Seven years in responsible tourism

Leading responsible tourism website, responsibletravel.com celebrates its seventh birthday this month (6 April). Here, the company's co-founder, Justin Francis reflects on the website's launch in April 2001 and looks towards the ethical food industry for tips for taking the responsible travel movement forward.

What was the original inspiration and vision for the company?

After returning from my travels in Africa seven years ago, I sat down with Anita Roddick and told her my business idea. She gave me one of the greatest pieces of business advice I have ever had and it involved just one piece of A4 paper!

I wrote down on one side of the paper all the negatives associated with the worst forms of tourism. On the other side, I scribbled down ideas around a type of tourism which re-connects tourists with local people, cultures and environments in a mutually respectful and beneficial way. A type of tourism that provides travellers with richer travel experiences, that celebrates the diversity of cultures, and creates better places to live in and to visit. It was this scrap of paper that formed the basis of the business idea behind responsibletravel.com.

When we launched responsibletravel.com with just 20 hand-picked holidays from four specialist operators, no one had even heard of the term responsible travel - we were the first business to really use it and people thought we were totally mad making it our business name!

At our launch I said that one day we hoped responsible would be to travel what organic is to food. By that I meant a consumer favourite that was better for you, the planet and local people.

Do you think that your vision for responsible travel has become a reality yet?

We've come a long way. We've worked with small travel companies run by people passionate about both their clients and the protection of the cultural and natural heritage of destinations. Many had great stories that were being held hostage so through responsibletravel.com we hoped to create permission for them to be told.

We now work with over 270 operators and over 600 accommodations around the world and without a doubt it is these companies, together with the winners of our Responsible Tourism Awards scheme, who remain our lifeblood and our inspiration.

The big players in tourism initially told us that tourists did not care about anything other than price and that it was not their responsibility to tackle destinations' problems. I'm pleased to say that this is changing fast.

However, the responsible travel movement still has a very long way to go to get the consumer attention that the organic, fair trade, slow food, farmers markets or sustainable fishing movements have and it is worth reflecting on what we can learn from them.

What can the responsible travel movement learn from the ethical food movement?

The world has witnessed a consumer and media revolution around food. We've seen Hollywood movies about the fast food industry; there have been campaigns here in the UK from celebrity chefs to improve school dinners and the lives of chickens; and supermarkets are giving over whole sections to organic food. The food industry is now all about protecting the diversity of locally sourced foods, supporting local food producers, and cooking traditional recipes that are distinctive to particular regions. The best food marketers (whether supermarkets, fair trade producers or celebrity chefs) re-connect the grower with the buyer via images and stories of the producer/farmer/fisherman.

This is what those of us in responsible travel must emulate - just as we read stories on food labels about farmers, travellers want to read stories with local guides, and just as we read about the health benefits associated with organic food, travellers want to read about the personal enrichment of discovering new things and places through responsible travel.

How well do you think the travel industry deals with the issues around global warming?

Both the food and travel industries (in fact, all industries) have been forced to ask themselves questions as global warming has become a reality. However, I think the food industry has led with far better and more sophisticated arguments than the travel industry has.

For example, The Soil Association conducted an extensive consultation about whether they should certify food flown in to the UK as organic by weighing arguments about global warming alongside those of poverty reduction in farming communities. The idea of food miles has been debated and backed by science that demonstrates that you need to look at the production process as well as distribution (revealing that it's lower carbon to fly in roses from Kenya than source them from Europe).

In travel we lack the science, and frankly the well-known figureheads, to tackle the debate about the benefits of tourism in destinations globally alongside the undoubted need to reduce our mounting carbon contribution.

What are your hopes for the future?

My hopes for the next seven years are to see a real revolution in travel, just as we've seen in food, and that we can turn an industry that employs one in 12 people on its head. If we can do this, we can secure and sustain some of the most beautiful places on the planet, transform the lives of communities who live there and enrich the experiences of the travellers who visit. It's up to all of us to work together to provide the inspiration and leadership for the future of responsible tourism.

Find out more at Responsibletravel.com.