This year at the World Travel Market, responsible tourism made its way from a niche-market corner into the mainstream. The BBC World sponsored the World Responsible Tourism Programme (WRTP), which included a series of seminars on some of the major topics within tourism and sustainability. The Programme culminated with World Responsible Tourism Day on Wednesday November 10, when the much-anticipated 2010 Responsible Tourism Awards were handed out.

Coming to the Fringe RT Network event as first-timer, I genuinely wasn’t sure what to expect. I’d never attended a networking event before and was worried that I’d feel a bit like an outsider with little to offer by way of contribution. I was, therefore, pleasantly surprised to find myself on the receiving end of…

The Old News: In 2002, a Cape Town Conference on Responsible Tourism in Destinations (held in anticipation of the Johannesburg World Summit on Sustainable Development) brought together 280 tourism-industry representatives from 20 countries. They issued a joint declaration defining the role and potential of responsible tourism. The terms they set and the path they began…