Peter Semone,Chairman, PATA (Pacific Asia Travel Association) discussed with Preeti Puja, Associate Editor, Aviation World at Routes Asia in Langkawi about the sustainability in tourism.Excerpts…

Talking about the sustainability in travel, what does that mean and what perspective you are looking at?
Sustainability is all about the environment. It’s kind of holistic thing we need to look at it. Sustainability for tourism is balancing the socioeconomic benefits with some of the negative environmental impacts that happen actually on cultures as well. I think, sustainability is becoming more of a balance between what you do and may be what you may necessarily do.

Aviation sector is little bit far off in terms of as it has been able to make SAF and all other things that if we can do, we can continue working on the environment angle but in the same time let’s work on some of the other areas that is critical to sustainability. Because one of the thing we have to think now is partnership between industry, government and its community. It’s very much about community and so far Asia has benefited to a large degree from tourism but like many destination in Europe they are going start to feel that may be the benefit and how ways the positive elements and this is a really interesting thing in terms of sustainability.

You know, we build tourism so quickly in Asia but we forgot or maybe we don’t see sometimes the invisible burden of tourism. So, when you have tourist, there is a lot of positive in terms of than leaving money behind but they leave a lot of other things behind as well like trash, they use lot of water, they add to traffic, congestion, just overall they are another element that kind of operating within the community . So sustainability is turning to be finding out what is the price of tourism.

Because, I think in a lot of ways we haven’t actually calculated what’ s the true cost of tourism. We only talk about revenues but we never really talk about at the destination level, about the expense, so we have three indicators: right: (i) we say number of visitors(ii) Per tourist spend and (iii) length of stay. And, that’s the very generic number. We need to be little bit more specific for work being done, we need to measure the invisible burden of tourism and understand that better and at least we all have to contribute the negative impact that we bring and hopefully more.

Tourism may be benefiting countries like India or Malaysia as much as we are saying that it is the sustainability and cost of hosting the tourist is much higher than we recognize.

Has the perception changed Post COVID?
I think Covid accelerated everything because it allowed us to see the other side of the coin which is if we don’t have tourism , everything is nice like environment is better , community is peaceful, but there is no money coming in. We need the money, we need tourism but I think we also learn that let’s structure and mitigate and reduce some of the negative impacts that happening and I think the people are also lot more aware as they have seen its like in their community to have tourist or not have tourist. I think the Covid just accelerated everything and I may very worried about certain issues like sustainable development cause because I think the other negative externality that we have to be worried is environment. One thing is Geo politics and the other thing is poverty and the gap that exist. It’s a long journey and its going to take little more time together in partnership with the public and private sector. I think we can do it we have to be determined to do it.

Any message for the readers of Aviation World?
I am very eager for PATA to partner more closely with the Aviation sector.PATA has been for more than 70 years and we have strong relationships with the aviation sector. I think in the Aviation sector there has been lot of cost cutting, membership subscriptions like that they took of but I think I believe that relationship between the Asia Pacific Aviation Sector and PATA can really help us develop together and we can work very much for the Ministry of Tourism and the government and the private sector at the destination level but having that the partnership in advocacy will make a big difference in the Aviation Sector as it goes through lot of changes. In many ways we are going to rewrite the way tourism is organized in the next ten years and very much includes the aviation sector.