Post pandemic travel to learn from New Zealand says Lonely Planet founder Tony Wheeler
4 Mar, 2021 05:05 PM
7 minutes to read
Macau s fake Venice: Guide publisher Tony Wheeler has devoted himself to solving travel s hard problems. Photo / Getty Images
Macau s fake Venice: Guide publisher Tony Wheeler has devoted himself to solving travel s hard problems. Photo / Getty Images
Thomas Bywater is a writer and digital producer for Herald Travelthomas.bywater@nzherald.co.nz@ThomasBywater
Can we turn an international travel shutdown into a new brave new start, the Lonely Planet founder has asked of New Zealand
Moving on from writing guidebooks, Tony Wheeler has since begun tackling the hard problems of global travel: carbon debt, over-tourism and sustainable development. And he thinks the world has a lot to learn from Aotearoa.
Regenerative Travel: Will The Pandemic End Mass Tourism?
A global pandemic and weariness in many places of cheap, mass tourism may hasten a real paradigm shift in the travel sector. Or not.
BARCELONA While some airlines, as bizarre as it may seem, continue to offer flights to nowhere on planes that take off and land in the same airport, just to assuage the need for certain tourists to fly others in the tourism sector are embracing a concept that goes in the complete opposite direction.
The trend is called regenerative travel, and its aim, says Silvia Grünig, a city planning specialist at Paris University and lecturer in sustainability at Catalonia s Open University, is not only that visitors take care not to degrade, in any way, the places they visit, but that they actually improve conditions there. They should make things better, in other words, and not just for the sector, but for locals, the environment and travel in the future.