ABTA recently published a new and timely report, Tourism for Good: A roadmap for rebuilding travel and tourism.
This report recognises the devastating impact of COVID-19 – the travel industry’s biggest ever disruptor. The immediate focus is naturally on business survival and recovery. However, we must not lose sight of the urgent challenges that we faced before the pandemic and will continue to face.
The universal and global nature of the crisis has reminded us of how we and our world are interconnected, necessitating a concerted worldwide response and a willingness to share and learn from others. This experience should now shape how, as an industry, we approach the other common challenges we face.
Tourism’s unexpected standstill has given us a unique chance to reflect on the type of industry we want to rebuild. Future prosperity depends on putting sustainability at the heart of tourism’s recovery. This can only be achieved by operators, governments, destination managers, partners and communities working together. This is an opportunity to purposefully build back better for a responsible and resilient tourism industry, fit for the challenges we face and a contributor to the global good.
Building on ABTA’s long-standing work on sustainability, this report therefore provides a framework to guide ABTA’s activities to support its commitment to continue to champion sustainability with its Members, the wider travel industry, destinations and customers, as well as ways in which this can be supported by policies and action by the UK Government.
This post has been adapted from the report introduction by Mark Tanzer, ABTA Chief Executive.
The report can be downloaded here.
