A PHIST Bump for Sustainable Tourism
by Teymoor Nabili
On September 24, Christy Davis (Asia P3 Hub Executive Director) attended a sustainability conference in Thailand — the “Phuket Hotels For Islands Sustaining Tourism” Forum (PHIST 2018).
Organised by the Phuket Hotels Association in conjunction with the Thailand Hotels Association, the conference was a new initiative by the hotel industry in Thailand to combat environmental problems brought on by mass tourism.
Following the closure of Boracay in the Philippines and Maya Beach in Thailand due to pollution and environmental degradation, the hotel industry has been galvanised into tackling these issues head-on.
In a panel titled “Smart Cities, Smarter Tourism”, Christy spoke of how hotels could consider implementing partnering methodologies within a “smart cities” framework, rather than hotels focusing on their own individual sustainability efforts, to identify problems and unify stakeholders on a city-wide level, and generate much larger scale impact.
In conversation with Phuket’s designated “Smart City Project Manager” Pracha Asawateera, Director of Adelaide University’s Smart Cities Consortium Nick Falkner and the Head of Environmental Affairs at Hyatt Marie Fukudome, Christy suggested how the next phase of Phuket’s development plan might benefit from a broader representation of stakeholders during the planning phase, and of the value to be gained from data-sharing and “combinatorial” thinking.
Article was written by Teymoor Nabili, Asia P3 Hub’s Media Advisor and a veteran journalist and broadcaster. He was also a moderator at PHIST Forum 2018 on ‘Development, Building and Infrastructure — What Does it Take to Sustain Tourism on an Island’.
Teymoor is a journalist, broadcaster and public speaker with 25-year track record of anchoring, reporting, writing and editing news and current affairs programmes for global TV networks. His latest TV work is as presenter/moderator for Perspectives — a series of live panel debates on Channel News Asia addressing major social, political and economic issues. He is currently the media advisor of Asia P3 Hub and CEO of a startup online news venture, TheSignal.
Reach out to him via LinkedIn.
