From the Team at Beyond Green Travel and Community Association of Big Sur: 

Dear Big Sur Community Members and Stakeholders,

As you may already know, the purpose of the Big Sur Sustainable Tourism Destination Stewardship Plan is to create a forward-looking action plan to better manage visitation to help protect Big Sur’s cultural and natural heritage, while also benefiting the local economy and community way of life for years to come.

As part of the process of reaching out to and collecting information from community stakeholders, the Resident Survey (links below) asks your opinions about tourism in Big Sur and potential visitor management strategies.  All individual responses to the survey will be keep confidential, and any comments that may be shared in the Destination Stewardship Plan will contain no identifying information. 

The deadline for completion of the survey is March 15, 2020. Please complete the survey only once, and please feel free to share the link with other residents or others with their roots in Big Sur.  The survey is available in both English and Spanish. 

English:  https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/bigsurdsp 

Spanish:  https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/bigsurdspespanol

The surveys are also available via our website, www.bigsurdsp.com, where you can continue to provide comments, suggestions, concerns and recommendations.  

While we encourage you to complete the survey online if at all possible, we can also provide a hard copy to complete.  If you would prefer a hard copy, please contact Kate Daniels at 831-241-2761, or you may also contact us via email:  info@beyondgreentravel.com. 

Thank you for your time in completing the survey. We look forward to our continuing engagement and consultations with Big Sur community members and stakeholders, as we work to create a plan that can help Big Sur remain a unique and special place for present and future generations.

Best regards,
Costas Christ
CEO, Beyond Green Travel

— 
Butch KronlundExecutive Director Community Association of Big Sur

As I have been saying for almost a year now, I won’t be posting the horror stories of overtourism any longer — they are multiplying faster than I can keep track. It is a worldwide phenomena.

Big Sur is exploring solutions, but to get there, we need data. Counters have recently put in a number of places (5?) on Carmel Valley Road, and I expect the same will happen here on Highway One. I have suggested a number of additional places NOT on Highway One. CABS put out an email request for suggestions on where they should be, and I answered.

Once I have something concrete to report, on anything about overtourism and Big Sur, I will do so. In the meantime, want to do something? Write to your state representatives (in CA) and point out the hypocrisy of this state’s position of climate change vis-a-vis the position of our tourist agency — visitcalifornia.com

California wants to be a leader in tackling climate change and yet it, through its tourist agency (paid for with our state taxes), uses the “road trip” as its major selling point for our state. We pay taxes for emissions control and development of green technology, for example, while we also pay taxes to invite people from all over the country and the world to take the ultimate road trip here — SF to LA — the usual route taken to sell our state to other countries. This adds to the environmental impacts we are trying to avoid — by tens of millions if not billions. This is the height of not just hypocrisy but of idiocy. Climate change is real. The science supports it. And where is California on the issue? Bringing in millions and millions of airplanes, cars and drivers to accelerate this change. I thought we were smarter than this. Contact your representatives and ask them to be smart.

This was sent out as part of a mailing by VisitCalifornia.com. They also mentioned MoCo’s sustainable moments campaign — which is mostly just “talk” or website rather than action. I like what Sonoma County is doing, and suggest we can learn from them. It is not a complete solution, but may be one link in a real chain of sustainability that includes more than just talk about what it is. We have TONS more tourists than ever, but the businesses here in Big Sur are not getting the business. Promote our local businesses, not Bixby Bridge or McWay falls. This has to change. The nature of the tourist has to change. The quality of the tourist has to change. Tourists are welcome here, just not idiots.

Sonoma County

Sonoma County Tourism (SCT) recently announced its shift from a Destination Marketing Organization to a Destination Stewardship Organization as part of its commitment to amplifying tourism’s positive role in the local community and environment. 

“Sales and marketing will remain very important for our organization,” said Director of Global Media Relations Birgitt Vaughan. “But everything will really stand on promoting our area to travelers who look for an experience that aligns with the values of stewardship and responsible travel.”

Sonoma County is positioned to become America’s first 100 percent sustainable wine region this year, a goal undertaken by Sonoma County Winegrowers five years ago in 2014. In partnership with SCT, green and white branded “Sonoma County Sustainable” signs posted at vineyards and wineries declare to travelers and locals the commitment to agricultural heritage and environmental stewardship. 

SCT launched a two-year partnership with Kind Traveler in August. This first-of-its-kind hotel booking platform unlocks special rates, perks and amenities in exchange for a $10 per night donation to a local charity within Sonoma County. 

Guests are incentivized with perks such as a complimentary bottle of wine, a credit towards dining, or a certificate to a local tasting room, while 100 percent of their donation goes directly to 1 of 3 local charity organizations: Redwood Empire Food Bank, Russian Riverkeeper, or Sonoma Land Trust. Visitors’ donations allow the organizations to maintain natural landscapes, hiking trails and waterways, and provide food to members of the community. 

Participating Kind Hotels include Farmhouse Inn, Timber Cove Resort, h2hotel, Harmon Guest House, Flamingo Conference Resort & Spa, Hotel E by Greystone Hotel, The Sandman Hotel, Vintners Inn Sonoma County, El Dorado Hotel & Kitchen, and Hyatt Regency Sonoma Wine Country.

For some comparisons about what I addressed in the first paragraph, the Hawaii Tourist Association reported that Maui visitor spending decreased nearly 2% to $2.6 billion, while visitor arrivals grew 4% to more than 1.5 million. That’s the opposite of HTA’s goal. (https://www.staradvertiser.com/2019/08/25/hawaii-news/as-impacts-mount-some-wonder-whether-managed-tourism-is-possible-on-maui/

That is also the opposite of Big Sur’s goal. We want the tourists who will stay here, patronize our local businesses, and thereby learn to love our local environment, culture, and the entire Big Sur Experience.

We are about 12 years behind Norway, the leader in the field of sustainable tourism.

“The effort dates back to 2007, when the country began working on a sustainable-tourism plan. In 2013, it became the first country in the world to implement a sustainable destination national standard, which is now the model used by the Global Sustainable Tourism Council, the international accreditation body for sustainable tourism.

“Norway has always been a sustainability trailblazer,” says Neil Rogers, a Stockholm-based consultant who has worked the past 40 years in eco-, adventure, and sustainable tourism. “Most Norwegians still live close to nature. They appreciate and care about the places they recreate in and understand that they must rapidly take actions to protect and conserve their environment and culture.”

The sustainable destination national standard goes way beyond leaving a note in a hotel room asking guests not to change their towels. It covers six main sustainability themes, 45 criteria, and 108 indicators in the areas of nature, culture, environment, social values, community involvement, and economic viability. Once a destination devises a viable plan, it implements energy-saving initiatives and projects that promote local food and culture, and it builds infrastructure, like signposts and trails or trail upgrades. Those upgrades are then monitored before receiving accreditation. From start to finish, the entire process takes two to three years. “The long-term goal,” says Sornes, “is that every destination in Norway is making use of the system.”  

This is a longer than usual article, and a bit complex, but worth the read. https://www.outsideonline.com/2401446/norway-adventure-travel-overtourism

Here is something a little different for you to study.

While we have been working through stakeholder meetings, Martha Diehl is one voice that keeps asking to start with collecting data. Fortunately for the rest of us, her voice is getting louder on this issue. Megan Epler Wood agrees with Martha when she says that local stakeholder meetings are insufficient because they are not discussions based on data that all can share and comprehend. Instead they are often led by angry and upset stakeholders trying to persuade other with opinions based on anecdotal information and with governmental agencies have no budgets to manage tourism’s impacts. “Neither the gurus nor the protesters are advancing approaches that are genuinely constructive because they are based on opinion and anecdotal information.” (Sustainable Tourism on a Finite Planet, p. 26.)

Thanks to the efforts of Lisa Kleissner, and her contacts in Hawaii, we have been able to obtain the surveys used by the UH for its own study on the Invisible Costs of Tourism. It will be easy to adapt them to our situation. It surveys both tourists and residents. We are looking for one that similarly surveys businesses. This can be the beginning of our data collection strategy, if we can work with cooperation from MCCVB and Monterey County to obtain the funds necessary to implement this data collection process.

Continuing on with the article that relies on Professor Epler Wood’s work found here: https://www.civilbeat.org/2019/07/how-these-top-travel-spots-are-making-tourism-pay-its-own-way/

While figures proclaiming the number of visitor arrivals or tourism jobs have become common yardsticks for assessing the health of a local tourism industry, the study finds that destination managers often ignore other vital metrics. 

Those include each individual traveler’s contribution to greenhouse gas emissions, wear and tear on local infrastructure, threats to biodiversity and demand for land and housing.

Failure to confront these hidden costs is starting to degrade the customs, culture, monuments, natural resources and other assets that make these destinations so appealing to visit in the first place.

In Barcelona, visitors swarm beaches and other beloved attractions, transforming places long loved by residents into virtual no-go zones for locals. Residents are being driven out of Venice as 30 million annual tourists bombard the Italian city, stampeding streets, sidewalks and canals and skyrocketing the price of rent. Poorly behaving tourists on Easter Island have made a mockery of the island’s indigenous culture, climbing on giant moai statues and posing with them for nose-picking photos. 

To turn this scenario on its head, governments and the travel industry must reinvest a higher percentage of tourism revenues into the destination, the study concludes. The first step toward achieving this requires destination managers to uncover the full cost of hosting each individual visitor. Only then can stakeholders figure out how to pay for those costs.

When such costs go ignored, the study finds that residents are forced to foot the bill. Or worse, the bill doesn’t get paid at all.

The idea is to make tourism pay its own way to the benefit of everyone.

To achieve this, the “Invisible Burden” study suggests local governments create a global trust or revolving fund account with apolitical leaders to finance the preservation of destination assets. (To be continued.)

As Megan Epler Wood stated in the quote I cited in part one, if local people are engaged in the monitoring of vital indicators to protect local resources AND the policy makers and tourist organizations like https://www.seemonterey.com/ and https://www.visitcalifornia.com/ actually listen and implement changes and develop the programs and frameworks to actually protect the health and well-being of the local populations, ecosystems, cultures, and monuments, then the civil disobedience witnessed in July would not be necessary. When local people do not feel they are being heard, but instead federal, state, and county government, as well as the tourist organizations mentioned above put money above the health and safety of the local population and of the delicate ecosystem, then frustration will lead to the kinds of behavior we have witnessed.

Continuing on with the article by Brittany Lyte from Honolulu Civil Beat, which can be found here: https://www.civilbeat.org/2019/07/how-these-top-travel-spots-are-making-tourism-pay-its-own-way/

“The famous case is Mallorca, where they were down to $30 per night for a hotel in the ‘70s because it was a very overcrowded tourist destination,” said Megan Epler Wood, director of the International Sustainable Tourism Initiative at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and the lead author of the study. 

“And I attended a meeting in the Canary Islands where the mayor of Mallorca announced that they were going to tear down hotels and the whole audience stood up and cheered. And, in fact, they did it.” 

Mallorca has since recouped high-value tourism on the island in part by shuttering hotels, and also by establishing a new eco-tax on tourists in 2016 that is funneled into a fund to pay the hidden costs of tourism. Those include managing and upgrading systems for water use, waste disposal, land use, air and carbon emissions, transportation, community values and cultural heritage.

“You can drive a destination over a cliff,” Epler Wood said. “But the way to reinsert value is to properly account for tourism’s costs and then strategically look at reinvestment.”

The Key here is “properly account for tourism’s costs” — in other words, design and implement meaningful ways to collect the data about what tourism is costing Big Sur. (To be continued next Tuesday.)

I wrote the article below, and the one that will follow later this morning two weeks ago, before the Mill Fire and before yesterday’s meetings with CABS AND Costas Christ. I still think they are valid, even though as Costas said last night, Borocay Island was an extreme solution.

Today, I would again like to offer two separate articles, this first one: Lessons from Borocay Island, The Philippines and then in a couple hours, continue on with my invisible burden series. While it would be difficult for Big Sur to implement some of these practices — we are not an island, most of the time — there is still much we can learn about the extreme measures that have been used and look at whether we can avoid any such extreme measures, in order to save to save Big Sur. (This post was originally scheduled for last week, but I changed the schedule to accommodate the Mill Fire reporting.)

The President of the Philippines closed Borocay Island, for 6 months — no planes were allowed to land, and no tourists were allowed in. The reason (to use the President’s words) was the island had become a cesspool that needed immediate action from political authorities.

While Borocay Island was closed, it was cleaned up and a new strategy put into place. The sudden decision to shutter the island for tourism in February 2018 was very harsh for the locals who depend heavily on tourism. The main idea behind the decision was to use the hiatus to clean up the environment, improve hotels’ sewage treatment systems, and to develop a tourism strategy that guarantees a sustainable future for the island. Hence, Boracay re-opened on October 26, 2018 with a new strategy that intends to restrict tourism to make it more sustainable

These rules are as follows:

• Quota on tourist visits based on the island’s carrying capacity (only 6,405 tourists per day can land on the island).
• New regulations regarding tourists’ attitudes and behavior (e.g., smoking and drinking alcohol are forbidden on White beach, the most visited beach on the island) – (click here to see all the regulations).
• New regulations regarding locals’ attitudes and behavior (e.g. raising pigs or chickens for a living is forbidden).
• Only the hotels compliant with the requirements of the Department of Environment and Natural Resources and the Department of the Interior and Local Government, and accredited by the Department of Tourism, can open again. Tourists can only come to the island if they reserve a room at one of these hotels.
• All hotels must be connected to a proper sewage treatment system.
• Road widening project to resolve congestion issues.
• Trash and unauthorized buildings will be removed from the wetlands.
• Buildings within 30 meters of the shoreline will be destroyed.
• Gambling is forbidden on the island.

These regulations, assuming compliance is widespread, should enable tourism on Boracay Island to become more sustainable. But what has really happened since the reopening? Costas Christ touched on one of the ramifications of this extreme measure last night.

For the answer to that question, go here: https://www.hospitalitynet.org/opinion/4094313.html to read the rest of the article.