G Adventures founder Bruce Poon Tip was in Auckland for the Force for Good Event. Photo / File
What is social entrepreneurship in tourism? G Adventures founder, Bruce Poon Tip explains.
“If you want all the comforts of home, maybe you should… stay home. Nobody wants you travelling.”
When Bruce Poon Tip, a Canadian businessman and founder of G Adventures, delivers this line during a tourism event in Auckland, his cheeky grin and comedic timing get a round of laughs from the crowd.
Yet, behind the humour is a weighty challenge for most tourists and tourism companies.
It was 1990 and 22-year-old Poon Tip was exploring Asia when he noticed the difference between backpacking and mainstream travel.
“I saw these coaches of people who were not really experiencing the country and I was on a $10-a-day budget, travelling around Asia, staying with local people and travelling on local buses,” he recalled.
“I realised that their experience wasn’t even a real experience, so I came back and I founded G Adventures,” he said, with the goal to offer “organised experiences that were cultural immersion-based, using local transportation, and local accommodation”.
Almost 35 years later, the company is now the world’s biggest small-group adventure travel company taking 200,000 travellers on 750 tours each year. The founding philosophy and focus on social entrepreneurship, however, remains unchanged.
It’s also a philosophy Poon Tip thinks the tourism industry is in desperate need of.
Current estimates put tourist numbers at 1.5 billion a year and in 2030, it’s forecast to hit 2 billion. It’s a massive number and one many countries rely on economically; especially if they are developing.
“Tourism in the 40 poorest countries is number one or two in terms of foreign exchange in that country,” Poon Tip explains, typically competing with oil for first place.
But in the not-too-distant past, this all stopped, for a while. The pandemic ground tourism to a stubborn halt and, like many other industries, there was much discussion about how to get back to normal.
But Poon Tip wasn’t too eager on “business as usual”.
“The travel industry just before Covid wasn’t so great. Normal wasn’t so great,” he said, referencing the headlines about over-tourism, tourist invasions, flight shaming and locals suing tour companies.
It’s not that tourism itself is bad but rather, the business model, Poon Tip said: one that prioritises amenities (think resorts, restaurants or activities) over the destination.
“When we sell people amenities over the destination, people start booking because they want 5-star accommodation or they want comfort levels or they want distractions like Broadway shows or go-cart tracks or you know, 10 different restaurants, to make sure they can get Italian food and French food and sushi when they’re in another country,” he said.
As a result, the destination becomes secondary or irrelevant, Poon Tip said, illustrating his point with a picture of a cruise ship in Alaska, which had a go-cart track on-board.
“Everything is there for them so they never really felt like they left home.”
Poon Tip isn’t against comfort but said it had been confused for comfort zone, with tourism companies trying to ensure travellers can go abroad without ever feeling foreign.
Covid only heightened this dynamic, he said, as social isolation and reliance on technology “fed our addition to convenience”.
“We are addicted, absolutely to convenience and ease and all the tech we have today makes things easier”.
What about travellers who want to experience the world but don’t want to forgo their favourite coffee order, eating schedule, bedding or hobbies?
The solution is simple to Poon Tip; stay home.
“The reason we’re all in this industry is to show people the world and show people different countries. Don’t you think if you’re in another country you should feel like you’re in another country?” he said.
Ironically, by trying to care for a traveller, tourism companies do them a “great injustice” Poon Tip added, as one can’t remove the discomfort or foreignness of travel without removing its benefits; “a greater sense of self, a greater understanding of our place in the universe but more importantly a greater appreciation of where we come from”.
Reducing travel to an itinerary of amenities or experiences extraneous to the destination isn’t just less rich or rewarding, it’s also dangerous, the G-Adventures founder said.
In fact, it’s “the most dangerous place” the travel industry can be.
Traditionally, if a tourism company in Bali wants to attract customers, it will promote unique attractions and experiences. But if tourism companies begin focusing on universal amenities such as resort chains or shopping malls, hotels or cruises, discounts become a key selling point.
The company rarely bears the cost of these discounts, Poon Tip points out. It’s local residents who feel the squeeze.
“Communities are not welcoming to tourists because they’re not benefiting from them being there, so they get angry,” he explained. This is why, in certain destinations, travellers are told to stay within a resort or hotel complex because locals are restless.
“Of course they’re restless because you’re in there, swallowing mass amounts of natural resources and on the other side of those walls they don’t have access to clean drinking water or medical care.” Poon Tip said.
“They’re upset, they’re not benefiting from you being in their country,” he added, saying this model of amenity-driven, mass tourism is “just not sustainable”.
However, there is a solution that benefits travellers, local communities and companies; social entrepreneurship.
The idea of social entrepreneurship isn’t new but G Adventures is a global case study for its use within tourism.
“When we get that intersection between extreme poverty and tourism, we can create great things like wealth distribution, poverty alleviation, that people never thought could be possible before,” Poon Tip said.
It all depends on how you capitalise on the value chain created when someone decides to travel.
Since travel is a privilege, it comes with responsibility, which travellers can approach one of two ways, Poon Tip says.
The first way is “mainstream tourism”. This involves booking with tourism providers that are cheap, amenity-rich or owned by non-local people. It looks like visiting Mexico but staying at an all-inclusive resort owned by an American company or travelling to Bali and only eating at cafes owned by Australians. The result is what experts call ”tourism leak” and is why, when a tourist spends US$100 towards a holiday in a developing country, only $5 stays in that country’s economy, according to UNWTO.
The second way is community tourism, which G Adventures describes as “everybody being included in the value chain”.
“When you go on holiday, everyone benefits from you going on holiday,” Poon Tip said, describing it as a “two-way dialogue” between travellers and locals, directly.
“It’s about being mindful of the impact your holiday spending could have and directing that money towards locals, in a way that changes lives.”
Your taxi from the airport could be through a co-op that provides jobs to women in India. Lunch is eaten at a Vietnamese cooking school training street children in hospitality skills. Your tour group stops at a small women-run weaving business that sells authentic crafts, shares culture with tourists and presents an appealing career for young people who would otherwise move to a big city.
“We’ve talked about this at G Adventures for years, that going on holiday could be your form of giving back,” Poon Tip said.
As wonderful as it would be, the idea of vacations-as-altruism does feel like a stretch. It’s also a convenient pitch for a tourism company founder to make. Surely $4000 is better sent directly to a charity on Costa Rica rather than taking a holiday in Costa Rica?
Poon Tip says yes, donating to charities is impactful but not a reality for younger generations, for three reasons.
“I think the next generation is not just going to give their money to someone because there is too much transparency in business now,” he said, describing how large portions of a donation often go towards administrative costs.
Secondly, younger people want to be more intimately involved with causes and fully understand what someone is going through instead of throwing money at a charity. Thirdly, Poon Tip said social enterprises had more impact, faster.
“Charities are not the ones who are changing the world right now. It’s Bill Gates, it’s Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk before he went weird, Ted Turner,” he said.
While describing vacations as generous feels farfetched, G Adventure’s founding logic does make sense.
If spending money on a trip, why not make that money go further? Why not prioritise local initiatives that, not only benefit local people directly but also offer a more genuine experience of the place and people I’ve come so far to see?
Because, if I’ve travelled for days (as most Kiwis must) to reach a far-flung destination, you can bet I’m not interested in feeling right at home.
When there's nothing as far as the eye can see, you may appreciate the company.