You are here: Home > About us > Achievements

Achievements

Tourism Concern’s campaigning efforts and programme activities have led to positive change and meaningful solutions at various levels:

Industry

• Over half of UK trekking tour operators adopted Tourism Concern’s code of conduct for improved working conditions for mountain porters following our ground-breaking campaign, Trekking Wrongs: Porters Rights. The successes of this campaign have also informed other campaigns and industry codes of conduct.
• All the UK’s leading tour operators have adopted policies on labour conditions for hotels included in their holiday packages as a result of our Sun, Sand, Sea and Sweatshops campaign. 

Government

• Following lobbying by Tourism Concern, the UK’s Foreign and Commonwealth Office established a permanent multi-stakeholder panel to ensure that destinations are not adversely affected by unnecessarily prolonged or geographically far-reaching travel advisories.

Destinations

• Plans for a massive tourism development in the Nungwi peninsula, Zanzibar, which threatened to displace 20,000 people, were scrapped as a result of our campaigning efforts.
• All-inclusive hotels were banned by the Gambian government after Tourism Concern joined forces with local partners to highlight the negative economic repercussions such developments have on local communities. 

Tourists

• Tourism Concern produced The Good Alternative Traveller’s Guide (2000), the first guide book providing tourists with information on where to go and how to maximize benefits to local communities. Our current publication, The Ethical Travel Guide (2009), sold 6000 copies in the first six months alone.
   

Education

• Tourism Concern’s educational materials and guidelines on sustainable tourism have helped shape the tourism-related undergraduate curriculum in the UK. Looking Beyond the Brochure, a teacher’s pack for secondary schools, was requested by three quarters of secondary schools in the UK.
• Tourism Concern’s specialist library holds the most comprehensive book-stock and educational resource on tourism in the UK and is widely used by students and academics.