The travelers that travel professionally, follow their own considerations. One of such concerns is to reduce tourism footprints to the minimum possible. By that, we don’t mean only the physical traces you may leave behind. A passenger leaves other footprints during a journey too that you will read below here.
Reduce Physical Tourism Footprints
In responsible tourism, a passenger who sets off for a journey knows that he/she will put an impact on the environment around her. If we leave for a road trip, we need to understand we have a responsibility to reduce our footprints to the minimum as we go. For example, we must:
- Produce less waste and carry our waste to the nearest city,
- Reduce using our own vehicles as much as possible, and walk all or part of the route if possible,
- Stop using our vehicles in a part of nature that lacks roads,
- Keep away from disposable items as much as possible,
- Avoid damaging nature or historical attractions,
- Be careful not to damage host communities’ living environments,
- …
Further explanations can be given for each of these cases. Each of these issues is worth pondering. Let’s contemplate a little and increase our knowledge about these issues to have more sustainable tourism by reducing tourism footprints to a minimum.
We must behave in such a way that the people in the host community feel happy to see tourists and consider it a sign of earning money and human interactions and establishing enjoyable and deep friendships.
Also, natural resources and cultural heritage do not belong only to us and must be well preserved for the use of future generations.
Reduce Emotional and intellectual Footprints of Tourism
As humans, we are social beings and meet our needs in relation to others. In this regard, both sides of human interactions must be satisfied and feel satisfied. Our emotional impact can shape people’s thoughts on our route or destination. Needless to say, these effects (tourism footprints) should be positive.
We live in an era when many media or emerging schools of thought want to give us more confidence. To achieve this goal, sometimes the solutions of such schools make us selfish human beings and indifferent to others. Therefore, we must be vigilant and aware so that we do not violate the principles and correct human relations to gain our own objectives.
A professional traveler (responsible tourist) should have a positive human impact on others. He must know that his actions or words or their consequences will be observed by others. These influences, whether positive or negative, will be the footprints of our tourism and will shape the views of the individual host community members toward future travelers.
One can have a positive and lasting impact on the host community with the following views or behaviors:
- Keeping the living areas or the environment of the travelers’ route or destinations clean,
- Paying respect for the personality, intelligence, accent, appearance, color, ethnicity … of the people we come in contact with,
- Paying respect for the beliefs, customs, habits, and methods, rituals, institutions, … of the people along the way or our destinations,
- Showing verbal and practical love as well as assistance to the people we see along the way or in our destination cities,
- Taking the time to get to know the people and their culture in order to gain more awareness, not to intervene and oppose the current situation, and
- …
Final Words for Better Responsible Tourism
In the end, we must keep in mind that the pleasure of responsible tourism is not just that we consider ourselves. In the meantime, as the Charter of Responsible Tourism implies, we must remember that considering other people’s pleasure is also a source of pleasure for ourselves.
Here in Destination Iran, we believe that in order for a professional traveler to have a happy memory of his trip, his awakened conscience requires him to keep his tourism footprints to a minimum. So, why not keep it as one of our criteria?
