What is community based tourism?

Communities have been welcoming tourists forever – and long before the existence of hotels. But it’s only fairly recently that the academic community has used the term community-based tourism, and seen it as a tool for international development. Community-based tourism in this context was seen as a tool for alleviating poverty in indigenous communities. Many recent projects have been set up by NGOs, not communities, with a long-term goal of eventually becoming entirely community-owned and run.

Many of these projects have not subsequently succeeded. “They were conceived in ignorance of the market, service connections and tourist distributors,” Justin explains. Projects were planned without adequate consultation – and some built in places so far off the tourist trail that no one would visit. As a result, some were even torn or burnt down by the communities they were supposed to support.

Justin did some research with environmental organisation Conservation International: “They had funded many ecotourism lodges and were dismayed with the results.”

Research in 2009 found that the average occupancy across 28 surveyed projects was just five percent. Many lodges didn't provide contact details, making them impossible to book.

“The big lesson for NGOs is that rather than building something, raising a community’s hopes and then at the very end thinking, ‘How do we sell it?’, you need to build partnerships and get some advice from the start,” says Justin.

Since the 2000s, many community-based tourism projects have fallen by the wayside. Yet, in the same time period, others have survived and gone from strength to strength.

Guyana is a small South American country that has seen a rise in tourism in recent years. Tourists find that as soon as they leave the capital, they use community-based tourism projects – there’s no other option. In the jungle, there are so few settlements and so little infrastructure that tourist lodges are de facto part of the community; they would not function without the support and infrastructure already established by the village.

But this doesn’t mean that community lodges succeed alone. Rewa Eco-Lodge is now a well-established lodge in Guyana. It’s part of an Amerindian community which live in the rainforest at a place where the Rewa and Rupununi rivers meet. Its remote location proved a challenge at first.

“The first year, only two travellers went there,” explains Claire Thorne of Wilderness Explorers, who work with our travel specialists Pioneer Expeditions. “In the second year, only four. It was heartbreaking for the village.”

Wilderness Explorers got involved and helped spread the word. The village is now a firm fixture on the tourist trail: “It’s really gone from strength to strength over the years, thanks to a very strong village council.”

A tourism company can market to a wider range of people. It can also provide financial advice. Some communities have never had large funds before and can fall prey to bad guidance without help from a more established partner.

Getting the right tourism agencies in at the beginning spreads the risk for small villages and gives them a huge potential market of customers.

“We used to call it a marriage,” says Jasmin Caballero, co-manager of Chalalan Ecolodge in Bolivia, who also runs her own tourism business. A marriage between a company and a community, especially for tourism. The community can provide a service but a company can do all the marketing and keep the finances where they should be.

A community may not have the initial funds needed to own a safari lodge. They may not want to take on the financial risk of ownership – not in decades peppered with financial crises and in the shadow of a global pandemic.

Outside ownership can make it easier for projects to grow so that they benefit many villages instead of just one. Our partner Basecamp Kenya is a safari camp which considers itself community-based tourism because the land where the safaris take place is leased from the community.

“Basecamp can scale much bigger with funding from the tourism business,” says Justin. “It operates in 1.2 million hectares of land – it has 400 staff and more than 10,000 families directly benefitting.”

It has been over 20 years since we launched, and we still market community-based tourism. But you will see a mix of trips on the site.

Many trips include one or two nights in community-owned accommodation a part of a wider itinerary.

The solution is to weave community-based tourism projects into other itineraries, says Justin. “What success looks like is a tourist travels around and stays one night in a community-benefitting lodge.”

Claire agrees: “People don’t go to Guyana to visit one lodge.” These projects need to be marketed as part of a full holiday package.

Another solution is to make them compulsory. If you want to visit Rwanda’s newest UNESCO site, Gishwati Mukura National Park, you need to stay one night in a community-owned lodge.

Communities will organise themselves so that they host tourists on a rotational basis. This means that the work is shared. On the Andaman Sea, you’ll find Thai villagers taking turns hosting visitors in idyllic beachside settings.

At Surama, a lodge in Guyana, tour guides work for two weeks, “and then they’re off roster do their own farming and hunting so they are protecting their own traditions,” says Claire, “This was amazing during a pandemic as they weren’t reliant on tourism.”