Carlos Dragonné
Strategic Tourism: When anecdotes are not enough
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Carlos Dragonné
Strategic Tourism: When anecdotes are not enough
For two decades, community-based tourism has been the easy answer in Latin America’s development discourse. Since the Otavalo Declaration (2001) and the San José Declaration on Rural Community-Based Tourism (Costa Rica, 2003), development agencies, NGOs and governments have embraced it as a virtuous formula: communities welcome travellers, share their culture and, in the process, achieve development. The intention is noble. The results, however, call for an honest, less romantic reassessment. A substantial share of these initiatives have failed, and we need to understand why before continuing to replicate the model.
The first problem lies in the economic structure, and it has a technical name: leakage. According to UNCTAD estimates, between 40% and 50% of gross tourism revenue flows out of small developing economies; reports cited by UNEP and UNWTO put the figure as high as 70% in Thailand and 80% in the Caribbean. Recent analyses by the Travel Foundation estimate average leakage at between 50% and 80% of total visitor spending.
Let me put that plainly: for every peso a visitor spends, most leaves the destination, flowing to airlines, booking platforms, hotel chains and imported supplies. The community is left with the photo opportunity and the crumbs, while travellers believe they have done their part. The starkest comparison comes from adventure tourism: four adventure travellers generate as much value for the local economy as ninety-six cruise passengers, because one value chain distributes the benefits locally and the other does not. What brings prosperity to a community is not the number of tourists, but how much of their spending stays in the local economy—and how effectively a strategy is put in place to make tourism a productive economic activity.
Designing from the wrong perspective.
The second problem is one of design, and research has documented it in frank, unvarnished terms. Much of the “top-down” community-based tourism driven by external funding collapsed as soon as donor support ended. Further evidence that Reagan’s trickle-down economics does not work in any industry. Weak marketing capabilities, dependence on distant markets over which communities have no influence, and reliance on outside support that, paradoxically, erodes their own capacity to sustain the activity independently.
This is project creation taken to excess. As we used to call it, mockingly: “projectitis.” The endless creation of ventures designed to look good in a donor’s report, rather than compete in a market. According to those same studies, the initiatives that survived were those that diversified their markets and took ownership of the business—in other words, those that stopped being projects and became enterprises.
And here lies the heart of the matter: we have fetishised the anecdote.
We confuse community-based tourism with the photogenic moment—the cooking class, the artisan’s demonstration, the ceremony, the weaving—and ignore everything surrounding it: accommodation, transport, logistics, marketing, service quality and professional development. That less glamorous 90% of the experience is precisely where the money lies—and where it leaks away. Exploiting the “anecdotal element” while neglecting the entire value chain guarantees that visitors will be moved for a moment while their money leaves for good. More seriously, it ensures they will not return, because we have reduced the essence of community-based tourism to a checklist that caters to frenetic travel rather than responsible tourism.
There is also a second form of failure: what happens when the tourism product succeeds but has never been conceived as part of an ecosystem. That is when gentrification—or, more precisely, touristification—takes hold. Mexico City is experiencing this to an extreme and absurd degree. In neighbourhoods such as Roma and Condesa, rents have soared by more than 100% in just a few years—an apartment that rented for 15,000 pesos in 2015 now commands around 35,000—while local businesses disappear one by one. There have even been protest marches declaring that gentrification is not progress, but a form of dispossession. Oaxaca and Mérida are beginning to follow the same pattern. The community that gained tourism may ultimately lose its own neighbourhood. Both forms of failure—leakage and dispossession—share the same cause: no one planned the system as a whole, so the market did it for them.
Bringing the parts together to complete the whole.
The answer is not to abandon the community ideal. The way forward is to build structures that connect and strengthen its different parts. That, in a nutshell, is strategic tourism: thinking about the entire experience rather than its defining moment. It means examining every component of the journey—food, crafts, culture, location, accommodation and transport—and building community integration initiatives around that whole, including every link in the chain. The producer who supplies the restaurant and the person who transports those supplies. With coffee, for example, it means looking beyond the cup to consider the people who ferment the beans and those who roast them. The weavers, guides, cooks, managers and reserve stewards. We speak of “Ancestral Guardians” without including them in the value chain. This chain is more than a technical concept: it is a matter of justice and of how the benefits of the business model are distributed. A value chain is valuable precisely because it embraces everyone, rather than relying on a model in which an outside actor decides who gets in and who is left out, who earns an income and who merely poses for the camera.
When that chain is conceived as a whole and rooted in the local economy, wealth stays within the community. A community that retains its wealth can set in motion virtuous cycles of reinvestment—in infrastructure, professional development and community development—as described in Scheyvens’ tourism empowerment framework more than two decades ago, yet still deferred in practice. This is also the strongest defence against dispossession: when the land, accommodation and businesses belong to the community rather than outside investors, touristification loses its fuel. Those who own the chain cannot be pushed out.
The most important virtuous circle is not economic. It is cultural.
Strategic tourism whose benefits are equitably shared is the only kind capable of keeping traditions, heritage and ancestral wisdom alive, because it turns them into a source of livelihoods rather than mere decoration for hollow messaging. When cuisine, a craft or a ritual feeds the community that safeguards it, it ceases to be a museum piece and becomes a living practice once again. This is the most delicate and urgent challenge: instilling in younger generations the need to preserve what others regard as little more than a social media anecdote. Ensuring that the weaver’s grandson sees the loom not as content to film, but as a future to inherit. Wisdom will not die out if we can enable people to earn a living from it without betraying it.
Tourism that merely harvests anecdotes is extractivism with good lighting. It is racism and economic discrimination. The choice has never been between the warmth of a community and the rigour of business: communities deserve that rigour, and strategy is not the enemy of authenticity, but a guarantee of its survival. Making strategic tourism a development policy priority—rather than a donor-funded weekend workshop—is, perhaps, the difference between communities that endure by telling their own stories and those that fade away while others tell their stories for them.
Autor: Carlos Dragonné
Sabores de México y el Mundo
The authors are responsible for the choice and presentation of the facts contained in this document and for the opinions expressed therein, which are not necessarily those of Tourism and Society Think Tank and do not commit the Organization, and should not be attributed to TSTT or its members.
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