Page 62 - bne_Magazine_March_2018

62 Opinion
bne March 2018
However, the issue is not merely a matter of enticing tourists; holiday factories in the Caribbean, the Mediterranean, and the Black Sea have little trouble attracting tourists, but they can also detract from community life, strain public services, and invite local ire. In Georgia, a small country with a mostly functioning if imperfect sort of representative democracy, a tourism model that favours sprawling, gated luxury campuses and distant corporate operators could provoke a backlash with political repercussions.
In Georgia’s subtropical city of Batumi on the Black Sea, throngs of Turkish tourists visit year-round, which has strongly contributed to the city’s development and reputation as
a favoured regional destination. Yet the predominance of Turkish tourism has also prompted a wave of anti-Turkish sentiment in the city, providing a constituency for an assortment of nationalist politicians – and a heavy dollop of regular embarrassment for the government, which maintains close ties with Ankara.
That’s not to say that large luxury resort complexes do not have a place in Georgia’s tourism mix; they obviously do, but they are hardly the only answer to Georgia’s tourism development. In reality, Georgia is a competitive destination on price and proximity for only a relatively limited number
“Georgia is a competitive destination on price and proximity for only a relatively limited number of visitors”
of visitors – Azerbaijanis, Armenians, and a subset of Turks, Iranians, and Russians. For many, a low-cost flight to Antalya, Sharm El Sheikh, or Croatia may be easier or cheaper.
For many other visitors (and probably including many of those from Georgia’s neighbouring countries), Georgia’s comparative advantages are in its distinctive cultural offerings
and undeniable natural beauty (think about the Gulf visitors in Borjomi).
Fortunately for Georgia, a tourism model that embraces low-impact, sustainable tourism that promotes interactions with local communities already exists in Costa Rica. Small hospitality operators dominate offerings, and the Costa Rican government actively supports tourism development that minimises ecological impact and distributes intensity across a variety of small food and hospitality vendors, and discourages those that do not. In many ways, Georgia’s tourism industry is already well primed for such a model, with its thriving guesthouse and AirBnB culture and only relatively recent penetration by international hotel brands.
However, there is still much that the Georgian government can do to train and incentivise small operators to scale their offerings to increasingly discerning international tourists. Perhaps more importantly, the Georgian government can also take greater care to preserve the country’s cultural
and natural resources. Regular, rigorous, and meticulous historical preservation remains a glaring blind spot, and the country’s famed natural beauty is undercut by appalling air quality, pollution, and rampant poaching and deforestation. A tourism policy that ignores these issues risks turning the country’s tourism potential into a non-renewable resource to be exploited until exhaustion.
Georgian tourism is on the cusp of greatness, but its newfound spotlight illuminates major risks as well as opportunities. Getting it right could cement tourism as a pillar of Georgian economic development for years to come. Failure, however, could breed discontent and contagion with little benefit for the country as a whole.
Michael Cecire is an International Security Fellow at New America and a non-resident Fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute.
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