Greater Bay tourism far from sustainable, says professor

Tourists coming to the Greater Bay Area have not been evenly distributed across its 11 cities, said Xu Honggang, Dean of the School of Tourism Management at Sun Yat-sen University, during yesterday’s Tourism Education Student Summit, organized by the Institute for Tourism Studies and held in Macau.

The Greater Bay was used as an example of the potential for sustainable tourism during the mainland professor’s presentation. Xu acknowledged that the Greater Bay had great potential for sustainable tourism but remained concerned about its shortcomings, with one of its weaker points being the coexistence of overtourism and undertourism.

“We also have a lot of challenges we are not satisfied with and we may have a special issue,” said Xu. “We see that tourists in this region are not evenly distributed. They [are] concentrated in small spaces, especially in city centers.”

“We also observed that all cities and their tourism systems are facing a lot of external shocks, especially typhoons and economic shocks,” said Xu.

Moreover, the tourism expert remarked that sustainable consumption and production measures have not been fully incorporated into the tourism industry, market, policies and behaviors in the Greater Bay.

“For instance, food and energy waste are quite easily seen in our daily behavior,” Xu noted, adding that people are aware of the behaviors.

Another factor that has prevented the Greater Bay from becoming a sustainable tourism destination is that jobs in the tourism sector are not “competitive enough.”

“In most [cities] of the region, jobs in the tourism [sector] are very low paid and [workers] work a lot,” Xu stated. Therefore, “the jobs are not attractive to our graduate students.”

The Greater Bay Area has an initiative aimed at freer movement of people and tourists between its 11 cities. However, Xu criticized Greater Bay tourism for not being inclusive enough.

“For instance, we don’t have too [many services] for people with certain kinds of handicaps, like seniors or people with vision problems. It is not inclusive tourism. We only target people with a certain economic power,” Xu explained. “In this region, we also observe a lack of diversified quality products, especially for those marginalized people.”

In addition, the urban sprawl of the nine Greater Bay cities in Guangdong and the partially incorporated sustainable tourism measures in most tourism programs are challenges standing in the way of sustainable tourism in the Greater Bay Area.

Challenges aside, the region is on its way to a sustainable tourism economy. Xu believes that the Greater Bay still has great opportunities, since it “has the best public infrastructure, offers the possibility to travel in the region, has very good quality higher education in tourism, has a very rich culture, has sustainable goals and is very innovative.”