Compassion as a neglected motivator for sustainable tourism

Abstract

Compassion is defined and identified in this paper as a powerful and universal motivator for actions that could help attain sustainable outcomes and enable aspirational forms of sustainable tourism, including just tourism, hopeful tourism and enlightened mass tourism that have not yet demonstrated real-world traction. Despite its potential, compassion has been neglected in the tourism literature. This paper reviews the 50-year quest for a “better tourism”, and presents a compassion-scape as a comprehensive and systematic framework for facilitating sector engagement with compassion. “Context” factors associated with tourism settings (e.g. level of development, purpose) and agents (e.g. mindset, psychographics, motivations) influence “encounter” elements, such as the relationship, type and distress characteristics. Subsequent “response” factors, such as type, recipient, timeframe and intention, influence the “implications” for sustainable tourism, which in turn affect the types of “intervention” (e.g. mindful interpretation, social marketing, faith injunction) implemented to achieve sustainable outcomes. The many innate methodological challenges for the researcher in measuring compassion are discussed, along with the issues involved in operationalizing the compassion-scape to engage and reform alternative tourism forms, notably volunteer tourism, pro-poor tourism, religious tourism and fair trade tourism as well as conventional mass tourism. A paper for the thinking reader.