Climate change: costs and opportunities for the travel industry

Lately, due to Ciara storm that mainly stroke the north of Europe, many flights cancellations and dis-services to tourists were reported.

These events, with or without clamor, are becoming more frequent: many policy makers, operators and mainly scholars are investigating on the costs and effects of these phenomena, such as climate change, the rising of the water level and, moreover, on the carbon footprint of tourist activities.

Many scenarios are being investigated, and direct impacts on tourist destinations range from redirection of the demand to other potential destinations to the adaptation of the travel seasonality, from the loss of attractiveness and poor quality of experience (also due to the changing of the eco-system), to the reduction of international travels caused by higher costs.

By consequence, in order to keep on being competitive, tourism destinations are pushed to address several and imminent challenges, such as:

• Promote low-carbon tourist activities;
• Promote information and training initiatives and campaigns for tourists and community;
• Set emergency plans to protect tourists and population;
• Develop partnerships with tourist enterprises and tour operators to reduce GHG-emissions from tourist activities;
• Invest on knowledge and scientific events to address the climate change and the consequences on tourism.

At Twissen we are experiencing a growing attention on sustainability for tourism, both from global tour operators that are promoting low-carbon tourist places, and from the same destinations through the diversification of the traditional tourism offer or even new forms of community-based tourism that seeks alternatives to mass tourism, favoring low-impact activities.

Francesco Redi

President and founder at Twissen. Manager in Local Development, Tourism Policies,  EU Funds. He cooperates with several European universities, public bodies, development agencies, DMOs and enterprises.