Judging the Responsible Tourism awards across five regions becomes more difficult each year. We see better entries each year reflecting the efforts made by businesses and destinations worldwide to “make tourism better.” There are now regional Responsible Tourism Awards for Africa, India, Latin America, and South East Asia, as well as a Rest of the World category for those not covered by the regional awards.
The Rest of the World Awards were announced on Monday and include gold, silver and ones to watch. In the making travel inclusive category TUI UK&I won gold for their Accessible Holidays Strategy. WISE Sustainability won gold for their development of technology to measure use, identify the profligate use of resources and enable management to reduce resource use. The Scottish Crannog Centre and the Ulu Ai Experience in Sarawak, Malaysia, won joint golds in the “creating shared value, increasing local sourcing” category. The Crannog Centre is sourcing as much as possible from within the 25-mile travelling distance of an Iron Age person.
Have you heard of a crannog? In Scotland, 2,500 years ago, some people lived in these Iron Age loch-dwellings.
— Scotland Is Now 🏴 (@Scotland) October 2, 2024
On Loch Tay in Perthshire, 17 crannogs have been found and now a replica is the showpiece of the @ScottishCrannog
📷 IG/kateinscotland_#Scotland #CrannogCentre pic.twitter.com/a7bmtkkol3
The Ulu Ai Experience is a partnership between tour operator Borneo Adventure and local Iban communities. The money from tourism has broken the subsistence agriculture cycle and stimulated a cash economy in the area. As they say in their submission for the Award “There is no point talking about conservation when communities are trying to overcome poverty.”
These gold winners are automatically entered in the Global Responsible Tourism Awards sponsored by Sabre, along with the gold winners from Africa, India, Latin America, and South East Asia. The full list of 2024 gold winners can be found here. You will see from the citations that we are clear and specific about what the judges are recognising as an example of “making tourism tourism better”. The Global Responsible Tourism Award winners will be recognised on November 4th at the awards ceremony in London.
Too often, the term “sustainable” is used only in the abstract sense. Responsible Tourism requires that we say what we are doing to make tourism better and that we are transparent about what we achieve. The Responsible Tourism Awards, launched by Justin Francis of Responsible Travel in 2004, are focused on identifying proven examples of Responsible Tourism practices which can, and in the judges’ view, should be replicated. We established the awards to encourage and showcase positive tourism and ways of making tourism better for communities, their natural and cultural environment, and tourists.
In a post on LinkedIn, Justin Francis reflected recently on two decades of the awards:
“Along the way, the winners have signposted best practices and changing expectations of responsible tourism. Some of the memorable, and often emotional winners – going against the norms of exploitative tourism is hard and is often not appreciated or rewarded – have included city tours led by formerly homeless people (Unseen Tours), brave campaigns against immoral but highly profitable orphanage tourism, hotels staffed by people with a disability and TUI Netherland’s remarkable effort to tackle child sex toursim in Brazil. ‘Kites fly highest into the wind’ as Harold often reminds me – and the Awards are about finding and celebrating the kite flyers for responsible tourism.”
The judges look for evidence of positive impact, innovation, replicability, influence, longevity and overall commitment to Responsible Tourism.
We are about creating change, so replicability is critical. Manisha Pande is the CEO of the ICRT India Foundation and a Director of the ICRT.global. Her day job is as CEO of Village Ways, which offers travellers the opportunity to see real rural India through local eyes and to stay in villages, walking with a local guide through the countryside, experiencing the rhythms of village life.
When Village Ways was founded two decades ago, it offered a very different way of experiencing India, walking, not trekking, through an agricultural landscape with a local guide learning about agriculture and life in rural India in a community-owned village guest house. It has brought additional livelihoods to remote villages and helped counter out-migration when young people move to the cities looking for economic opportunities.
At the prestigious Vigyan Bhawan in New Delhi on World Tourism Day, the Vice President of India, the Minister of Tourism, the Secretary of Tourism, and the Director of General of Tourism were present. Manisha was there with two village teams with whom Village Ways works closely as partners. Village Supi in the District of Bageshwari in Uttarakhand and Village Sabarvani in the District of Chhindwara in Madhya Pradesh. Ministry of Tourism, India who won in the categories of Agri Tourism – and Responsible Tourism.
