Responsible Tourism and the Tourism Industry: A Demand and Supply Perspective - Responsible Tourism: Critical Issues for Conservation and Development - page 94

Table 5.2 Respondents' level of agreement with costs and benefits of RTM

Scale Item Perceived cost or % Strongly Agree

benefit of RTM & Agree

Being ethical and responsible is the most important
thing a business can do 94

Business planning and goal setting should include 92

discussions of responsible management
Responsible management is essential to long-term profitability 94

Good (responsible) management is often good for business 92

Businesses will have to ignore responsible management
in order to remain competitive in a global environment 78

You must forget about responsible management if the
survival of the business is at stake 64

Business has a social responsibility beyond making a profit 62

It is too expensive for our business to use smaller suppliers costs 61

We do not use smaller community suppliers because
of safety and security issues costs 60

Our customers want international standards that smaller
local businesses cannot offer costs 58

Community support helps us run our business better benefits 47

We think responsible tourism management improves
our staff performance benefits 67

Our employees are proud to work for a socially
responsible business benefits 73

We think responsible tourism management is a useful
marketing tool benefits 81

Our brand, image and reputation benefits from
responsible tourism management benefits 77

Tourism agency initiatives to facilitate RTM adoption

The lack of RTM practices in the South African tourism industry is clear. A host
of governmental and non-governmental agencies have emerged in the last ten
years to accelerate transformation, provide information on best practices and give
practical advice to tourism industry role-players. Despite these positive efforts,
van der Merwe and Wöcke's (2007) and Frey's (2007a) research found that an
understanding of government policies, such as the Responsible Tourism Manual
for South Africa (RTMSA) (Spenceley et al, 2002) and the BEE Tourism Charter
and Scorecard (DEAT, 2005) is low. Frey (2007a) found that 44 per cent of
respondents understand the RTMSA (Spenceley et al, 2002) badly or not at all
(Figure 5.4). The Responsible Tourism Guidelines (DEAT, 2002), which along
with the 1996 White Paper on Tourism Development and Promotion (DEAT,
1996) were the national policy precursor to the RTMSA (Spenceley et al, 2002),