Community Based Sustainable Tourism – How is it applicable to the Sri Lankan context?

Tourism is a rapidly growing phenomenon and has become one of the largest industries in Sri Lanka. Contribution of Tourism to GDP of Sri Lanka is around US$ 1 billion. With the current boom in tourist arrivals, Sri Lanka tourism is enjoying a high occupancy rate and the country has been ranked as a top tourist destination by many international bodies. Thus, this is the right time to expand tourist attractions and  acquire high-quality clientele because, traveler preferences are unpredictable and they keep changing.

Community Base Sustainable Tourism is considered as the best pro-poor alternative tourism promotional approach, especially for developing countries. Sustainable tourism is an industry committed to making a low impact on the environment and local culture, while helping to generate income and employment for local people. The aim of community based sustainable tourism is to ensure that development is a positive experience for local people, tourism companies, and tourists themselves.

Since tourism happens in the community, the involvement of the community is one of the key elements in ensuring the sustainability of such tourism product development. However, gaining effective input from the community in tourism product development has been a great challenge for developing countries like Sri Lanka.

However, it does not seek only the communities’ benefit from tourism but it also looks at how tourism can contribute to the process of community development while absorbing community’s resources and skills through their productive participation. It is a well known fact that there are plenty of untapped tourism resources in rural Sri Lanka which can be used to develop the Community Base Sustainable Tourism approach and improve the living standards of the poor.

The Community Based Sustainable Tourism is applicable to Sri Lankan context in many ways. It supposes to deliver benefits to the community while they are encouraged to develop tourism enterprises. Incentives can be created to enable community to get benefits from tourism and conserve wildlife and natural resources. Community members’ skills and capacity can be utilized in tourism development while enhancing them in order to improve their income level and well being. Community members’ ethic, norms and social values are protected. Arts, music, dancing, folklore and other socio-cultural heritages are utilized for tourism development while protecting and enhancing them. Tourism development will work hand-in-hand with conservation of the environment and socio-cultural heritage.  

The role of government in community based sustainable tourism is critical. It’s obvious that community tourism cannot survive if there is no clientele. The government should support the community in solving the questions on how to obtain target customers, what the visitors' perspectives of products are and how to bring the products to them. Because community based tourism is a niche product, direct marketing should be carried out towards selected customers and selected tour operators. Further, in addition to providing a stable economy, it needs to ensure a market-friendly business environment, with appropriate regulations and oversight to ensure that social policy, environment and safety concerns are adequately dealt with. The government is also responsible for the necessary infrastructure facilities. Human Resource is vital and government should put pressure on the hotel schools in this regard. It is an excellent way for local entrepreneurs to get into business and government should facilitate them.

Conversely tourism organizations have a major role to reach out to Community Based Sustainable Tourism. Promote sustainable tourism products by using market related instruments and incentives; reduce inappropriate consumption; provide tourists with authentic information; enabling them to understand all environmental and related aspects (e.g. human rights situation) of tourism when selecting any destination or holiday package; provide information on respecting the cultural and natural heritage of destination areas; ensure that the marketing of 'green' tourism reflects sound environmental policy and practice; train staff to foster tourist responsibility towards the destinations; encourage multi-cultural education and exchange; actively discourage exploitative sex tourism; adopt, observe, implement and promote codes of conduct.

In a nutshell, Sri Lanka has plenty of tourist destinations and opportunities to promote Community Based Sustainable Tourism that still it has not been touched. Finally, this approach is luminous to reduce the poverty elevation of rural Sri Lanka and to widen the tourism industry, but the government and tourism organizations have not focused much attention on the subject.