Malia Asfour, the managing director of the Jordan Tourism Board, North America, has started the second year of her three-year term as chairman of Tourism Cares, the travel industry association dedicated to sustainability and to protecting the great travel sites of the world.
I spoke to Malia last week about the current projects and direction of Tourism Cares. Since its founding in the early part of the 21st century, it has evolved and continues to evolve. It is finding new ways to make the support of tourism benefit local communities and travel businesses in ways that will continue to bring benefits into the future. In a sense, they are developing ways to make their sustainability efforts more sustainable.
Tourism Cares was started as part of the U.S. Tour Operators Association, by tour operators who could witness up close in their daily operations the deterioration of the sites they made their livelihoods from. It was an idea whose time had come and it caught on and grew quickly. Soon the association spread beyond the tour operators and was joined by companies from all segments of the travel industry, who all realized that ultimately they shared its objectives.
Among the association’s first efforts were big clean-up and site-restoration projects. The association would invite its member companies to send some of their team members to join in on all sorts of jobs. It was real hand labor in most cases, from picking up litter, to painting, building, planting, shoveling, sweeping, raking, whatever was needed at a particular site. Hundreds of people would show up to participate, and it was always a festive event. It started with Tourism Caring for Ellis Island followed by Tourism Caring for New Orleans. The clean-up projects became regular events, and the association has held some 30-plus of them, making real tangible differences in many places, and earning heaps of gratitude from people at the sites.
The projects brought unexpected side benefits. They brought people from various segments of the travel industry together in a really personal way, based on something larger than themselves that they could join together on, even though out in the business world they may be competing companies.
It was a marvel to see how much human labor could accomplish if you gather a group of people together who had an enthusiastic drive to help, and were organized and directed into various tasks. The good karma you could feel as a participant was in itself a great lift to one’s spirits. The participants could see this in other participants, and their energies fed off each other.
The camaraderie that developed from joining in a group effort was a buoyant force in itself. The value of the work to the sites themselves was visibly striking. You could see a pronounced difference in the site from the beginning of the day to the end. The thrill of being part of that group effort was not advertised as part of the proposition, but it was tremendous. Those were glory days, experiences to be held and cherished. It was a big payoff for one’s efforts.
But now, as the association has evolved, it has found other ways of helping to preserve sites that can bring more long-term benefits to a site than one big clean-up project could. It’s an updating of the old adage, “Give a man a fish and he will eat for a day. Teach a man how to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.” It could be reframed as “Give a woman a computer and an education, and you can change her life. Give a number of computers to a number of women in a village, and you can change the community for the better in a sustainable way.”
Malia explained, “Tourism Cares is actually rethinking about what Tourism Cares is, what the brand is. What we’re trying to do has shifted from the old days of volunteering.”
A central part of the strategy comes together in what TC calls its Meaningful Travel Map. It’s a map that is populated by places that have been vetted and endorsed by Tourism Cares as solid possibilities for engaging in tourism activities that benefit a destination and its people in a sustainable way. She explained how it works.
“We look at a destination,” she said, “and see what they need to become part of the Meaningful Travel Map. We look at destinations holistically and see where the need is on the sustainable track, and help them identify how they can start their sustainable process through meaningful travel.”
As good as the clean-up projects were, TC is now finding stronger ways to leave its benefits with a destination.
“It’s more of a matter of digging deeper into local community and seeing how we can help to make tourism a force for good in their community,” said Malia. “What are the things that they need? What needs to be funded to help them improve their hospitality or tourism infrastructure? We want to make sure that anything we touch and do has a long-lasting impact.”
To show how it works, Malia explained how the project worked recently in Jordan.
“When Tourism Cares launched the Meaningful Travel Map in Jordan,” she said, “we worked with a sustainability expert on the ground, and we identified 120 different social enterprises that could benefit from tourism dollars that were in locations where we had a lot of tourism coming in. For example, in Jerash you can tour the Roman ruins, then you can go and have lunch with the local community in a place called Beit Khairat Souf, a women’s cooperative where you learn how to cook with women. And you can buy organic food from the women. The money is a force for good. It stays in the community, to help fund a day care center so the women who live in the community can leave their babies there and go earn an income. It shows how tourism can help fuel pieces of an economy that can help locals living there.”
About 25 miles outside of Amman there’s a women’s cooperative called the Iraq Al Amir, where the women in the village are able through tourism to buy computers so they can do their homework. Once that was vetted, it could go on the Meaningful Travel Map.
“Tourism Cares helped develop the map, then we educated the Jordanian DMCs [destination management companies, or ground operators],” said Malia. “And we’re doing the same in Colombia and Panama. We have a Meaningful Travel Map in Colombia. We are launching one in Panama this year. We were in Norway last year, and we were in Victoria and Tahoe.
“It’s finding communities that can benefit from tourism dollars, that have something to offer travelers and can make that connection between a traveler and a local that is priceless. We educate the local DMCs on these meaningful travel experiences that are available, then by having the Meaningful Travel Summit, we educate the US operators on these experiences, have them actually experience them, so that they can put them in their itineraries. So it’s a full circle of service in terms of the tourism infrastructure, to be able to get all the pieces involved.”
Malia calls it “a cool win-win.
“It’s a really valuable exercise for DMCs to learn the ways they can incorporate sustainable tourism into their itineraries. And it’s a great vehicle for the tour operators, who don’t have to go and vet all the experiences for themselves. They are already vetted experiences, and have approval of Tourism Cares so they know. It’s a full circle win-win that helps travelers connect and spend locally, so that local communities can thrive.”
It provides a way for any person who has an urge to do something positive for the environment a way to do it, just by taking a trip. That’s a real cool win-win
David Cogswell is a freelance writer working remotely, from wherever he is at the moment. Born at the dead center of the United States during the last century, he has been incessantly moving and exploring for decades. His articles have appeared in the Chicago Tribune, the Los Angeles Times, Fortune, Fox News, Luxury Travel Magazine, Travel Weekly, Travel Market Report, Travel Agent Magazine, TravelPulse.com, Quirkycruise.com, and other publications. He is the author of four books and a contributor to several others. He was last seen somewhere in the Northeast US.