Faraway Tourism and Mobility

As the leading tourism provider, TUI looks intensively at the environmental impact associated with faraway tourism.

The complexity – and therefore the complications – of making an assessment of this issue and deriving recommendations on the basis of such an assessment is highlighted – analogous to the concept of assessing the impact of technology – in a draft question-matrix for an initial "tourism impact assessment". With no promise of completeness, the following summarises some of the dimensions to be taken into consideration *.
* Comment: This article is based on a revised version of the article "Faraway tourism – risk or opportunity for sustainable development" by Wolf Michael Iwand, published in Schrader, Hansen: Sustainable Consumption, Campus 2001

Holiday travel has now become an indispensable part of the consumption itinerary for a large percentage of the population. Faraway tourism, associated with air travel in particular, has gained increasing popularity in this context. This modern form of our individual search for paradise is impossible to realise without modern mobility. This is because one associates "far away" not only with exotic destinations but also with fast travel which was only made possible by modern forms of mobility. In this sense, tourism is in its origins a "mobility machine". However, faraway tourism is also an expression of other conditions of increasing globalisation. One can no longer talk about faraway tourism in a one-dimensional way because the digitisation of information technologies and the international financial markets has dynamised all processes around the world – including all tourism processes.

Impact assessment "holiday mobility"
The continuous annual increase in numbers of holidaymakers increases the complex pressures from needs-satisfaction, resource consumption, negative environmental influences and traffic growth. The consequences are felt in the destination countries just as much as in the source countries. Whilst there is general agreement on the existence of these pressures, understanding what to do about them, in other words, the response from politics, business, technology and individual behaviour, is less clear and unequivocal (see diagram).

Pressures: what drives the changes
Satisfaction of needs: Modern cheap offers of transport makes it possible to travel to remote countries increasingly frequently. The travel destinations become increasingly exchangeable as a result of this process: the "made by" (by which tour operator) will become increasingly more important than the "made in" (where the holiday is spent). For the tour operators, satisfying needs means achieving high levels of customer satisfaction, and is thus the company's most important success factor. But satisfying needs also means satisfying the needs of the people who live in the remote destinations. What was true for the development of the Balearic Islands and the Canaries: "that prosperity arrived by plane", is also hoped for today by a large number of countries in the Third World more vigorously and even in the LDCs, the Least Developed Countries. They can therefore not understand the threat of restrictions on air transport and on free tourism development which would deny them opportunities for jobs, education, income, and foreign currency. Resource consumption and climate impact in the context of faraway tourism primarily involves the consumption of primary energy when travelling to and from the remote locations and the associated emission of pollutants and their impact on climate. Holidaymakers who stay on average around 15 to 20 days in remote countries consume around 90 per cent of the total energy expended on their holiday merely for the flight to the destination and back. The climate-damaging emissions (CO2 equivalents) produced during a flight at around 11,000 metres have a much higher impact than at lower levels in the atmosphere or on the ground.
Growth: Third World poverty is one of the greatest global hazards to the environment because it opens the door wide for the over-exploitation of nature merely for the purpose of daily survival. Sustainable development therefore only has a chance of succeeding by way of economic development – which equates to adding value for the inhabitants. Faraway tourism offers Third World countries a concrete opportunity of tackling poverty by achieving growth and development.

Responses: What Needs to be Done
Regulatory policy: the policy is aimed at making good the failings of the market. The Federal German Environment Agency (UBA) has calculated that the price of petrol would have to be increased ten-fold to environmentally compensate for the negative effects of car driving. But speed limits, driving prohibitions or a major increase in petrol and/or kerosene taxes of this order of magnitude are just as socially unacceptable as they are politically unimplementable.

Corporate sustainability management:
Corporate sustainability management stands for a new sustainable corporate business policy. By establishing an environmental department in 1990, TUI succeeded in producing an environmentally-friendly tourism product through dialogue and co-operation with environmental organisations and the parties involved in tourism. Its short-term goal is reducing the negative environmental impact by way of small systematic steps such as improving the environmental efficiency of thousands of holiday hotels. The long-term goal in the context of sustainable development is precautionary environmental protection: the prevention of environmental pollution through the pro-active environmental management of tourism companies. As an example, the number of nature reserves world-wide has been increased ten-fold within the last 50 years thanks in part to the increase in tourism.

Technology:
An example of innovative solutions from technological development is that TUI´s own carrier Hapagfly, is the first airline in the world to have upgraded its aeroplanes with so-called “winglets” to considerably reduce kerosene consumption and carbon dioxide emissions. Instead of further developing a supersonic Concorde, the demand should be raised again for fitting catalysers to aircraft. And an alternative to today's carriers could be a technically sophisticated zeppelin used for transporting passengers (example: Cargolifter) or carbon-dioxide-free hydrogen engines (example: Cryoplane).

Individual behaviour and alternatives:
This area of action is aimed at individual consumers. But can one ask people to do without a holiday in the Caribbean when this holiday is better value than a holiday in Upper Bavaria? And the model "not so often but longer" cannot function if employees are afraid of losing their jobs after taking “six-weeks” holiday.

Prognoses: Beyond Ecological Sustainability
In the 90s, sustainable development was mainly discussed in connection with eco-compatibility or risks. That is why mobility and faraway tourism are mostly only debated in terms of climate change. But the term "sustainability" (which originated in the forestry sector) has not only encompassed ecological balance since Rio 1992, but also a much more complex development which incorporates the economic, socio-cultural, societal, inter-generational, and international or global balance. All five dimensions have to be taken into consideration when analysing whether faraway tourism is a risk or an opportunity for sustainable development.