Book An Immersive Travel Experience With The Blue Yonder
For World Tourism Day 2023, the UNWTO emphasises the importance of more and better-targeted green investments for people, the planet, and prosperity. The 2023 theme on "Tourism and Green Investment" highlights the significance of responsible and sustainable tourism operations.
Ahead of World Tourism Day on September 27, we talk to Gopinath Parayil of The Blue Yonder, an organisation focusing on immersive local experiences that put something back into the local community.
What was the idea behind setting up The Blue Yonder?
The Blue Yonder is now in its 20th year. It was set up to bring attention to River Nila (Bharatapuzha), significantly influencing the Malayalee psyche. We started looking at tourism as a tool/platform to co-create solutions to various challenges that we could see in the region where we grew up. From environmental challenges to struggles of artists and artisans to make a living with dignity, there were many areas where we felt we could contribute. This resulted in us exploring socio-cultural, economic, and environmental impacts in the areas we wanted to work in, resulting in setting up a pioneering, responsible travel business in India. Once we started seeing results, we slowly spread our work to other parts of South India.
What makes Blue Yonder special? What sort of experiences do you provide? And how do you pick the experiences?
Most of our experiences result from various sustainable development initiatives we have carried out, mostly curated and co-created in consultation with locals. For a traveller, it might be an amazing twilight dining on a Chinese fishing net or a Farm visit to the Pokkali rice fields, but for us, it was a project that we launched as part of a Climate Change adaptability initiative or a Climate change resistant food initiative. An immersive half a day spent with musicians learning about traditional percussions of Tamil Nadu or Kerala might have come out of an initiative to document the musical traditions of a region or sometimes an initiative to bring dignity and supplementary sources of income for artists who are working hard to preserve a tradition.
Our experiences range from soft adventure and conservation-focused travel to culture and heritage-focused experiences. These experiences range from a couple of hours to multiple weeks of travel.
In our business model, travel experiences are not what we curate first but various projects. We identify challenges, and travel experiences are often a by-product of solution building. Dancescapes in urban and rural areas are our latest products where we work with mostly performing artists from Classical, Folk, Theatre and contemporary movement genres. Travellers get to observe practice and training sessions, attend performances, and get essential exposure to art forms that define a region ( or vice versa). Here is a playlist that has some 50+ experiences in just Kerala and Pondicherry.
What challenges did you face in building a sustainable and responsible travel organisation that works with local communities?
In twenty years, we have encountered more than ten significant climate change-related disasters across the country that caused destination losses to a minimum of five billion USD per destination. This has been the case from West Bengal, Tamil Nadu to Kerala. Working in climate-vulnerable destinations affects the business in the same wavelength as it affects the communities.
Most of our resources (both human and financial) get deployed during the crisis and in the recovery period, challenging our definition of "being a sustainable business." By the end of the day, whatever you invest in developing projects and products as part of responsible tourism initiatives comes to a standstill with the increased frequency of climate change-related disasters. The replicable, scalable model of climate resilience and adaptability seems to be the biggest concern for our existence.
In light of the growing importance of travel as a tool for economic regeneration, what in your opinion, is the most pressing sustainability issue facing the travel industry today?
Identifying or curating different market profiles is essential for the survival of the industry. As a company catering primarily to inbound travellers, we now have an increased flow of domestic travellers into experiential holidays. With the concern of carbon emissions from the travel industry, the cultural creatives of the world will seriously start consuming less of experiences that need longer flying distances.
This would mean the need to invest in promoting responsible travel within the domestic market and in experiences that can be consumed as part of longer stays that create more positive impacts on destinations.
What did you see that you wanted to change in the travel sector?
There are hundreds of things I would want to change within our industry. Before it gets too late, the travel industry must learn to work with development and humanitarian sectors globally and in hyper-local destinations. With the frequency of disasters worldwide, several money-minting destinations will be even more vulnerable, and the government alone will be unable to invest in "rebuilding better." The travel industry can’t afford to see it as an island but as part of a symbiotic ecosystem where partnerships and multi-sectoral collaborations will sustain it.
The realisation that a 9 trillion USD travel industry can do with its access to shelters, food and beverage, highly skilled human resources, supply chain and logistics and uncanny ability to raise funds in a short period needs to be employed for the benefit of destinations and communities. If destinations are resilient in the future, the travel industry will sustain itself sooner.
More about The Blue Yonder here.
