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The State of Galapagos Tourism |
State
of Tourism in the Galapagos, July 2012
By Rick Schleicher
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In 2004 70 thousand tourists arrived in the
Galapagos. An unprecedented number up to that point,
nearly a 20% rise from the year before and less than
5% of the revenue generated by tourism to the
Galapagos that year touched the hands of the local
population. The amount of tourists arriving to the
Galapagos as land based tourists was so negligible
no one measured it. Today more than 140 thousand
tourists arrive here annually; 37% are land based,
38% cruise ship (the remaining are students,
scientists, business men, etc.) and it is estimated
that still less than 12% of the revenue generated by
tourism to the Galapagos touches the hands of the
local population.
We conceptualized our business in 2004 with the idea
that tourism could be generated locally via the
internet, tourism that could support environmentally
and economically sustainable businesses within the
populace, as opposed to the fishing industry which
had decimated fisheries or farming which as a viable
means to make a living had been destroyed by mass
importation of agricultural goods from the mainland.
Or even tourism as the majority of people working in
that industry were doing it for the profits of
foreign companies, being paid a discounted rate of
the real world value of their services. Again, this
was 2004. The idea was that our company would have
two main functions, bring the tourists in small
private customized community based tour groups (as
opposed to “packaged”/mass tourism) and coordinate
their tours here using existing amenities and
services rather than creating a vertical company by
building our own hotel, opening our own restaurant,
buying our own boat, etc. In this manner not only
any profits we made, but actually the majority of
the revenue generated through our company would end
up directly in the hands of the people that live
here and that would increase their awareness of the
need to protect the resource that was funding their
livelihood, an awareness that was and still is to a
somewhat lesser extent lacking. For us, involving
the community in what we were attempting to do was
one of, if not the key difference between simply
making a living/money and making a life in the
Galapagos. Most of you are familiar with the many
other differences we are wrestling to make.
Here we are eight years later. Our business has been
only marginally successful in this regard. Our
business is growing, but not at a rate that will
likely ever have a significant impact. Our positive
economic impact on the sustainable businesses in the
community has been limited by our volume of clients.
Soon after the inception of our business large
international travel companies (Gap, Row, REI,
Disneyland et al) began mass marketing budget land
based tours to the Galapagos and several wealthy
investors from the mainland arrived and built
vertical travel companies as described above,
neither support local businesses anymore than they
absolutely have to and neither is here to do
anything but make a buck. Add to that at least
twenty other new travel companies have emerged in
the Galapagos since 2004 competing for a market that
cannot possibly support them all.
Annually our business puts $300,000 into the local
economy, plus another $100,000 from the marathon we
organize each year. We support only one fishermen’s
family and only augment local agriculture by about
$10,000 annually. That doesn’t rate even half a
feather in our cap for seven years work.
One of our aspirations at the outset in 2004 was
that other locals would imitate us. Five have copied
our business model and web page practically
verbatim, but none of them copied the ethic,
developing sustainable economies outside their own.
Many people associate eco-friendly with
“eco-nomical” which can be true, but seldom is,
particularly here in the Galapagos. In order to
compete in the market place it takes a lot of extra
work to “sell” the value of programs such as “pesca
viencial” (fishing with locals) or providing locally
grown food (costs more than imported), more extra
work to provide those and it often means losing
business to companies that do not provide such. So
the trend for other Galapagos companies has been
instead to simply state somewhere on the company’s
website that they are a leader in eco-friendly
tourism and at the cutting edge of efforts to
preserve the Galapagos.
Developing a business relying on the internet to
generate customers in the Galapagos is a tough nut
to crack. It is one thing to have a web site it is
another to have it prominent in search engine
results where people can find it. Of the five
companies that have copied us… and I don’t know for
a fact that they copied us, what was needed was
obvious and not something you would want to patent,
but of those five, three have been creative in
solving the problem of a web/internet/search engine
results presence. They have falsified reviews on
trip adviser and trip adviser’s competitors,
labeling themselves an “attraction” rather than a
tour company. (Trip advisor doesn’t review tour
companies), basically they piggy-backed a web
presence. Trip adviser and its competitors
don’t/can’t do anything about falsified reviews. It
is too expensive/outside their business model to
adequately police reviews. They are basically just
software programs and the guys that keep them
running.
We have been in business for seven years. Not
everyone, but practically everyone who travels with
us leaves here so over the top happy, I sometimes
imagine them practically willing to give me their
first born son. The first born thankfully usually
returns home with them. In those seven years, almost
everyone has written us a nice thank you letter, but
only three people have gone to all the trouble to
write trip adviser. It is time consuming and since
trip adviser doesn’t review tour operators, they had
to post their reviews in trip adviser’s “forum”
section. These other local companies have more
positive reviews than they’ve had clients. I’m
really not knocking them. Imagine being born here,
trying to make a business in tourism, facing all the
practically insurmountable marketing challenges.
Falsifying reviews on trip adviser is not so
egregious in that light. It happens everywhere else
in the world too. Opening a restaurant? The first
step is falsifying reviews on the internet. I
understand all too well the challenges these other
local companies face trying to get themselves where
people can find them when searching for a vacation
to the Galapagos.
What we did to get where we are on the internet was
difficult, time consuming and expensive. Now we are
the first result in a Google search for “land based
tours Galapagos”, “customized tours Galapagos” and
on the first or second page of results for many
other search criteria. We receive more than six
hundred new visitors to our site a month.
Our aspiration that other local companies would be
able to or want to imitate us was naive and short
sighted. We didn’t understand the market forces that
were coming to bare.
About trip adviser, pay most attention to the
negative reviews while keeping an open mind that a
competitor for a particular business can also write
a falsified negative review (it happens) and that
trip adviser doesn’t care anymore about falsified
negative reviews than they do about falsified
positive reviews.
On a related subject, I don’t have any proof of
this, my only evidence is the changes in the
percentages of types of people that write us, but
here is my hypothesis. Most or at least a good
percentage of the people with the where withal to
travel internationally have already been here to the
Galapagos. Galapagos is difficult and expensive to
get to, unlike say Hawaii where many people are
likely to go several times in their lives. For most
people Galapagos is a one time deal. This leaves an
available market for the Galapagos of the people
with the where withal who haven’t been here or are
discovering they might want to come, the people that
have recently come into the where withal and the
people without the where withal/economy budget
travelers.
Over the past year or so there has been a dramatic
increase in the number of “budget” and
twenty/thirty-something traveler’s writing us. I
don’t think in the first five years of our business
that we even had one organizing guest of a tour
under forty, well maybe a couple in their late
thirties. Anyway, this new younger set, tend to
write as if we were in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico or
Bali, Indonesia, “Do you rent mopeds?” They seem to
have no consideration that they are traveling to the
last somewhat intact biological refuge on the
planet. They want to go “multi-sporting”, want
things on a budget and they want me to know they are
“shopping around”.
Contributing to or perhaps precipitating this trend
are: the large international travel companies who
market land based tours with names like “Galapagos
on a Shoestring” or “multi-sport Galapagos”, guide
books and internet travel websites, blogs, etc.
which promote the idea of traveling to the Galapagos
as if it is no different than traveling to Costa
Rica. The traveling part isn’t any different really.
The planning part is quickly becoming similar. What
is different of course is the fragility of the
ecosystems at the destination’s end.
Perhaps the recent development that has had the
greatest immediate impact has been the introduction
of yet a third airline servicing the Galapagos, Lan.
They opened their marketing of the Galapagos by
offering incredibly cheap airfares and land based
package deals (marketed mostly in South America).
See
http://www.flightglobal.com/news/articles/lan-to-launch-galapagos-flights-in-september-339598/
though this article is way off in reporting the
number of flights to the Galapagos.
For the first time people can now book their own
flights to the Galapagos over the internet and not
only that, but can use frequent flyer miles through
Lan’s affiliated airlines. You can be sure the other
two airlines flying to the Galapagos will also soon
be providing this “service”. We often receive
letters now, “I have my flights, I’m arriving this
date, leaving this date, what do you have for me?”
Usually what I have for them is bad news. They’ve
booked a round trip flight to Baltra and so will
likely be spending the majority of their time in the
tourist capital of the Galapagos, a place we send
only about half our guests and rarely for more than
a night, mostly just to show them the impact of what
is happening and an example of how to ruin a
perfectly good island.
The solution to the above is in the hands of the
Ecuadorean government, but since they aren’t doing
nearly enough, it falls to travelers to make
educated choices about where, how and with which
companies they travel. Our guests or “hearts” as my
wife refers to them have done just that and have our
unceasing gratitude.
I/we bring tourists here. That is our business (how
we feed and clothe ourselves), albeit that we
designed our business within a sustainable model as
opposed to the non sustainable model which is the
Galapagos today. Still, we are bringing tourists,
actually more than we ever have, annually more than
a hundred a year (not counting the marathon we
organize, sustainable, leave only footprints, $
directly to the hands of the inhabitants), 0.075 %
of all tourists arriving in the Galapagos, less than
one tenth of one percent.
I’ve been asked, I don’t know how many times, “What
would you do if you could do anything to
save/preserve the Galapagos?”
I don’t have to hesitate. No informed, sensible
person would have a different answer.
“Forbid tourism. Shut it all down”. That’s how you
preserve a delicate and unique ecosystem as opposed
to “cashing in” while it still exists which appears
to be the current plan. My plan B for ourselves, I
suspect would be moving to a ski resort in
Argentina, affluent residents, good schools and
recreational opportunities and not too far from my
wife’s family who she cannot live without, plus we
would live in a place with four distinct seasons, my
wife and son would get to know what snow and cold
are, spring and fall. Of course we’d be starting
from scratch, lose our farm and the business we
created. We’d be okay. This reminds me of the
loggers of redwoods or salmon fishermen in north
western US a few years ago being forced to stop
logging and fishing, to find other ways to make a
living. I understood. I understand. I don’t think we
have to worry about that though. It appears we’ll be
allowed to witness what the loggers and salmon
fishermen were spared had they been allowed to
continue. I’ll do it with my wife and son while
continuing to wrestle to make a difference.
Short of forbidding tourism?
- Up the park entry fee to $500.
- Create a national web site through
which all tours to the Galapagos must be
booked through Ecuadorian companies.
- Require that all payments for
Galapagos tours flow through national
banks.
- Require that any tour of the
Galapagos must be at least ten days.
- Eliminate all commercial and sport
fishing in the Galapagos. All fish
caught in the Galapagos must be eaten in
the Galapagos.
- Tariff all incoming produce to the
Galapagos that can be produced here.
- Stop subsidizing the cost of energy
(electricity and gasoline).
- Tax all incoming sporting equipment
at $100 per, bicycles, kayak, surfboard
etc. for visitors, companies and locals.
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These suggestions would be an economic death
sentence to most of our friends and many local
businesses, depopulate the islands, end political
careers. They would increase our business
exponentially, actually have a net positive effect
on the Ecuadorean economy overall within three years
(obviously not on the economy of the Galapagos as it
exists today), increase revenues for the Ecuadorean
government and the Galapagos National park
immediately, save the Galapagos from the downward
spiral of ever increasing tourism and it will never
happen. I can send you the economic analysis of the
above on request. It is rather startling.
What is far more likely to happen, aside from the
degradation of the visitor’s experience is that some
strain of avian flu, distemper, dengue, lime disease
will cause the extinction or near extinction of some
form or forms of fauna that everyone comes here to
see. These animals are endemic to islands that up
until recently have been isolated from all of the
world’s various diseases and so have little or no
immunity. After the unique species of the Galapagos
start dying, these islands will just be a bunch of
hard to get to islands on the equator with barely
enough water for swimming pools and certainly not
for golf courses, though nobody comes to Ecuador to
golf anyway.
Aside from a few scientists, a few economists and
the Charles Darwin Foundation (see
http://www.darwinfoundation.org/english/pages/interna.php?txtCodiInfo=33),
who doesn’t think this is hyperbole?
What gets celebrated in the international press are
minimally consequential victories (some would
disagree) like the eradication of goats on Santiago
(they still run wild on practically every other
large island), Lonesome George (the last of his
species of giant tortoise) successfully inseminated
a giant tortoise of another species, the capture of
one or two illegal shark fin fishing boats a year
(as opposed to who knows how many others that
operate daily), etc.
No one talks much about what has already occurred
here. Extinction of many species of giant tortoise’,
birds and plants, endemic species that exist here
that are on the endangered species list, the
decimation of fisheries, no one seems to pay
attention to the fact that 97% of the plant mass on
the inhabited islands of the Galapagos is invasive
introduced species. No one talks about feral cats
eating marine iguanas etc.
No one talks about introduced insects perhaps the
biggest threat (carmelitas didn’t exist here only 15
years ago, I’ve seen a new aphid introduced in the
last three years that is currently denuding the
trees that surround our house, not the end of the
world as they are introduced species, but the fact
that this bug wasn’t here four years ago could be).
The amount of domestic animals being allowed to
enter the islands is greater than it ever has been.
Now you can find hybrid dogs of all varieties in
households here, status symbols, Pit Bulls to
Pekinese and this is exacerbated by the lack of
education/ethical practices with regard to the care
and training of domestic animals (they often run
freely on the beaches, mate freely in the streets
and for the most part are fed poorly) and lack of
enforcement of state or municipal ordinances. There
is practically no end to the things I could site and
I likely missed the most important ones here.
It is true nature adapts, however this is the one
place in the world where you REALLY don’t want it to
have to. Conversations with officials, business men,
politicians et al about all of the above… if the
conversation goes on for any length of time, it
generally ends (after accessing political and
economic “realities”) in discussions about the Gaia
theory. Basically man is a bacteria and the planet
will take care of itself in the end so what’s the
big woo?
My big woo is that this is my son’s and his buddy’s
planet. I believe the following, “We do not inherit
the world from our fathers. We borrow it from our
sons.” And so we continue to slug it out here,
continue to offer up the Galapagos with a vision
that looks back and forward, but most importantly is
about today, with no punches pulled.
Siempre Amor,
Rick, Bere and Roley |
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CST#2083876-40 |
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