Tourism power in action

We all know that tourism drives job creation and increases prosperity in local economies. Tourism also has a direct affect on poverty reduction and an indirect affect on increasing health and human services; i.e people prosper they can afford a better diet and health care.

The United Nations World Tourism Organization ranks tourism in the top three categories for economic development, “demonstrating that travel can play a vital role in helping developing economies mature.”

Indeed, already more people are traveling to developing countries. Last year, the 48 least-developed countries saw the number of tourists rise from 6 million to 17 million, and tourism revenue rise from $3 billion to $10 billion.

That’s a massive increase while still a small percentage of international travel as a whole. (124 million people travelled internationally in just the first two months of this year).

The UNWTO predicts the total number of international travellers this year will rise 5%, with Chinese travellers spending more than ever. The American, French, and now the Chinese spend the most while travelling, according to the UNWTO. Nearly $1 trillion per year is spent by international travellers, the UNWTO says.

Imagine if more of that money went to developing countries.

Travelling to developing countries is the same as investing in the developing world. The returns instead come in the forms of local products, services, and lifetime experience.

Egypt is seeking tourism dollars again and sees visitors as key to its economic recovery. “As the leading foreign exchange earner and representing one in every seven jobs, tourism is a crucial factor in Egypt’s economic recovery,” Egyptian Prime Minister Essam Sharaf said at a recent U.N. meeting on tourism.

Tourism power is an untapped resource in the world economy. Choosing where to travel and how to spend money when we are there is often considered fun. But looked at another way, from a business and economic perspective, those choices can have major consequences.

In the developing world, tourism accounts for almost half of total service exports. Increase those dollars and place them in sustainable development programs, which the U.N. is encouraging, and soon improvements can be seen in education, the environment and disease reduction.

“Responsible and sustainable tourism allows destinations and companies to minimize the negative impacts of tourism on the environment and on cultural heritage while maximizing its economic and social benefits,” the UNWTO says.

Moreover, it creates empathy. When people travel and see conditions in disrepair or people living in poverty, there is a desire to help and lend assistance. Of course there are charitable institution throughout the developing world and there are financial investments to be made in companies that operate or trade with developing world partners, thereby increasing economic recovery. But there is something special about taking money out of your own wallet and handing them to a person in need while getting a local product or service in return.

The All-Inclusive debate rumbles on..

The debate over First Choice's decision to move to an all-inclusive platform rumbles on, with AITO now saying that this represents a 'massive blow' to sustainability and campaign group Tourist Concern extending their criticism beyond First Choice to other operators such as Thomas Cook who have 135 all-inclusive properties in its Turkish brochure alone.

Tui have defended their position pointing out that they are only responding to consumer demand, rightly stating that the all-inclusive market has grown by 32% in the last five years and is now becoming the holiday style of choice for cash-strapped Brits and Europeans (my words - not Tui's).

Tui also claim (rightly) to have been working closely with hoteliers to make their programmes more sustainable by working with local suppliers and employing local people under fairer working conditions.

Apropos, my personal experience of all-inclusive is limited albeit a few years ago my wife and I enjoyed an all-inclusive holiday at a first class resort in Jamaica.

The hotel was first class, the food was excellent and the facilities we enjoyed were superb including watersports and tennis. At the same time, as an all-inclusive vacation it also represented excellent value for money.

One one occasion, we did manage to get to Dunns River Falls, on an organised excursion, but with this single exception, my knowledge of the island remains to this day:-

Jamaica = Airport - Resort - (Dunns River Falls) - Resort - Airport -

Never got see Bob Marleys house either...

The Million Dollar Memo - your chance to win!

Tourism Queensland is the the team that dreamed up the successful Best Job in the World campaign and they have just come up with a new weeze. The Million Dollar Memo.

This is a new campaign targeting the global incentive travel market by offering companies and workplaces around the world the opportunity to compete for AUD $1,000,000 worth of travel experiences to Queensland "Great companies are built by the great people within them, so we'd like to reward that hard work by giving one lucky company the chance to win the Ultimate Reward - AUD $1,000,000 worth of Queensland travel experiences for their staff," said Tourism Queensland CEO Anthony Hayes. "We've sent the Million Dollar Memo to thousands of companies and workplaces worldwide, inviting them to showcase their organization to a global audience by telling us why they are the best company in the world and why their employees deserve the AUD $1,000,000 worth of unique travel experiences to Queensland. To be in the running, entrants need to create an entertaining 60 second video that shows what makes their company great and why they think Queensland is the ultimate reward destination. Video entries can be submitted at www.milliondollarmemo.com.

Fancy a crack?

The Most Difficult Languages to Speak??

I'm proud that I can get by in a few languages, French, German, Spanish and some would say English (I'm from Yorkshire.!) - but here's a recent list I read of the most difficult languages for English speakers to get to grips with..


1. Arabic

Arabic breaks down into families. One is the Modern Standard Arabic of print, media, and online content. The other is spoken Arabic, which encompasses many colloquial dialects which vary by region. This means that if you pick up conversational Arabic in Tunisia, it might still be tough to be understood in Kuwait.

For all dialects of Arabic, pronunciation is difficult for English speakers, as many consonants are formed at the back of the mouth.

Arabic script is a phonetic, 28-symbol alphabet descending from Phonecian. Most letters change shape depending on their position in the word, and letters may or may not be joined. The most basic challenge in tackling written Arabic is in reading from right to left, working against an English speaker’s deeply embedded instinct.

Arabic grammar has very few parallels with English and Indo-European languages. The plural is expressed by changing the vowel structure of the word: kitab (book) becomes kutub (books). The bulk of verbs are irregular and can be formed 25 ways. It’s a logical grammar system, but a complicated one too.

2. Basque

In a study conducted by the British Foreign Office, Basque was ranked as the hardest language to learn. Geographically surrounded by Romance languages, it is one of the only language isolates of Europe, with no syntactic parallels to English. The regional dialects are highly diverged, though a standardized Basque is used for media and academics.

Basque is agglutinative, meaning that words are formed and modified with prefixes and suffixes. While “law” is lege in Basque, the phrase “according to the law” would be structured by suffixes as “legearen arabera.” Instead of prepositions, Basque uses cases endings to show the relationship between words, such as mendi (mountain) and mendira (to the mountain). It sounds simple, but with eleven cases, each taking four forms, the grammar is complex.

Basque is written in the Roman alphabet and pronunciation is fairly easy, even with new consonant sounds like tx or tz.

3. Cantonese

Cantonese is a tonal language, which is challenging for English speakers who are used to speaking with emphasis (“I didn’t eat YOUR sandwich!”) and inflection, rising tones to pose a question. Cantonese can be difficult even for those fluent in other Chinese dialects because of its tonal system. While Mandarin has four tones, Cantonese has eight, with pitch and contour shaping a syllable’s meaning.

Chinese has a logographic (pictoral) writing system of 5000+ characters. This presents a new hurtle to language learning, since a reader of Cantonese can’t sound out syllables in a text as we can with phonetic alphabets. They must know and recall the name of each character.


4. Finnish

Finnish is in the Finno-Ugric language family, with Estonian and Hungarian. Without Germanic or Latin influence, Finnish vocabulary is completely alien to English speakers. Its grammar is also somewhat notorious. There are fifteen noun cases, sometimes with subtle differences. Talotta means “without a house,” while talolta means “from a house.” Tricky.

There are six verb types, classed by their stems. These stems alter as the verbs are conjugated. The language is agglutinative and verbs are conjugated with a succession of suffixes.

But, Finnish is written as it sounds (in the Roman alphabet), and pronunciation is comfortable for English speakers. A common speaking problem lies in remembering single or double vowel sounds, as in tuli (fire) and tuuli (wind).

5. Hungarian

Though it uses the Roman alphabet for writing, Hungarian is tricky. Unique vowel sounds (á,é,ó,ö,ő,ú,ü,ű,í) and consonant clusters (ty, gy, ny, sz, zs, dzs, dz, ly, cs) make it difficult for English tongues to read and pronounce Hungarian.

Instead of articles, Hungarian conjugates verbs in one of two ways for definite and indefinite objects. Olvasok könyvet means “I read a book,” while Olvasom a könvyet is “I read the book.”

Because possession, tense, and number are indicated by suffixes, not word order in a sentence, Hungarian sentence structure is very loose and flexible. Sounds forgiving for a novice speaker, huh? The truth is that any sentence can take on several meanings if the suffixes are altered slightly. It’s a confusing system to learn.


6. Japanese

The good news is that pronunciation is easy. Japanese vowel and consonant sounds are familiar to those fluent in English, which makes the language easy to parrot and understand.

But written Japanese can be a headache to learn. It uses four alphabets including the Chinese-influenced kanji (pictoral), two phonetic writing systems, and the Roman alphabet (Romanji).

The notion of honorific language is challenging for learners. Japanese speech can vary with levels of politeness, with each level having set forms and rules. English has no set way of speaking honorifically or intimately, and learners may have trouble recalling when and where to use honorific speech.

Grammatically, Japanese is a mixed bag. There are only three irregular verbs and a pretty consistent structure, with verbs at the end of the sentence. Nouns carry no gender or number, though they can function as adjectives or adverbs, which can be confusing for readers.


7. Navajo

The Navajo language was used as a code by US forces in World War Two. In the Pacific battles, Japanese codebreakers cracked other allied dialects and coded language. They could never decipher Navajo.

Navajo is a verb-centred language. Even adjectives have no direct translation into Navajo; descriptions are given through verbs. It’s a prefix-heavy language, with 25 kinds of pronominal prefixes which can be stacked onto one another. This forms incredibly long phrases like chidí naaʼnaʼí beeʼeldǫǫhtsoh bikááʼ dah naaznilígíí which means “army tank.”

Another feature unique to Navajo is animacy, wherein nouns will take on certain verbs according to their rank in the hierarchy of animation. Humans and lightning are highest, children and big animals come next, and abstractions sit at the bottom. It’s a fascinating aspect of the language and culture, but a tough one to memorize and put into practice.


8. Mandarin

Written Mandarin is pictoral and contains over 20,000 characters. Some base characters, like root words, appear in other symbols, like (the character for “woman” forming part of “sister.” The written form of the language has no phonic connection to the spoken form.

Mandarin, like Cantonese, is a tonal language, and a misused inflection can change the meaning of a sentence. The syllable “ma” can mean mother or horse, depending on the inflection!

Grammatically, Mandarin is easy than some Indo-European languages. Words, for the most part, have only one grammatical form. Their function is shown through prepositions, word order and particles. Building and comprehending this syntax, however, takes time. There are some tough elements like Mandarin adverbs: a dozen words which have no direct English translation.

9. Korean

At first, the language seems far easier than other East Asian tongues. No tones! No pictoral writing system!

It’s true that reading and writing in Korean is easy to master, as the language uses the very logical Hangul phonetic written system. Speaking and listening, while tone-free, can be challenging with unique sounds that are hard for English speakers to recognize, let alone master.

The biggest challenge with Korean lies in the grammar. Verbs can be conjugated hundreds of ways, depending on tense, mood, age and seniority.

Like Japanese, one sentence can be said in three different ways, depending on the relationship between the speaker and addressee. Adjectives are conjugated too, with hundreds of possible endings. Also, there are also two different number systems, quite different from one another.

If anyone else has any suggestions, I'd like to know...what about Hindu???

Package industry pioneer passes away

Vladimir Raitz, co-founder of Horizon Holidays and creator of the air package holiday, has died aged 88.

Raitz was born in Russia, but left as a child as part of the mass Jewish emigration in the 1920s.

He had the idea for package holidays while in Corsica in 1949.

The first charter flight flew from Gatwick to Corsica in May 1950, taking six hours including a refuelling stop in Lyon, with the first package holidaymakers sleeping in tents.

Horizon organised the first package holiday to Palma in 1952 and the Costa Brava in 1954.

The business grew significantly over the next 20 years until it was sold to Clarksons Holidays in 1974.

We had the pleasure of working with Vladimir during our time at Air Malta.

84-year old set to cross Atlantic on a raft

84-year old British adventurer Anthony Smith has big plans for 2011. In January of next year, he and three other men, will attempt to cross the Atlantic Ocean aboard a raft made out of plastic gas pipes. Setting out from the Canary islands, they'll cover more than 2800 miles, in 60 days, finishing up in the Bahamas sometime in March. If successful, it'll be the culmination of a dream that Smith has waited nearly 60 years to see realized.

The former RAF pilot has led quite a life of adventure. Back in 1963 he became the first Briton to cross the Alps in a hot air balloon and he has explored east Africa by balloon as well. He is also an accomplished filmmaker and the author of more than 30 books. The ocean crossing has been his goal for most of his life however, and five years ago he took a big step towards making it a reality when he took out an advertisement in the Daily Telegraph that read: "Fancy rafting across the Atlantic? Famous traveller requires 3 crew. Must be OAP. Serious adventurers only."

From that advertisement, Smith found his crew, and he'll now be joined on the voyage by 57-year old yachtsman David Hildred, 61-year old hot air balloonist Robin Batchelor, and Andy Bainbridge, who at 56, is the young man of the group. Bainbridge is an experienced sailor and long time friend of Smith.

The raft is being built out of 13-yard sections of pipe that will have both ends sealed, trapping the air inside and making the craft buoyant. There will also be two small shelters, built from pig huts, that will provide the crew a respite from the elements, and a small fence will line the outside of the boat to prevent them from falling overboard. The simple boat has been dubbed the An-Tiki, a nod to Thor Heyerdahl's Kon-Tiki, and will have an "elderly crossing" sign on the sail.

Smith and his team hope to take advantage of the strong trade winds that arrive in January so that they can avoid the Atlantic storm season and finish the voyage on schedule.

Black Box Inventor Dies..

David Warren, the Australian inventor whose "black box" flight data recorder revolutionised the safety of air travel and aided countless crash investigations has died aged 85.

His own father died in a plane crash and he hit upon the "black box" idea while probing a 1953 disaster involving the world's first commercial jetliner.

"Without any explanation, without any witnesses, without any survivors ... it was a really baffling mystery," Warren said in a 2003 interview.

Warren, who died on Monday, was the first European child born on Groote Eylandt, a remote Aboriginal island in Australia's northeast, in 1925.

His father was among 12 people on board the "Miss Hobart" mail plane that vanished over the southern Bass Strait in 1934, one of Australia's earliest air disasters.

Then just nine years of age, Warren was left with his father's last gift to him, a crystal radio set, which he used to listen to broadcasts after lights-out in his boarding school dormitory.

Building radios soon became his schoolboy hobby, but a World War II ban on amateur radio led Warren to dump his nascent ambitions as a "radio ham" in favour of chemistry, his ultimate career path.

He first hatched the idea of cockpit voice and data recording while investigating a 1953 crash of the Comet, the world's first commercial jet, basing his design on a miniature pocket recorder he had seen at a trade fair.

"I put the two ideas together," he said.

"If a businessman had been using one of these in the plane and we could find it in the wreckage and we played it back, we'd say, 'We know what caused this.'

"Any sounds that were relevant to what was going on would be recorded and you could take them from the wreckage."

After an initial lack of interest from authorities, Warren built a prototype "black box" in 1956. It was able to store four hours of voice recordings and instrument readings.

The idea was slow to catch on, with Australia's Department of Civil Aviation advising Warren that his "instrument has little immediate direct use in civil aviation".

Military authorities went further still, with the Royal Australian Air Force dismissing it as unnecessary and likely to "yield more expletives than explanations".

It took a lunchtime demonstration of the device to a visiting British official in 1958 for the potential of his design to be recognised and christened the "black box" -- a reference to its technical mastery.

"One of the people in the discussion afterwards said, 'This is a wonderful black box'," Warren said. "A black box was a gadget box. You didn't have to understand it but it did wonderful things."

It was 10 years before black boxes -- in fact brightly painted to make them easy to spot at crash sites -- were made mandatory in Australian aircraft. "Our driving force was air safety so we felt that it's succeeded in that regard," he said in 2003. "It's a very satisfying feeling."

Tourism for Tomorrow

The World Traveland Tourism Council is looking for finalists for their 'The Tourism for Tomorrow' awards, aimed at recognizing best practice in sustainable tourism within the travel and tourism industry worldwide. Given the concern about natural and cultural resources, the awards provide the WTTC with the opportunity of promoting and partnering with the industry leaders in responsible tourism, highlighting the prime examples of best practice.

The awards are determined in 4 categories:

DESTINATION STEWARDSHIP AWARD:

This award goes to a destination – country, region, state, or town – which comprises a network of tourism enterprises and organizations that show dedication to, and success in, maintaining a program of sustainable tourism management at the destination level, incorporating social, cultural, environmental, and economic aspects, as well as multi-stakeholder engagement.

CONSERVATION AWARD:

Open to any tourism business, organization, or attraction, including lodges, hotels, or tour operators, able to demonstrate that their tourism development and operations have made a tangible contribution to the conservation of natural heritage.

COMMUNITY BENEFIT AWARD:

This award is for a tourism initiative that has effectively demonstrated direct benefits to local people, including capacity building, the transfer of industry skills, and support for community development.

GLOBAL TOURISM BUSINESS AWARD:

Open to any large company from any sector of travel and tourism – cruise lines, hotel groups, airlines, tour operators, etc. – with at least 200 full-time employees and operating in more than one country or in more than one destination in a single country, this award recognizes best practices in sustainable tourism at a large company level.

An independent panel of judges, including some of the world's most authoritative experts of sustainable development (and a stringent application process involving on-site verification visits by these experts) has earned the Tourism for Tomorrow Awards growing levels of respect among key audiences - the industry, governments, and the international media.

The winners and finalists are honored at a special ceremony during the Global Travel & Tourism Summit held from May 25-27, 2010 in Beijing, China.

For more information about the Tourism for Tomorrow Awards and how to apply check out the website: www.tourismfortomorrow.com