Travel & Tourism Week: What Are We Building Together?

Every year, Travel & Tourism Week gives us an opportunity to celebrate the enormous value of our industry. The jobs we create. The economies we support. The connections we make possible. The millions of people who experience a place they have never been before and come home seeing the world a little differently.

I have spent more than 30 years working in tourism, and I still believe deeply in its power.

But I also believe we need to ask more of it.

As I step into the role of Interim CEO of Tourism Cares, I have been thinking a lot about what our industry needs right now and, more importantly, what we are capable of doing together.

For much of my career, I represented Jordan in North America. My job was, quite literally, to bring more travelers to a destination. But over time, the question became bigger than how many people can we bring?

Where do they go once they arrive? Where do they spend their money? Who benefits from that spending? What stories do they hear? And how can tourism help strengthen the communities that make a destination worth visiting in the first place?

Those questions changed the way I thought about destination marketing.

They also brought me to Tourism Cares.

Sustainability has to be part of the business of tourism

We sometimes make sustainable tourism more complicated than it needs to be.

Yes, our industry has enormous environmental challenges to address. We need to protect natural resources, respond to a changing climate, and reduce the footprint of travel.

But sustainability is also about whether the restaurant serving our travelers buys from local farmers. Whether a tour operator puts a community-owned experience into an itinerary. Whether a hotel hires locally. Whether travelers leave the main tourism corridor and spend money in communities that have historically been left out of the visitor economy.

These are not decisions happening on the sidelines of tourism.

They are the business of tourism.

I saw this firsthand in Jordan.

Working with Tourism Cares, we launched the first Meaningful Travel Map in 2018 to connect the travel trade with community-based organizations and social enterprises across the country. The idea was simple: if we could make these experiences easier for the industry to find, they would become easier to include in itineraries and easier for travelers to experience.

And when that happens, tourism dollars move with them.

The Map helped us introduce travelers to places and people they might otherwise never have encountered, spread economic opportunity beyond Jordan's most iconic tourism sites, and create new visibility for local organizations, many of them led by women.

That is sustainability to me.

Not simply asking travelers to make better choices, but building an industry that makes those choices possible in the first place.

Our greatest opportunity is the power we already have

The travel industry has tremendous purchasing power.

Every itinerary we build, supplier we contract, destination we promote, hotel we choose, experience we recommend, and story we tell is a decision about where tourism's economic power goes.

Imagine what happens when we begin looking at those decisions collectively.

What if every tour operator added one locally owned experience to an itinerary?

What if every destination made it easier for the trade to find businesses that benefit its communities?

What if every travel advisor knew how to connect a client with an experience that wasn't just memorable for the traveler, but meaningful for the place they visited?

None of these actions alone will transform tourism.

Millions of them will.

And that is where I believe Tourism Cares has an incredibly important role to play.

We are not here to tell the industry that it needs to care more. I have worked alongside this community for decades. I know how deeply people in travel care about the places they sell, the people they work with, and the experiences they create.

Our job is to help turn that care into action.

To connect the people who want to make a difference with the partners who are already doing the work.

To make meaningful travel easier to find, easier to buy, easier to sell, and easier to scale.

And to bring our industry together so we can learn from one another instead of trying to solve the same challenges alone.

So, what do we do next?

During Travel & Tourism Week, we will hear a lot about the power of travel.

I want us to think about what we are doing with that power.

Look at one itinerary you sell. One destination you promote. One event you plan. One supplier you contract.

Ask yourself:

Where is the money going? Who is benefiting? And is there an opportunity to do it better?

Then change one thing.

Find a community organization or locally owned business you haven't worked with before. Add a meaningful experience to an itinerary. Talk to your destination partners about where tourism dollars aren't reaching. Explore the Meaningful Travel Map and find a partner you can put in front of your travelers.

And then tell someone else what you did.

Because the future of sustainable tourism isn't going to be built by a handful of sustainability professionals.

It will be built by all of us, through the everyday decisions that make travel happen.

I've seen what is possible when we do this well. Now, as Interim CEO of Tourism Cares, I am excited to help more of our industry put that possibility into practice.

Let's get to work.

Malia Asfour
Interim CEO
Tourism Cares