The Tourism Voices project offers a platform to those communities and local groups, whose homes are visited by tourists, but whose opinions (on tourism) are hardly ever heard, not in tourism promotion, nor in tourism information or tourism development processes.
Our goal is to empower local communities to take over the messaging and reform tourism information structures, both in the Global South and the Global North.
We offer a platform to all local groups, whether it be local youth, women, environmentalists, small entrepreneurs, farmers, municipalities, teachers or other stakeholders, to create localized perspectives on sustainable and inclusive tourism and present them to tourists and the tourism sector.
The current Tourism Voices project is a follow up to the Original Tourism Voices project that ran from 2000 to 2002 in which stories were recorded from 21 different tourism destinations in 13 different countries. These stories are presented on our website as Tourism Voices Originals. The TourismVoices project is currently revisiting these destinations, and working with local youth to revisit the groups that were interviewed and collect their current stories. These will then be compared with the original stories, to assess the progress (or lack thereof) in the sustainable development of tourism.
Get Involved
* If you are a local storyteller with stories about how tourism affects groups in your community, or you are interested in collecting them, please contact us and we will find a way to share them through our platform.
* If you are a local group in a tourism destination, and you feel affected by tourism (positively, negatively or both) and you want to get your story out, we can find a way to cooperate with you. We offer a Tourism Voices Training to assist you in collecting the relevant information and to convert this into attractive stories for our platform. If you live in a region already covered by Tourism Voices Originals, we would like to work with you to update the original stories and assess what has changed (or not). If you live in a region not covered yet, we would like to cooperate with you to add your region to the TourismVoices platform.
* If you are a tourist, interested in taking your responsibility for respecting local communities and creating more impact on sustainability and inclusiveness in the regions you visit, please consider the stories of local people and adapt your behaviour accordingly. If you want to go the extra mile, you can support our platform by contributing to our work through our socials.
* If you are active in the tourism sector or one of its industries, you can use the information as guidelines for your work to build more sustainable and inclusive tourism.
* If you are active in sustainable and inclusive development and you would like to join our platform and/or cooperate with us in projects, we are very open to new partners.
* If you want to support our project as a donor, you can join and contribute to our socials or contribute directly to one of our projects.
If you want to know more about the TourismVoices Project you can check the following links: