Mass tourism is the real pandemic, regenerative travel is the vaccine
In 2024 passenger demand is expected to exceed pre-Covid levels, while tensions between mass market companies and local communities increase and ecosystems collapse. According to one expert, the days of mindless meandering must stop here.
Regina Domingo doesn’t mince her words on the damage this summer’s holidaymakers will wrought on their getaway destinations. You’d almost struggle to believe her business was reliant on tourists, if you didn’t already know.
But there’s a huge difference between different types of visitors, locations, and companies, the woman behind the Nakawe Project tells us. The organisation works with communities in Baja California, Mexico, helping them identify natural capital assets and shift from extractive practices, often tied to mass tourism, and take up sustainable livelihoods.
Meanwhile her other company, Baja Adventures, is a regenerative travel specialist focused on non-invasive wildlife encounters, community integration, and authentic cultural experiences. So who are we to argue with such an authority?
At 40, Domingo tells us that ‘in the last 10 years of life I’ve seen entire ecosystems collapse in front of my face’. So it’s no surprise she claims to be more determined than ever to utilise a background in conservation to try and improve and reduce the devastating impact tourism has on the environment and climate. A subject that has exploded in the post-pandemic era.
The temporary pause of lockdowns offered a fleeting vision of nature recovery en masse, but this has long-since given way to rocketing passenger demand. In the UK , we made 86.2million overseas trips last year, up from 71.2million in 2022. If the next annual figures jump even half as much, we will have exceeded the 93.1million international journeys Britons took in 2019. And this breakneck return of an industry has been met by increasing tension with local communities, boiling over earlier this year into widespread protests in many places prone to over-tourism. Among them Spain’s Balearic and Canary Islands.
‘It’s not been successful,’ Domingo says of the effort to try and push back against mass, extractive and exploitative tourism. ‘We are in one of the worst moments ever for mass tourism, especially around wildlife tourism. It’s incredibly pathetic how many countries I can mention where whales are being harassed for a selfie, or Instagram video, people not understanding the rules about these species, and our oceans. So it’s not been working, I don’t think protests are the way to handle things. We need to organise all the data in the same way we did with Covid.
‘This is way more important, it’s way more dangerous. This is the real pandemic, it’s us and the way we are treating natural resources,’ she continues. ‘With protest, it’s a fight, and if we continue fighting we are not going to get anywhere. This is not a fight. This is non-negotiable. This is something we need to face as humans, and accept what we have done wrong, and the need to understand in order to agree on next steps. Which include thinking about how we organise societies, countries, and economies.’
Economics are integral to any conversation about tourism’s pros and cons. Data from the World Travel & Tourism Council tells us that in 2019, 44 countries were reliant on tourism for more than 15% of national employment. Caribbean islands accounted for the biggest regional proportion, but Portugal, Lebanon, Uruguay, Jordan, Greece, Thailand and Croatia were also listed, alongside more economically advanced islands like New Zealand and Iceland.
‘We have to try and find a balance. We can’t just hire everyone and make places purely sustained by tourism. Covid was a big example of making us understand the possibility of everything collapsing, leaving all these communities reliant on a surge in business that doesn’t come soon enough,’ says Domingo. ‘The goal needs to be protecting and restoring ecosystems, cultures and species, because it’s something we are losing at an alarming rate everywhere.
‘It’s not about creating jobs in tourism, its about understanding the main challenges in each location. The different ways of approaching this. That could be science, it could be tourism, it could be laws, politics. Sometimes it might even just be educating communities about how they consume, helping them transition to more sustainable means. Educating them and empowering them to create different economies based around new necessities,’ she continues.
Drawing on experiences close to her current home, Domingo recounts how many small businesses in Baja California are tied to mass market tourism. Or taco bars. Or the fishing boats selling the catch to serve in those tortillas. This lack of diversity makes them highly vulnerable to changes that seem inevitable. A collapse of fisheries due to overconsumption, water and plastic pollution could be one outcome. Another might be more tightly controlled tourism, leading to lower visitor numbers and weakened demand.
‘Instead of fishing, we could devote some money and interest to research and science that gives us a better understanding of whats happening in the water,’ Domingo tells us. ‘There are so many things we still do not understand about the land and the water, and we need to use the people who have been extracting the natural resources from these two ecosystems to better see what their current state is, and what to do about them. Who knows these regions and ecosystems better?
‘Mass tourism is a huge problem, bad management of natural resources because of tourism is a huge problem. So what I have mainly come to see in these last years is that we should try to understand better how to diversify locations, activities, opportunities, even the marketing within tourism needs to change, to be understood as more fragile,’ she continues. ‘Of course, it needs to be inclusive, but it cannot be accessible for everyone, because then we destroy fragile ecosystems that are needed, we erase culture, and we pollute places in ways that our planet cannot sustain.’
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Images: Baja Adventures