WHAT is Life Beyond Tourism

‘Life Beyond Tourism’® for Intercultural Dialogue is the upshot of over 10 years of activity on the part of the Fondazione Romualdo Del Bianco, in the implementation of its motto:   “International integration, without competition, respecting individual identities – Discovering the past together, working to build a shared future”. Cooperating with over 350 academic institutions and universities in some 50 countries worldwide, the Fondazione has fostered meetings, communication, discovery and knowledge, and consequently also respect for diversity, the safeguarding of identity of place, and the enhancement of our tangible and intangible cultural heritage.

Thus the Fondazione Romualdo Del Bianco has increasingly devoted its energies in recent years to researching and implementing the ‘Life Beyond Tourism’® for Intercultural Dialogue project and theory which began as a pilot scheme based on the values enshrined in the Manifesto.

This theory holds tourism to be a powerful tool for helping to promote knowledge, without which mutual respect is well nigh impossible.
By knowledge here, we mean knowledge of the roots of one’s travel destination, and thus appreciation for both cultural diversity and traditional knowledge.

Life Beyond Tourism® fosters intercultural dialogue at a time when the exponential development of the globalization process demands constant, ongoing commitment to dialogue — a commitment in which tourism with its worldwide dissemination can play a strategic role of crucial importance.

This ‘community portal’ has been set up to provide a virtual area for those who subscribe to this approach, to allow them to meet and to debate in a public space; but also to foster an encounter and a dialogue between “theory” and “practice”, between the world of global heritage as a whole and the world of those whose livelihood depends on that cultural and natural heritage; in other words, between the world of those who play a part in the debate on protecting and enhancing mankind’s heritage, and those involved in its physical conservation, in its enhancement and in the tourist industry, providing services for the traveler visiting that heritage to increase his or her knowledge, not just to be able to say:  “…been there, done that, bought the T-shirt!”

So in Life Beyond Tourism®, the concept of heritage is basically considered to be an opportunity for promoting ‘workshops’ for knowledge and debate in order to foster the growth and spread of quality in:

a) demand, thus to encourage the development of mass tourism increasingly in the direction of a “tourism based on values” rather than a “tourism based on consumer services” — this will allow mass tourism, currently under attack for ‘wearing down’ our cultural heritage and for undeniably chipping away at the genius loci, the spirit of place, to raise its knowledge-based profile to loftier heights;
b) supply, thus in educating the territory to first “invite” and then to “host” its mass tourists as guests; this is aimed particularly at local authorities, however it includes not only those who work in the tourist industry but also the broader community of citizens whose livelihood depends on that heritage.
So “Life Beyond Tourism®” merges “theory and practice”, “heritage and travel”, in other words the discipline that regulates heritage and the world that lives off that heritage, the tourist industry.  That is why Life Beyond Tourism® contributes to global “intercultural dialogue”, thanks precisely to the travel occasioned by people’s desire to get to know mankind’s heritage.

Subscribing to “Life Beyond Tourism®” means wanting to play an active role in making a crucial contribution to the international community, a contribution of which those in the tourist industry should be proud, as indeed should tourists themselves.
It is a system which, while operating in a business environment, is very much aware that success is closely linked to feeling part of an enterprise that is part and parcel of a shared “system”, thus aware of its links with the local area, and to enjoying a healthy and respectful relationship with its clients; an enterprise wholeheartedly convinced of this new approach to business, where sly cunning is replaced by genuine human relations.

The present economic crisis works in favor of this kind of communication and helps to focus people’s attention on it, getting even the least attentive among us to reflect and to realize that the standardization of services leads inevitably to the standardization of behavioral standards in tourist destinations, and thus equally inevitably it kills the spirit of place.  International branded soft drinks in hotel bars throughout the world embody a lack of respect for guests who have not chosen to invest their time and money in a trip simply to discover, taste or appreciate drinks they can drink in the comfort of their own home, but to discover the identity of their destination in all of its unique, local characteristics, including in such seemingly minor details as local drinks.
The world today needs humanity more than it needs cunning, it needs fresh spontaneity more than it needs international standards, like those impersonal welcome messages that flash on pay tv screens in modern hotels the moment guests enter their rooms.  Those poor guests will never be able to even say thank you for the welcome, but then such an impersonal approach does not deserve thanks.

“Life Beyond Tourism®” is an opportunity for cities in the 21st century, an opportunity which those cities, especially World Heritage sites, cannot afford not to seize.  It is a way of once again shouldering responsibility for promoting the mission that they have often lost along the way, and for far too long now.

So let us start over again, beginning with the travel agency or travel promoter who can get tourists to reflect for a moment by asking them the simple question:

“Are you more interested in tourism based on values, or in tourism based on consumer services?”