It’s been promoted by multilateral agencies like the World Bank and the United Nations, as well as environmental and conservation organisations.
The logic underlying luxury tourism is that if fewer, high-spending tourists visit, this will result in less environmental impact. It’s often labelled as a “high-value, low-impact” approach.
However, studies have shown that luxury tourism does not lead to reduced environmental impact. Luxury tourists are more likely to use private jets. Private jets are more carbon intense than economy class travel. Supporters of luxury tourism also ignore that it reinforces economic inequalities, commercialises nature and restricts land access for indigenous populations.
In some ways, of course, the motives of African countries seem understandable. They remain starved of much-needed foreign exchange in the face of rising trade deficits. The allure of luxury tourism seems almost impossible to resist.
For instance Mauritius was the first of the three countries to explicitly adopt a luxury tourism strategy. In the late 1970s and early 1980s the government began to encourage European visitors to the island’s “sun-sand-sea” attractions. Large domestic business houses became lead investors, building luxury hotels and buying coastal land.
Over the years, tourism has provided significant revenues for the Mauritian economy. By 2019, the economy was earning over US$2 billion from the sector (before dropping during the COVID pandemic).
However, tourism has also been symbolic of the inequality that has characterised Mauritius’ growth. The all-inclusive resort model – where luxury hotels take care of all of a visitor’s food and travel needs themselves – has meant that the money being spent by tourists doesn’t always enter the local economy. A large share of profits remains outside the country or with large hotels.
After the pandemic, the Mauritian government took steps to loosen its focus on luxury tourism. It opened its air space to attract a broader range of tourists and re-started direct flights to Asia. There’s growing agreement within government that the opening up of tourism will go some way towards sustaining revenues and employment in the sector. Especially as some other key sectors (like offshore finance) may face an uncertain future.
Elsewhere, Rwanda invited global hotel brands (like the Hyatt and Marriott) to build hotels and invested heavily in the country’s “nation brand” through sponsoring sports teams. The “luxury” element is managed through maintaining a high price to visit the country’s main tourist attraction: mountain gorillas. Rwanda is one of the few countries where mountain gorillas live.
After the pandemic, the government lowered prices to visit mountain gorillas but has also regularly stated its commitment to luxury tourism.
Rwanda’s position goes against a lot of recent literature on African political economy, which argues that parties with a stronger hold on power would be able to deliver better development outcomes.
While that may be case in some sectors, the findings of this study suggest that weaker political parties may actually be more responsive to changing policies that are creating inequality than countries with stronger political parties in power.
Guest Editorial