The humanitarian potential of the $9T tourism industry

When Cyclone Aila smashed into Bangladesh and eastern India in 2009, Gopinath Parayil and his team became accidental humanitarians. Parayil’s responsible tourism company, Blue Yonder, frequently worked in the Sundarbans, a forested area that straddles the border between India and Bangladesh and is famed for its tiger reserves and mangroves. Usually Blue Yonder provided tours and partnered with local communities there, but when the cyclone hit, Sundarbans was one of the worst-affected areas. The team jumped into action, helping in any way they could. They were “literally pulling people out of debris,” Parayil said. His company and others also provided accommodation to people displaced by the storm. “The tourism industry had resorts and hotels where we had enough water [and] electricity, because many of the properties were actually not dependent on the power grid, which [was] all damaged, but on renewable energy sources,” he explained. At that time, his team had no experience in disaster response. Now, things are different. Parayil said they’ve been caught up in at least 10 major natural disasters in nearly 20 years of operating. They’ve gained experience, become better prepared, and built resilience into the work they do with communities. By the time floods hit the Indian state of Kerala in 2018, “it didn’t take us even 30 minutes to bring together all our resources to respond to the crisis. … We were using our kayaks, our canoes, our boats, whatever we had, our life jackets and paddles … [to] go and rescue people,” he said, ultimately moving thousands of people to safety. With climate disasters increasing, including in some of the world’s top travel destinations, tourism companies and professionals are increasingly likely to find themselves on the front lines of emergencies. These experiences got Parayil — who previously studied disaster response — thinking. “As a travel company we have access to shelter, accommodation, food and beverage, highly skilled human resources which can be deployed within such a short time because we are there in the hyper-local level, on the ground, all the time,” he said. Those are all things the humanitarian sector needs during a crisis, “and this is all sitting unutilized in the tourism industry.” Parayil believes that the $9 trillion global tourism industry could revolutionize humanitarian response by repurposing resources during disasters, as well as helping the communities where they work to prepare. What’s more, he believes this contribution could be largely self-funded. ‘Solidarity tourism’ Parayil is not the only person to have noticed that the tourism industry has resources to offer during crises. When New York City was hit by Hurricane Sandy in 2012, AirBnB says it was contacted by a host who asked if she could offer her place for free to evacuees. Eventually, more than 1,000 other hosts joined AirBnB’s first emergency response effort and the company now has standard procedures for such situations. “Could we be applying some of that tourism industry money to invest in [things like] … building more resilient infrastructure … to really protect communities?” --— Christina Bennett, chief executive, Start Network Sara Dolnicar and Scott McCabe, who research sustainable tourism at the University of Queensland and the University of Nottingham, respectively, have also documented the role that tourism and hospitality companies played when Russia invaded Ukraine nearly a year ago, in a phenomenon they dub “solidarity tourism.” Alongside local efforts, international companies got involved: AirBnB offered free accommodation, the Eurostar and airlines offered free travel, and Uber gave free rides to those fleeing the war. While this work is welcome, write Dolnicar and McCabe, they note that very little of it has been formalized — only AirBnB has “an established emergency assistance procedure.” More businesses need to develop action plans, they suggest, to avoid implementing hurried solutions at short notice. But experts say that it is locally led work in climate-vulnerable tourist destinations where the partnership could really deliver. Popular tourist spots from Indonesia to the Maldives to the Caribbean are experiencing ever-more frequent climate-related disasters. In many of these places “a lot of the really critical infrastructure … is built around tourism. That’s people’s livelihoods. That’s the guys who have the trucks, the generators, the whatever [else] to make things run,” said Lars Peter Nissen, director of the humanitarian group ACAPS. Nissen also serves as an advisor to the Resilient Destinations Foundation, which was set up by Parayil and others to explore the potential in this area. A humanitarian-tourism partnership is in both sectors’ interest, Nissen said. While an overwhelmed and underfunded humanitarian sector needs new collaborators “who can help us do the heavy lifting,” the tourism sector needs destinations to be more resilient and to recover quickly after disasters so that tourists can return. “At the core of this idea, there’s a very nice win-win situation,” he said. The idea also ties into the growing push for localization in humanitarian response. Many travel guides and tour operators are locals themselves — they speak the language, understand the community’s needs, and know the area like the back of their hands. “In a humanitarian emergency … we need transport, we need logistics … and if that’s all local already, and it’s part of a tourism sector in an area, then … we don’t have to be flying in all of these international people to be doing all this work. … Repurposing all these services and skills and supply chains that the tourism industry has is a big pro,” said Christina Bennett, chief executive of the Start Network, a humanitarian membership group focused on innovation. Parayil pointed to the value of local expertise about food as an example. In India, he said, people are not used to eating cold meals. “During a crisis, just because they are in need doesn’t mean that you can just give them whatever is available. … It is our job to make sure that they eat with dignity.” In 2015 when flooding struck Puducherry — an Indian town known for its French colonial architecture, where Blue Yonder had an office — “what we did is we reached out to a lot of hotels and restaurants in the region … [to] convince them to transform their regular hotel kitchens into community kitchens,” Parayil said. They were all filled with stock “because they were expecting travelers to come all the week and then all of a sudden there is this disaster. … For five days we were serving something like 4,500 meals a day.” World Central Kitchen, the nonprofit founded by celebrity chef José Andrés, follows a similar model. It typically hires local cooks and works out of restaurant kitchens to provide food that is appropriate to local needs during emergencies, simultaneously supporting the economy and recovery. Fundraising potential What about the question of money? Parayil believes that there too, the tourism industry — which dwarfs the humanitarian sector financially — has much to offer. To begin with, if tourism professionals were routinely trained in disaster response, it would give humanitarians access to millions of people globally that are on the ground locally and need only change tack when disaster strikes. It also has the ability to raise funds quickly through its international networks and access to human stories. When Blue Yonder found itself helping with the response to the 2015 Nepal earthquake, for example, it started gathering stories from the community via its contacts on the ground and publishing them online. Tour companies in Australia and the United States then reached out to help. Blue Yonder connected them with humanitarian groups and together the companies managed to raise tens of thousands of dollars in just a few days — in large part from clients who had previously traveled to the affected areas as tourists and were emotionally connected to them. Meanwhile, for longer-term resilience and preparedness work, the experts reiterated that the tourism industry has an incentive to invest in order to protect destinations. With its billions of dollars, “could we be applying some of that tourism industry money to invest in [things like] … building more resilient infrastructure and … mangroves on coast lines … to really protect communities?” asked Bennett. Some of this work is already happening, led by companies like Blue Yonder. The question is, can it be scaled up, and what risks and challenges might come with it? “One [risk] is, would travel companies use this kind of ‘humanitourism’ as greenwashing,” wondered Bennett, particularly given the sector’s significant contribution to greenhouse gas emissions and the extractive role it plays in some communities. “If a tour operator is under the impression that it could offset its carbon emissions by engaging in disaster response, that math isn’t going to work,” she said. Any humanitarian-tourism partnership “should not be at the expense of the tourism industry … doing other things to offset their carbon footprint.” Both Nissen and Bennett also stressed the importance of the work being truly locally led. Any work should be directed by local humanitarian groups or authorities who best understand the community’s needs, they said. Bennett particularly cautioned against big international tour operators attempting to lead efforts on the ground. “You could have people doing harm if they don’t know what they’re doing,” she said. But to deal with all these questions, a conversation needs to be started, Parayil said. To that end, he set up the Resilient Destinations Foundation, which aims to bring together the tourism, development, and humanitarian sectors to create climate-resilient and climate-responsible tourist destinations. He’s also in contact with various organizations in the hope of setting up training programs, and wants to jumpstart the discussion at ITB Berlin, a major travel trade show in March where he’ll be hosting a panel discussion. There is all this “untapped potential,” he said. “If this can be scaled up … I believe strongly that this will change how the humanitarian sector actually looks at relief.” For both Nissen and Bennett, the next steps are about experimenting — “bringing together tourism and humanitarianism in hyper-local ways to understand how it best works, what each sector brings to the table … how to avoid the pitfalls,” Bennett said.“Once you’ve done some work there … then you can start bringing it to scale.” The bottom line, said Nissen, is that “I don’t think we can afford to say no to a good new idea. … It has to prove itself … but by all means, there’s a potential … so let’s give that a shot.”