VisitEngland

2.19. Tourism as a force for good

In order for tourism to be a force for good, it helps if everyone involved feels inspired to contribute and has a sense of purpose. If you combine this with good corporate governance and incentives for teams to challenge old behaviour, you really can change for good.

Key Takeaways 2.18

In a nutshell

  • Doing good things is good for business.

  • Get together and agree how you can change for good.

  • Reward your employees for finding better ways of doing things.

Change for good

Regenerative tourism is an uplifting approach with the goal of increasing positive impact - for people, their communities and the planet. It is a also multi-faceted approach as well with many interlinked themes.

Viewing these themes collectively, we see the shift from old ways of thinking to new ways of successfully running our businesses with purpose. Regenerative tourism is about moving from:

  • Risks to opportunities.
  • Simple brand and image building to long-term sustainability and resilience.
  • Reacting to external factors to a proactive approach.
  • Take, make, waste to circular or closed loop thinking.
  • Short-term goals to long term triple bottom line financial and non-financial reporting.
  • Growth for growths sake to responsible and measured green growth.
  • Treating sustainability as an afterthought to embedding sustainability into the heart of the business.

VisitBritain/VisitEngland

Regenerative Tourism Handbook graphics

The point of purpose

There is much talk about purpose in business these days, but what does it mean? Purpose - real purpose - should be greater than the products you make or the services you provide.

At the heart of establishing a wider moral purpose is the recognition that doing good and making money are not incompatible. The problems arise when people try and force fit purpose into a business. That approach is rarely successful.

For purpose to be genuine and truly become part of the culture of your business, it is important to include all your important stakeholders, particularly your employees in the process. This helps ensure future buy-in and guard against dilution, or fizzle out, as your purpose permeates through the business (see Everyone, Everywhere - 4.2).

Most importantly, remember that purpose without performance is simply PR (public relations).

Corporate governance

For larger organisations, corporate governance will be broad and complex, and in most cases, probably already well covered. For smaller businesses, you can still follow these responsible practices in your own way.

Areas to think carefully about and monitor diligently include:

  • Data compliance: GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation).
  • Staff welfare, including anti-bullying and whistleblowing policies.
  • Modern slavery – a modern slavery statement needs to include the steps a business has taken during the financial year to ensure that slavery and human trafficking is not taking place in any of its supply chains and in any part of its own business.
  • Diversity, Equity and Inclusion which we covered in section 2.14.

Monitoring progress

Without a method of measuring progress, it's hard to know how far you've come or how far you have to go to reach your goals. A key performance indicator (KPI) is a measurement tool that helps evaluate the success of a business, a particular activity, or personal performance.

To ensure that sustainability is fully embedded into the fabric of your business and into every employee’s role, it is great to link actions relating to sustainability to KPIs, performance reviews and, ideally, bonuses.

In other words, simply hitting a financial target whilst having a poor approach to people and the planet should not be enough to merit a successful appraisal or outcome for the individual in question.

Most importantly, building this type of measurement into staff conversations can be highly motivating – creating a direct link between excellent behaviour and the reward of pay rises or career progress.