Vocal For Local

That's us.

What we stand for is aligned with the 2023 Responsible Tourism Charter and the excellent 2022 draft of India's Tourism Strategy.

Here's what that means in practice:

1. We believe responsible tourism is vital, and can make a positive contribution across the spectrum from the planetary environment to the sustainable development of village life, particularly for the young and women, and particularly in less visited regions.

2. We believe responsible tourism directly improves people's lives by increasing their self-reliance, their education, employment and life skills, their employment prospects, their quality of life, their health, their digital connectivity, and, consequently, can be the major factor in reducing outbound migration.

3. We believe rural tourism must be built around the cultural integrity and authentic experiences of actual village life and practices today, promoting the bio-diversity, inspirational contemporary activities and adventures, heritage derived food and drinks, and the repurposing of village houses to enable visitors to 'get under the skin' of local people's actual lifestyles.

4. We believe private companies, NGOs and governments, regional and national, share a direction and ambition, so can usually co-operate or work in partnership, and each will achieve more by doing so.

5. We believe in distributed tourism strategies that spread the benefits of rural tourism to more areas rather than, as has historically been the case, concentrating tourism on a few over visited attractions, so that tourism can increasingly benefit the many not the few.

6. We believe that all tourism needs to be 'green tourism' for the benefit of the planet, but also because increasingly visitors will demand it, and only choose holidays that apply sustainable and responsible practices - not just talk about them.

7. We believe that there is an increasing convergence between national and international visitors, who are increasingly affluent, younger (prime target market: 30s to 50s), and who choose the same brands, consume the same media, work for the same or competing companies, and have similar ambitions whether they live in Bangalore, Bahrain or Birmingham, and, consequently, there can be a convergence of brand positioning and marketing strategy for destinations - what appeals to one, appeals increasingly to all.

8. We believe in smart tourism based not only on paperless, digital communication, data storage, energy efficient management systems, but also on the mobile phone facilitated by widespread skills training and achievable quality assurance standards.

9. We believe that developing visitor-focused destinations is key to long term tourism success, so creating appealing destination 'packages' (clusters of places, activities, accommodation, trained staff, competitive prices etc) for national and international, general and niche guests, is crucial. One of our primary roles and most valuable expertise is in destination product design for targeted markets.

10. We believe that our work should above all profit regions, communities and individual village families, and that's why we are committed to helping others to profit, not ourselves - and why we are committed to being Vocal for Local.

Image courtesy of USGS.