What does sustainable hospitality, ethical tourism and responsible travel look like in Siem Reap, Cambodia? It turns out to be very different but also quite instructive for a country like New Zealand.
Transcript
I am currently visiting Cambodia following a three-week visit to Sun Yat-sen University in Zhuhai, China. Here I have been struck by the sustainability practices of a family-run guesthouse in Siem Reap – the gateway city to the temples of Angkor, and one of the most visited heritage destinations in Southeast Asia.
It has been interesting to observe the practices of the place where I am staying, which are instructive for anyone thinking seriously about what responsible, regenerative hospitality can look like in a destination that depends almost entirely on tourism.
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To begin, it has been interesting to see how a small, independently owned guesthouse survived a global pandemic, and emerged with its environmental and social commitments intact.
In New Zealand memories of the COVID border closures and periods of lockdown remain vivid. The creation of travel bubbles between New Zealand and places such as Queensland and Rarotonga which has also successfully suppressed the spread of COVID. The immediate shift to domestic tourism marketing to support stricken tourism businesses, the government business support programme, and Jobs for Nature. Then the re-opening of borders and the ‘return to pre-COVID levels of tourism’ lead by the initial return of Australian tourists.
The guesthouse I am staying in now opened in 2008, offering 22 rooms set in a small tropical garden with a swimming pool, and built its identity from the outset around what its own materials describe as a focus on sustainability, ethical consumption and responsible tourism.
When COVID-19 reached Cambodia, the property’s own account is unsentimental: the guesthouse was empty overnight, and 28 staff and Remorque (pronounced re-mork – known in Thailand as a tuk-tuk) drivers were suddenly out of work. Siem Reap, a city whose entire economy is built around the temples of Angkor and the millions of visitors who come to see them, became a tourist ghost town.
The scale of the collapse was unprecedented. Around 90 percent of all tourism-related businesses in Siem Reap closed down during this period. The guesthouse came close to closing permanently on several occasions. What kept it open was hard work, fundraising efforts, and a determined commitment to retain every member of staff for the duration of the crisis.
In a sector where staff layoffs were generally the default response, a small, independently owned guesthouse managed to keep its entire workforce employed through two years with effectively no tourism revenue. This reflects a particular model of hospitality, one in which staff and drivers are considered not as a flexible cost to be shed in hard times, but as a community for whom the business holds an ongoing responsibility.
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The pandemic’s impact on Siem Reap, and on Cambodia’s tourism sector more broadly, extended well beyond the immediate loss of revenue. Siem Reap itself was transformed during this period. While tourism collapsed, the Cambodian government undertook a major road construction project in Siem Reap. That work involved the widening of narrow unsealed streets. When the guesthouse lost 5m of its garden frontage drivers worked to rebuild the garden.
The infrastructure investment that took place in Siem Reap during the pandemic was substantial. Siem Reap emerged from the crisis with government investment in rainwater drainage, sewage systems, flood protection systems, cable transmission infrastructure including internet, and traffic signage. As in New Zealand infrastructure investment was accelerated during the years when tourist arrivals disappeared.
This is a reminder that the impacts of a crisis like COVID-19 on a tourism-dependent destination are never simple. Livelihoods were devastated and many businesses failed. And at the same time, a city used the enforced pause to build infrastructure that would have been far harder to construct around the usual volume of visitors and traffic.
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It is also a reminder of how tenuous tourism employment can be in times of political instability. The Siem Reap tourism economy is dependent upon flows of visitors from neighbouring Thailand and Vietnam. Despite the recent completion of a new international airport in Siem Reap, most international visitors arrive from Thailand, travelling by train to the Thai-Cambodia border and then by bus to Siem Reap.
The current border conflict has greatly compromised this flow of visitors to Siem Reap. No doubt the conflict in the Middle East and the continuing confusion surrounding peace talks and the status of the Gulf of Hormuz is further impacting tourism. It is a sad reminder of the dependence of tourism livelihoods on political decisions being made on the global stage. Currently the Angkor temples are largely being visited by local Cambodians again due to the state to global geopolitics. Many local tourism businesses including markets, local restaurants and remorque drivers are feeling the absence of visitors again.
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Where I am staying I have been impressed with the commitment to and constant innovation of a portfolio of sustainability practices. Central to this is an education programme, which for over a decade has sponsored staff and drivers with English classes and higher education through a registered fund. Scholarships are offered at several Cambodian universities and staff have also been given the opportunity to take educational trips to other provinces of Cambodia. This initiative is designed to help staff understand their own country better, and to gain insight into what it is like to be a tourist themselves. This was a deliberate effort to close the gap in perspective between those who serve tourists and those who experience tourism. This is a gap that can otherwise entrench fairly rigid and unequal relationships between hosts and guests.
The same fund has supported emergency healthcare for staff, drivers, their families, and other underprivileged families in the surrounding countryside. The property also supports a clinic providing healthcare to communities living on the Tonle Sap, the great lake that dominates central Cambodia and that is home to some of the country’s most economically marginalised floating and stilt communities.
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The fund has additionally contributed to Cambodia’s first hard-plastic recycling machine and has supported several other plastic recycling programmes. We are all familiar with the scourge of plastic and the impact that microplastics are having on the global environment, including the oceans.
In response this guesthouse uses bamboo rather than plastic straws. It provides free drinking water that guests can use to the fill glass bottles provided in each room, or their own drink bottles. This measure explicitly aims to reduce the estimated 4.6 million plastic bottles that are used each month by tourists visiting the Angkor World Heritage Area. Whether or not that specific figure can be independently verified, bottled water consumption by international tourists is a material and visible contributor to plastic waste in destinations like Cambodia, that free bottle refill directly addresses.
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Beyond plastic reduction measures, one of the unique elements of this property’s sustainability programme is its eco-shop and refill station, Cambodia’s first zero-waste bulk store which was established in 2018.
The concept of the eco-shop needs to be placed in the context of a tourism economy heavily reliant on single-use plastic convenience. The shop offers travellers a place to choose plastic-free alternatives. These include refilling personal containers with shampoo, shower gel, mosquito repellent, and other necessities – all locally produced using local ingredients. They can also purchase reusable items such as tote bags, cutlery sets, and toiletry containers. Many of these products are locally made.
This dual framing – environmental benefit and local economic benefit – recurs throughout the property’s sustainability commitment. A refill station that reduces plastic waste while creating local manufacturing jobs models an integrated, locally-embedded approach that scholars of regenerative tourism argue is necessary if tourism is to leave destinations better off rather than simply less damaged.
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Taken together, describe what amounts to a comprehensively plastic-conscious hospitality operation. These include refillable soap dispensers, clean plastic waste recycling through a local initiative that converts plastic bottles into wall materials for housing construction and the recycling of plastic containers and glass jars through the eco-shop which are offered free of charge to customers for refilling purposes. It also organises regular litter-collection events to clean local streets and raise public awareness.
It is worth noting how unglamorous most of these measures are. There is no single grand gesture such as a solar array or a carbon offsetting headline. Rather this is an accumulation of consistent, practical operational choices that demonstrate a business culture of waste reduction.
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The framing here is candid about the scale of the underlying problem. Litter and plastic waste are significant issues across Cambodia, with rubbish often dumped around villages or burnt which only create further environmental harm. Tourism is a substantial contributor to this growing litter problem. Practical advice is offered to guests to behave in ways that are simple and actionable.
None of this requires significant sacrifice or expense from the traveller. What it requires is a small adjustment of habit and a willingness to treat the destination as somewhere whose environmental and social fabric is worth protecting, rather than simply consuming.
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Responsible tourism
The property’s guest materials extend well beyond plastic reduction, offering a broader set of tips for what it explicitly frames as responsible travel. Tips range from the practical to the ethically pointed, including water conservation, advice on haggling or bargaining, tipping, and the protection of vulnerable people, particularly children with clear and unambiguous guidance on visiting orphanages.
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In doing so, useful advice is offered on local activities and causes that are worthy of support. Among the organisations is a partnership with APOPO; a Belgian-registered humanitarian NGO that represents a remarkable applied-science success stories in post-conflict development.
During the deeply troubled 1970s over 6 million mines were laid in Cambodia. In addition, during the American War in Vietnam an estimated 26 million ordinances were dropped in Cambodia supposedly to target the Viet Cong. Since 2015 APOPO has trained African giant pouched rats – affectionately known as HeroRATs – to detect landmines and explosives that are remnants of war by scent alone, ignoring the scrap metal that confuses conventional detectors and slows manual detection and demining.
A single HeroRAT can clear an area the size of a tennis court in roughly thirty minutes. A human working with a metal detector can take up to four days to cover the same ground. The rats are too light to trigger pressure-activated mines, are cheap to breed, train and transport, and are easy to motivate using simple reward-based clicker training.
When APOPO started using rats for mine detection in 2016 the ambition of APOPO and other mine detection organisations was to make Cambodia mine-free by 2025. That ambition has been moved to 2035-2036. Now 75% of Cambodia is mine-free. The remaining 25% is on the Thai border and that work has been greatly slowed by continued conflict in border provinces.
APOPO helps brings tourists closer to that goal — both by raising public awareness of the scale of the problem and by generating donations that fund ongoing clearance. The numbers are genuinely striking. Since operations began, APOPO’s rats and dogs have located more than 155,000 landmines and items of unexploded ordnance and returned almost 100 million square metres of contaminated land to safe civilian use — an area roughly the size of the city of Paris — directly improving safety for nearly six million people across the countries in which it works.
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Of course The Angkor Archaeological Park and UNESCO World Heritage Area is the jewel in the crown of Cambodian tourism. In New Zealand we have very belatedly committed to differential pricing for the use of visitor facilities in the conservation estate such as huts on the Great Walks. At Angkor international visitors pay for one day, multi-day or annual passes. A year would barely be enough to comprehensively visit the Angkor complex given its vastness.
Quite rightly, Cambodians have free access to the temples. Last Sunday at light show at Angkor Thom to celebrate the birthday or the King’s mother, drew thousands of local residents in cars, on scooters and on foot. In the evenings families picnic to watch the sunset over Angkor Wat. It is uplifting to see local Cambodian’s enjoying the marvels of Angkor rather than being excluded from such an iconic setting.
And behind Angkor I have seen amodel of hospitality built on a deep commitment to sustainability. Manifest in refillable amenities, compostable packaging, local sourcing, staff education funds, healthcare support extending well beyond the workforce into the wider community, and a candidness in telling guests uncomfortable truths about begging scams, orphanage tourism, and the limits of short-term volunteering.
It is a model that survived a catastrophic interruption with its sustainability commitments intact and deepened. There is also something here that speaks to the holistic, relational models of regenerative tourism that I have touched on in earlier episodes – models in which the wellbeing of land, community, and visitors are understood as bound together and where responsible travel is a partnership between hosts and guests.
