What are the changes we need from tourism? If tourism can be so bad and we want better, what changes may we want?
Tourism and holiday making are fraught with difficulties today.
Problems range from the many people who are excluded from holidays by cost, to the landscapes and oceans that need protection from developments that only benefit holidaymakers.
Tourism often doesn’t contribute to the health and well being of those who travel, nor make the communities and places they visit better and more healthy.
Holiday making is wasteful. Our ways of taking leisure use too many resources, from the things we consume on holiday to the miles we travel.
And when we get there, the communities we visit often don’t get the benefits of our visits economically or socially.
Footloose tourism
Youth hostels set out to change those problems then.
They introduced travel for people who had not been able to travel before by lowering costs. They introduced a modern footloose way of travelling from place to place, backpacking as it’s known today. With lowered costs they brought a new kind of accommodation to tourism open to anyone.
In these posts I’ve introduced the travels of two young women in 1936. They paid a shilling each to join the Youth Hostels Association (YHA) and 6d each night for a bed in a single sex dormitory.
If you missed that, you can read it here.
They had somewhere to wash and cook and, as a bonus, the company of anyone else staying at the same time. Youth hostels were made to help all to travel, not just a privileged elite.
Youth hostels aimed to cause as little damage as possible to the environment. They introduced a code for good tourism in 1930, believing that good behaviour made good tourists welcome wherever they went.
Health and education
Youth hostels aimed to bring about better health. They wanted to contribute to learning. They believed that better understanding of different places and cultures would reduce conflict.
They aimed to work simply without waste, using as little as possible. They used surplus housing and buildings, and equipped them simply, without trappings of excess service and luxury.
They benefitted communities. They brought work to local people who often owned and ran their own properties as youth hostels.
People living in local communities ran the organisation, through highly devolved and autonomous structures, welded to local and regional difference.
Only those who travelled carbon free on foot or by bicycle, or using public transport could stay in youth hostels. Private cars were banned.
A local network encouraged travel to nearby places. They aimed to give holidays to people in local areas, close to towns and cities. They sited holiday accommodation in what is sometimes called the great nearby.
Travel and strawberries
In five years after the first youth hostels had opened YHA had 59,000 members and 262 hostels in which they could stay. They covered the breadth of England and Wales. They were an international phenomenon at the same time.
All this was achieved at remarkable speed. They changed lives. When Hilary Hughes set out from her home on the Dale in Widley in England in 1936 she had little idea how her journey and youth hostels would change her life.
She became a botanist. She made a reputation cultivating strawberries. But all that lay ahead in the summer of 1936 when she and her friend Margaret set out. Hilary and Margaret left home without fuss and youth hostels changed their lives.
Modest change like that looks startling today. Maybe we can learn something from that.
Maybe in their journey, and the changes around them we can learn something that will help us understand ways of delivering better travel.
Top image: washing at one of the first youth hostels in England, courtesy the YHA archive at the Cadbury Research Library, University of Birmingham.