 |
Just 17 years ago, a little
over 20,000 tourists visited Costa Rica annually.
Today, over one million visitors enter the country.
Above, the Bagaces waterfall in Guanacaste. |
| Courtesy ICT |
 |
| A lowland swamp and drainage
basin for several northern rivers, Caño
Negro National Wildlife Refuge is magnificent
for birdwatching. |
| Courtesy ICT |
 |
| The Santa Rosa National Park,
located in Guanacaste, contains the country's
largest area of tropical dry forest, and offers
visitors pristine and private beaches. |
| Courtesy ICT |
 |
| Chirripó National
Park is home to Costa Rica’s tallest peak.
On a clear day, you can see both the Pacific
Ocean and the Caribbean Sea from the summit. |
| Courtesy Sergio Pucci
Photos |
Not many decades ago Costa Rica was only known
amongst people who had family down there or by “hard
core,” often individual, biologists and scientists.
The number of trees and animals well exceeded the
population, and tourism had no impact on the economy.
The rise of ecotourism in Costa Rica has an interesting
history. 1972, the then President Daniel Oduber founded
the National Park system, together with world-renowned
Costa Rican ecologists. They started making Costa
Rica famous from the perspective of conservation,
and soon the first groups of specialized tourists
like National Geographic, scientists and the Sierra
Club began to arrive in this rich country to see what
the National Parks were all about.
Meanwhile, Mr. Bary Roberts, now marketing advisor
at the Costa Rican Institute of Tourism (ICT), was
observing all these changes from Spain. Being based
in a small Mediterranean town which was developed
in such a way that its nature and culture were destroyed
in just five years, made him think about his country
and its future. Costa Rica still had the whole future
ahead, and very small decisions could easily bring
an optimistic future, or bring disasters like in this
small Spanish town. The only thing Roberts could think
was: “Oh my God, if this ever happens to Costa
Rica we are in serious trouble.”
In 1978, when ex-President Oscar Arias was Minister
of Planning, he started organizing a long-term plan
for Costa Rica. To this meeting was invited a very
well known and distinguished gentleman named Dr. Maurice
Strong, who has been an Under Secretary to the United
Nations for environmental affairs.
During his visit to Costa Rica, he encountered Mr.
Roberts, who expressed his concerns to Dr. Strong
over lunch. “I am worried that people will start
coming to Costa Rica, too, and impose their ideas
and topics, instead of us managing things ourselves
–with quality.” Dr. Strong took Mr. Roberts’s
concern seriously, they discussed business, and sooner
than Roberts realized, his old company was sold and
a new one created.
A company called Eco Desarrollo SA, Eco Developments,
was created. When the time came to decide what to
sell and how, the name Ecotourism got invented. The
registration process started in 1978, and it was finally
registered in 1982. Now it is a registered trademark.
And as far as Mr. Roberts knows, nobody has been able
to find a document dated prior to 1978 where the word
is used. Did he know how widely ecotourism would spread
around the globe? “I never expected it to become
such a big thing, and that was not my intention. I
intended to be the leader in ecology, in eco adventures,
in eco Safaris, and that was it.”
Things did not move quickly. By 1985 very little had
happened, and the number of tourists annually visiting
Costa Rica was as little as 20,000-25,000 a year.
The Costa Rican tourist industry was not getting what
it wanted, and things moved at a very slow speed.
At that time a Canadian tour operator called Fiesta
Wayfare brought 13,000 tourists to Costa Rica annually
–more than anyone else.
Discussion between the Mr. Leonard Nathan of Fiesta
Wayfare and Mr. Roberts changed the future of selling
Costa Rica. What Fiesta was doing was to bring tourists
to Costa Rica, and the only places they would visit
during their one-week holiday was Jaco beach, famous
for surfing, Irazu Volcano, and San José. What
Mr. Roberts told Fiesta was that tourists still bought
additional packages when they arrived in Costa Rica,
and ended up paying double prices, because no one
had told them what Costa Rica really had to offer.
So the next thing was to include more destinations
and variety in the packages, and two weeks after the
new travel catalogues had come out, everything was
sold. The following year this new product –new
Costa Rica with its diversity and pure beauty—came
to represent 33% of Fiesta´s sales. After this,
the rest of the tour operators in Canada got on the
band wagon, then tour operators in Germany –often
the pioneers in discovering new tourist destinations—and
finally tour operators in the US got on.
By 1992, accommodations for tourists were still limited,
and there was not enough capacity to handle the influx
of visitors. According to Mr. Roberts, “We had
so many people coming here and we didn’t have
a place to put them. They slept in restaurants and
on terraces.”
While ecotourism was becoming the fastest growing
product in the tourist industry, the number of so
called “green washers” was growing –those
who say they are ecologically responsible, but who
just say the words in order to attract attention and
get customers because the name ecotourism is so popular.
What ecotourism really means to the tourist industry,
as William Rodriguez, president of the Chamber of
National Tourism in Costa Rica, CANATUR, and general
manager of United Airlines, explains, is completely
different. “It is not enough to strive for tourism
which is based on nature, because this often means
exploiting nature. It has to go deeper, and that’s
why the type of tourism we want to conduct is ecotourism,
which is an appreciation of nature.”
This is why in 1993 Costa Rica decided to develop
a kind of certification program, which would allow
people to distinguish between tourism-related service
providers with some kind of responsibility. The following
year, in 1994, this rating system received serious
attention, and international and multi-disciplinary
experts participated at seminars with the private
sector, hoteliers and tour operators. They worked
together to design a system that eventually became
the Certification for Sustainable Tourism, or CST.
This is now the basis of development in all aspects:
the harmonious and proper development and protection
of nature, the social and cultural heritage of people
and economic success.
First of all, CST refers to biodiversity and biological
impact, which is similar in many ways to a normal
environmental impact study. Secondly, it refers to
management and internal policies, such as proper energy
control, savings, etc. The third is the relationship
with clients, to allow them to participate in protection,
for example by educating them not to get their towel
changed every day, how to save energy, etc. The fourth
area is the relationship with the community, which
is very important because it measures, for example,
whether one buys products that are produced locally,
whether one hires locals and trains them to participate
in their development project.
Each of these four aspects is certified in five levels
– similar to the five-star rating system. However,
to make this system work transparently, a hotel’s
final CST rating is based on its lowest rating out
of those four areas. There is no averaging out, and
if a hotel does not fulfill the requirements in one
of the areas, it does not qualify in any of the others.
To keep up with technology and world changes, CST
adds more requirements to the list on a regular basis.
Also, it bases its system on the fact that people
are becoming more educated, and that we can demand
more from ourselves –approaching tourism in a
progressive way.
Therefore, sustainable tourism does not try to work
against development, but it simply takes care of the
future –not satisfying our present needs by eating
up the next generation’s resources. CST does
allow beach resorts as long as they follow certain
rules: proper disposal of water, recycling, energy
saving, etc.
The little half leaf and half face, the symbol of
CST, is now included in all Costa Rican marketing
campaigns, and there are plans to include this in
the logo for the country. “To us, sustainable
tourism is the only way to follow. The position of
Costa Rica in this new century has to be sustainable
or it just won’t exist,” says Mr. Roberts.
The next task is to sell this concept to consumers,
so that they can learn and see what CST is all about,
and to make them demand it. Mr. Roberts sees the trend
in this kind of development: “This is the way
the consciousness of the US population is going. More
and more people every day are requiring responsible
tourism and they are looking for it. This is why we
offer them a web site where they can see exactly how
the hotel they are going to stay at is rated. We are
planning to push this everywhere in the world, because
the future of tourism is in sustainable tourism, and
CST is the best tool we have for evaluating it.”
What, then, is the difference between ecotourism and
sustainable tourism? There is a lot of misuse and
abuse of the word ecotourism, and television channels
today are running documents on ecoterrorism to show
how tourism can go wrong in some countries. This is
also because ecotourism has been used to describe
natural aspects without taking into consideration
social aspects. Costa Rica is moving towards sustainable
tourism.
How has sustainable tourism been welcomed in Costa
Rica? According to the Costa Rican Institute of Tourism,
the level of maturity in the private sector in tourism
is high. The high level of education in Costa Rica
contributes to this, and these days the Internet is
a tremendously powerful tool to make people aware
of the responsibility they have for nature and society.
The first thing President Pacheco did when he became
President earlier this year was to declare tourism
a national priority, and that was soon followed by
the declaration of a process whereby environmental
protectionism gets constitutional rights. Roberts
hopes that the world will follow Costa Rica: “When
I see him (President Pacheco) promoting the CST program
in Johannesburg, I don’t think any president
or any politician can ignore this much longer.”
In an interview, President Pacheco expressed his dissatisfaction
with the rest of the world. “I am not very happy
about the (Johannesburg) Summit, but I am very happy
about my country, because we were able to show that
there on the Caribbean coast there is a small, peaceful
nation that is trying to save the planet. We didn’t
get many promises from Johannesburg. People don’t
understand that all of us have to save nature. Perhaps
it has been our fault, maybe we haven’t been
able to communicate very well. We have to work on
that, like we have worked in Costa Rica. If there
are no animals and no trees, there is no planet. It
is no use to ask for more and more money if there
is less and less oxygen. What for? It is crazy.”
This is why President Pacheco is going forward with
the Bill on Environmental Rights. It was sent to the
Congress on September the 15th, and it needs to pass
two debates. Since it is about reforming the constitution,
the whole process is expected to take two years until
the actual change can be seen in the constitution.
Meanwhile, Costa Rica has about one quarter of its
territory under some kind of protection, and the percentage
increases all the time since private individuals also
are deciding to protect their precious land. The country
has amazing biodiversity: it has more species than
the richest African countries. Just the number of
different orchids is more than one thousand. |
