Calvia to host International Tourism Conference

This week, Calvia will be hosting the International Conference of Responsible Tourism in Destinations (ICRTD) with the Responsible Tourism Partnerships (RTP) and Calvia Council and  Fundación Calviá 2004 in association with the TUI Group. The two-day conference is going to take place at the Auditorium in Paguera which begins with a welcome and opening speeches on Wednesday morning from Harold Goodwin, Maria Eugenia Frau Moreno, Jane Ashton and Inma De Benito, although the evening before a welcome cocktail party is being held.
The first international conference was held in South Africa  in 2002 in order to increase the profile and awareness of  the need for responsible tourism and to encourage tour operators, hoteliers, governments, local people and tourists to take responsibility and action to make tourism more sustainable - making better places for people to live in and better places for people to visit.
The purpose of the responsible tourism movement is to use tourism to create better places for people to live in and to visit, to enable tourism to contribute to good lives for people in thriving destinations whilst still allowing a destination to grow through investment for the future.
The annual conferences enable a sharing of experience and help people from diverse places to learn from each other and this year in Majorca, the speakers and panelists are coming from all over the world with a wide range of experience in a vast selection of areas in the tourist industry.
In the late 1980s tourism fell by almost 20% and in the early 1990s local authorities worked with the International Federation of  Tour Operators to address the challenge of mass tourism in resort areas.
The ECOMOST initiative was a joint effort by the local authorities and the source market operators to address the sustainability challenge.