Are there some areas of travel in which social media is helpless?

by Steve Keenan

Here’s a conundrum for you. Are there some areas of travel in which social media is utterly helpless? Where there is nothing that can be done to help change?

I paused to think at the AGM this week of The Travel Foundation, a fine body whose slogan is ‘caring for the places we love to visit.’

At the meeting, I heard that British tour firms have done well in recent years to clean up parts of the Mediterranean and make destinations sustainable.

The efforts by firms like Tui and Thomas Cook have been the results of hard work between themselves, resorts and the Foundation.

The collaborative projects have resulted, for example, in reductions of plastic bottle waste in Cyprus and local food being supplied to five hotels in Turkey. In all, the Foundation has helped projects get going in 20 countries.

This has all been achieved largely without social media: more down to hard graft, patience and face-to-face meetings. Remember those?

But now there is a warning that the next wave of Russian and eastern European holidaymakers may have, um, a different set of priorities - showering less or not using plastic bottles not being high on the agenda.

Industry legend Noel Josephides has spent 40 years in tour operating to Greece and is a shrewd observer of change.

“All the new growth in tourism to Cyprus is Russian,” he says. “And Russia is way behind us in any form of green perception. They act like we did 10 year ago and that is the challenge: the economies that have not had the privileges we’ve had.”

And this is the conundrum.

We have all become so used to using social media as a force for rapid, and generally positive, change that I’m completely stymied as to how to deploy SM in this context.

If, as Andy Cooper of Thomas Cook says, the Russians are ‘light years’ behind us in terms of green awareness, how on earth do the socially developed countries tell the Russians how to behave?

I’ve seen them barreling past queues in Dubai’s water parks and generally acting like school’s out. Which, as Noel says, they generally are – and as Britons did to excess across swathes of southern Europe in decades past.

On a recent visit to Moscow for WTM’s Vision conference, it transpired there is not even a proper accounting system in Russia to know how many inbound and outbound tourists there are.

The Foundation will continue to do its bit – and, indeed, has just launched a new public-facing website.

But how to get a message to the Russians to think responsibly and spend time sorting their towels out is an enormous challenge that defies me. Should we even be bothering at this stage – or is this exactly the time to use SM to get a message across before the damage is done?

I shall return to this theme in future. In the meantime, I would be delighted to hear any ideas….