Thiruvananthapuram: Responsible Tourism to rope in community tour leaders'
Thiruvananthapuram: For the first time ever, the Responsible Tourism Mission is recruiting ‘community tour leaders’ from within the coastal community in an around Kovalam for ‘Village Life Experience’ packages. The VLE experiment, which began eight years ago in 2010, was an attempt to take the tourists away from the beaches, an attempt to demonstrate that Kovalam was not just its sun-kissed beaches.
These one-day tour packages will have five or six stops, each stop an introduction to a unique, and for the foreigner exotic, way of village life like coir retting or earth loom weaving or fish net making or traditional oil extracting. Though the VLE package has caught on in a big way in Kumarakom, Kovalam has never had enthusiastic takers.
Still, each year the Responsible Tourism organisers dust off the packages, and re-introduce them as new in the hope that it would work. But, the experiment continued to fail. “This time we thought we will rope in youth from the community to lead the VLE tours,” said Rupesh Kumar K, the state-level Responsible Tourism Mission coordinator.
Earlier, in the absence of a tour leader, it was the district RT Mission coordinator who had to travel with the tourists. “Now we have realised that to sell experiential tourism packages, the tour has to be led by smart and sensitive youths who hail from the community,” Mr Kumar said. “It is they who have a better idea of the terrain and history of the area. They can make the experience more worthwhile,” he added. The plan is to train and equip at least 20 ‘community tour leaders’ in Kovalam alone.
The RT Mission has a structured package, with fixed stops. However, this year, the Mission has become more flexible. “Any person from the community can come up with their own VLE package and if we find it interesting we will include that as part of the official package,” Mr Kumar said.
“Further, our VLE packages will no more be rigid. If a tourist is not interested in a dairy unit, we will drop that and include another stop, say a silk weaving unit, that she would be interested in,” he added. Such decisions can be made swiftly if the VLE tours are led by ‘community tour leaders’.
