Tourism Escape
Why Master in Tourism?
For a long time I was using travel and experience as an escape route and wanted to reflect on my discoveries, struggles, and lessons from my past trips and I realized I need to dive deeper into understanding and how to help communities through the lens of tourism and what better way to do this than to go to graduate school and expose myself to information that I never knew existed.
Tourism Leadership
As tourism leaders, we develop a deeper understanding of economic conflict and learn how to bring about peace through sustainable efforts and initiatives. Understanding cultural differences can help us create, reduce, and question our unconscious biases and help push for policies and regulations that will help us enhance and preserve heritage sites, reduce poverty, and reconcile and heal wounds of conflict.
It is important to realize that through tourism, we can protect areas that are at risk of going extinct. Tourism generates financial and overall health benefits through ecotourism and sustainable nature-based tourism. As leaders, we can find potential solutions to the dilemmas managers are facing in potential areas of developing countries as well as our local communities.
The importance of Ecotourism
In theory, ecotourism proves a means of generating tangible economic benefits from protected areas to offset the often substantial cost of protection, without the environmental cost associated with extractive industries such as mining, forestry and agriculture. Ecotourism forms a link between protected areas and the livelihood of local people “providing revenue to the local community sufficient for local people to value and therefore protect, their wildlife heritage as a source of income.