By Fraaz Mahmud Kasuri
At Hospitality Plus, we always try to bring you some very relevant and updated content on the fields of hospitality and tourism. This is all because of the confidence our readers put in us. For this edition, we conducted a survey in the northern areas of Pakistan where we observed and interviewed hundreds of tourists and tourism operators regarding the responsible attitude of the tourists while they were on their tourism expeditions.
Mostly in Naran and Kaghan and then in Neelum Valley, team HP observed various people and interviewed them about their approach towards responsible tourism. Majority of the people, first of all, did not know about the term ‘Responsible Tourism’ while those who knew were not actually behaving responsible.
What is Responsible Tourism?
“Responsible Tourism is about “making better places for people to live in and better places for people to visit.” Responsible Tourism requires that operators, hoteliers, governments, local people and tourists take responsibility, take action to make tourism more sustainable.”
It was unfortunately observed that from operators to tourists and from hoteliers to local people, nobody was showing responsibility to give people a better tourism experience. Operators were having bookings but not fulfilling the requirements of the tourists, hoteliers were booking rooms but cleanliness and other facilities were missing, no government support or involvement was visibly observed, local people were somewhat supportive but not local vendors. The strange thing was that the tourists who were visiting the places were also not behaving in a responsible way. Littering, wrong parking, unplanned camping, dangerous adventures, rash driving and much more; all of that was just adding fuel to the already fueled fire.
According to the team HP’s city-wise survey, tourists from Karachi are the most responsible tourists. Majority of the people who were following the rules and regulations of the tourist places out there belonged to Karachi. Tourists from Islamabad stood second as they were also among those who were behaving responsible. At number three, it was observed that tourists from Lahore were struggling to behave responsible and trying to keep the things at peace. Rest of the cities either small or big ones were far behind these three cities in showing responsibility while being on some tourism adventure.
One thing that was noticed and it was quite alarming that tourists were taking very young kids even of one to two years of age to the higher places where oxygen level could also go a bit low.
It was also noticed that many of the ladies were wearing heals or other uncomfortable shoes that can cause any fatal accident anytime.
Some young boys were trying to skim through the uneven and dangerous roads on bikes without any precautionary measures. They must know that adventure tourism is a separate field.
In short, whatever the role we are playing in the field of tourism, we need to be responsible and vigilant to keep the tourist places beautiful and tourists safe.
