How do we make the travel industry focus on sustainability?

A couple weeks ago I made the case on this blog that the adventure travel industry needed to "manage up" to harness the power of the larger tourism industry in order to advance its goals of preserving places and cultures.

A day or two after that post went up, this headline from the Las Vegas Sun popped up on my monitor:

"Travel Expert: Environmental policies loom as tourism threat."

The expert in the story? Roger Dow, President and CEO of the U.S. Travel Association.

Well thanks Roger. Doesn't exactly sound like an invitation for us to start managing up now does it?

It's pretty easy to look at a sound bite like that and say, "Well, the big shots in travel just don't get it. They're just about more, more, more and we're trying to do this sustainably."

Certainly, that case can be made. But as a marketer, I can also say with certainty that "more" is what our clients want. If we don't bring significant amounts of visitors to them, we don't have a job. All this focus on sustainability is fantastic and absolutely necessary. But without demand it doesn't matter. Let me put it this way: If the Glacier National Park-area tourism economy wasn't worth over $800 million annually*, would our politicians have banned mining in the area? Would Yvon Chouinard be known as an environmental titan if Patagonia had one less zero on its balance sheet?

The point is that the days of "either-or" need to end. Sustainable destinations need robust demand as much as they need sustainability. Indeed, supply and demand are not mutually exclusive, they are the very definition of what makes a market.

I would like to believe that the larger travel industry will take cues from adventure travel regarding sustainability. But I have a hard time seeing that happening on a significant basis until they see more dollars behind it. So that puts the challenge on us. How do we grow our own businesses and make our little $89 billion adventure travel industry (which I still think is undercounted) into an economic tiger? Then and only then will the $9 trillion global travel gorilla take notice.

*Source: Institute for Tourism and Recreation Research, University of Montana, 2006 financial data for Glacier Country tourism region.