answer was "Hmm, we aren't sure, we don't even know if the industry would accept this. Right now, we are testing it with the media. We are just testing to check how the industry would respond. There is actually fear amongst the politicians that RT would scare away investors!".

Great! So much for the understanding on RT!

In the same meeting I suggested that they should do workshops on RT for Government, Industry, NGOs and Political parties of Kerala as an initial step. There was (still is) a danger of trends of "greening" that happened in the name of Eco Tourism.

For this to be taken care, all stake holders should have clear understanding about what the whole concept is about. There was a tremendous level of learning that needs to go into the system.Being a fertile ground for many initiatives which were entrepreneur driven, there was (is) tremendous scope for Kerala to be the ideal flag bearer of Responsible Tourism in the country if supported by the government machinery.

We had proposed that we would do two symposiums in India. A National level one in New Delhi and a State level one in Kerala with Dr. Harold Goodwin leading the symposia. Kerala tourism offered to support but disagreed about the Delhi part. Finally we agreed to do the National Symposium in Kerala and were offered financial support to organise the same.

Even 14 days into the event, nothing happened and I was just tired running from office to another and explaining why RT is important for a destination like India and especially Kerala.

When we arranged a meeting for Kerala Tourism with Dr. Goodwin of the International Centre, in the back drop of World Travel Mart in November 2006, all that they did was to tell us that they will take a decision once they are in Kerala and asked me to go down for a meeting . (and this was after keeping them on the loop for almost 6 months!) And, the decision was all about if Kerala wanted to host the Symposium on Responsible Tourism or not!

Both the bureaucrats were definitely moving out of the tourism department and hence were quite indecisive. It reached a stage where I decided "enough was enough" and took the event to Bangalore which was organised on the 16th of this month at Our Native Village, in Bangalore.

With the remaining two weeks, I wanted to ensure that whatever little energy I had, that should be channelised to make the event a success and bring together a small group of people from the travel industry, NGOs, Government, media and academicians. I really didn't have any more time to waste.

© GP 2006