G Adventures' Bruce Poon Tip discusses new documentary the Last Tourist. Video / NZ Herald
As travellers return to trotting the globe post-pandemic, so too have a lot of less comfortable aspects of the travel industry. Ones few people are willing to talk about.
The Last Tourist is a film that hopes to change the way you travel.
In the genre of the “documentary exposé” - following the tradition of Cowspiracy and An Inconvenient Truth - it’s now travel’s turn to go under the lens for a critical review.
Tourists behaving badly, animal cruelty and gated luxury resorts on the edge of some of the world’s most deprived communities - it makes for a harrowing watch.
The thing is, these are problems that didn’t require a team of investigative reporters to uncover. They’ve been an open secret for years.
The film’s executive producer Bruce Poon Tip says that the idea came to him over half a decade ago. Running a company leading guided expeditions and travelling to every continent on Earth, his team has encountered many of the problems and contradictions featured in the film. The G Adventures founder said that it grew out of an idea that they would make their own guerrilla documentary and it bloomed into a professional feature-length film.
Naturalist Jane Goodall is among those who have weighed in on how tourism must change.
The Last Tourist now runs at an imposing 1 hour 41 minutes and has cameos from naturalist Jane Goodall, animal rights activist Lek Chailert of the Save Elephant Foundation and the CEO of National Geographic, Gary Knell.
Shot over 16 locations, there is a lot of ground to cover when it comes to addressing the flaws of industrialised global tourism.
“The heroes of the film are the destinations,” says Poon Tip. When asked about who the “villains” of the story are, he is a bit less glib.
“I don’t like to see things in that way,” he says. However he agrees plenty of companies lean into villainising and alienating groups for profit.
“When you go to these compound resorts they tell you ‘outside these gates the natives are restless, so don’t leave the resort’. It drives all the revenues back into the all inclusive.”
The Canadian businessman is aware of the conundrum, particularly in parts of the world where luxury tourism is growing. The friction between tourists and locals is not entirely imaginary, he says.
“There are tensions when you have thousands of people living in luxury when outside a compound resort you don’t have clean drinking water. Locals not benefitting from tourists being there is used against them in the wider tourism industry.”
Poon Tip’s outspoken attitudes towards commodity tourism and mass-market cruising has earned him plenty of enemies. He says that he is aware of several occasions where sponsors at tourism events have asked that he and G Adventures be removed from speakers lists, because of these views.
But he says the film is not taking aim at any company in particular but a whole way of travel.
Inconvenient Truth: The Last Tourist brings travel under the lens of the documentary exposé.
At one point in the documentary he draws attention to cruising as the surreal extreme of the trend of uncoupling tourists from real-world experiences. If you book a cruise to ride on a go-kart track in the middle of the ocean, does it still count as travel?
“I think it’s a very dangerous place to be when the destination is no longer relevant and as an industry we’re promoting the amenities above the place.”
It might not be as cynical as the gated luxury resort, but it’s still one way travellers are being shut out from “real world” travel experiences. Also, it shuts out any benefit in local economies from tourists spending money abroad. In 2018 G Adventures adopted the Ripple Score for holidays, to show the percentage of tourist spend that stays in a community.
Apart from odd moments of levity - budgie smugglers extending as a visual metaphor for travellers’ lack of self-awareness and tourists gone bad in Bali - there are some genuinely harrowing moments in the film.
An elephant being beaten until it performs; for-profit orphanages offering backdrops to the holiday photos of Western “voluntourists”.
Despite Bruce’s reluctance to name the “bad guys” of the piece, most travellers watching the film will have an uncomfortable moment of realisation: are we the villains?
The tourism industry has done heinous things, but it has done them in our name. In spite of this, it is a side rarely seen by tourists.
Then there came the added shock of producing a documentary about tourism in the midst of a pandemic.
While an international travel shutdown helped highlight the problems of over-tourism, it also showed how reliant some of the most fragile economies are on tourist dollars.
It turns out the only thing worse than bad tourism is no tourism.
The Last Tourist: Has tourism lost its way?
Like all documentaries crusading for social change, the film’s purpose is not just to identify the problems of tourism but to offer solutions. Thankfully the second half of the film is far less harrowing than the first, but no less earnest.
If Leonardo Di Caprio’s Cowspiracy had the power to convince audiences to eat less meat and Morgan Spurlock’s Super Size Me had the power to eat less, full stop - what is the desired effect of G Adventures’ consumer tourism doco?
“If there’s one goal that we have for The Last Tourist, it would be for people to understand the privilege they have when they choose to travel. So few people on this planet have that opportunity,” says Bruce.
“It’s also about the power you have when you decide to go on holiday. By being a little bit more conscious you can do so much good from that decision.”
You don’t have to suspend your beliefs or values when you book a holiday.
