PRESS RELEASE: 17th July, 2006.
GETTING BEHIND COMMUNITY BASED TOURISM
responsibletravel.com and Conservation International have joined forces to promote a new type of tourism that is changing the way in which we travel.
 After decades of watching tourism from the side-lines, communities (often with profoundly different ways of life to ours) are offering tourists the opportunity to stay with them to share their cultures. In doing so the tourist helps support development and conservation.
Community based tourism (CBT) offers tourists an unrivalled insight into another culture and lifestyle. Rather than an hour spent at a reconstructed 'tribal' village the traveller is invited to be part of community life.
CBT is a two-way street where tourism provides local employment and income for education, development and conservation initiatives; and the tourist has a unique opportunity for cultural exchange and interaction with members of a remote tribe or community.
As many of these projects are by their nature small-scale and off the beaten track, responsibletravel.com (RT.com) and Conservation International (CI) have launched an initiative to provide free marketing for community based tourism ventures in order to promote them to consumers and tour operators across the globe.
Even more importantly, RT.com and CI will seek to connect community based tourism projects with appropriate tour operators from the 160 tour operators whose holidays RT.com currently markets. RT.com envisages that it will be these partnerships that are the key factor in creating regular bookings for the community based tourism enterprises.
Justin Francis, responsibletravel.com Co-founder and Managing Director, said: “Working with CI, we intend to bridge the gap between the rapidly increasing number of tourists interested in authentic responsible tourism and small scale community based tourism ventures that may fail if tourists and the industry are unaware that they exist.”
“By partnering with responsibletravel.com, we will be able to provide smaller community based tourism projects with the opportunity to use a branded and well-known mechanism so that they can connect and market their sites directly with tourists and tour operators all over the world,” said Neel Inamdar, CI ecotourism business advisor.
He added: “CI and responsibletravel.com will be the catalysts to help market conservation and community based sustainable tourism.”
 One example of a successful community project is the Chalalán Ecolodge in the Bolivian Amazon, a joint initiative of the rainforest community of San José de Uchupiamonas and Conservation International (CI) in Bolivia. Created in 1995 by a visionary group of San José villagers, the ecolodge provides employment opportunities through nature-based tourism, a much-needed economic alternative to logging. CI's goal at the outset of the Chalalán project was to create a viable ecolodge that was wholly owned and operated by local managers and staff. To accomplish this, CI trained villagers in a broad range of activities, including marketing and management, house keeping, food preparation and how to guide tours.
In February 2001, the community received full ownership of the lodge from CI. Today, 74 families receive regular direct economic benefits from employment and management of the ecolodge. The Chalalán Ecolodge is already being successfully marketed through responsibletravel.com.
Conservation International has been working with many local communities creating community based tourism projects to help them conserve their environments; however, until the launch of the responsibletravel.com / CI initiative, they had been lacking the means to market their destinations to the responsible traveller.
RT.com and CI will also collaborate on the First Choice Responsible Tourism Awards 2006 to be presented at the World Travel Market (WTM) on Wednesday 8 November.
Further Information:
For more information on this initiative, see: www.responsibletravel.com/communitybasedtourism
Chalalán Ecolodge Information Center
Tel./Fax. +591-2-434058 La Paz
Tel./Fax. +591-8922419 Rurrenabaque
Email: chalalan_ecolodge@latinmail.com
http://www.ecotour.org/destinations/chalalan.htm
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Notes for Editors:
responsibletravel.com is an online travel agent - based in Brighton, England - launched in 2001 for travellers who want more real and authentic holidays that also benefit the environment and local people. For more about the company, click here.
Conservation International (CI) applies innovations in science, economics, policy and community participation to protect the Earth’s richest regions of plant and animal diversity and demonstrate that human societies can live harmoniously with nature. Founded in 1987, CI works in more than 40 countries on four continents to help people find economic alternatives without harming their natural environments. For more information about CI, visit www.conservation.org.
Contact:
Justin Francis, Co-founder
Justin@responsibletravel.com |
