An alliance between a guidebook author and community-based tourism
Community ecolodges funded by the Small Grants Program in Costa Rica banded together in 2001 to form ACTUAR, the Costa Rican Association for Rural Tourism. I have formed an alliance with ACTUAR in which I use the knowledge and reader trust that I have developed over the 26 years that I have written and updated The New Key to Costa Rica, to familiarize tourists with the benefits of community-based tourism, thus generating sales for ACTUAR member businesses.
In addition to featuring ACTUAR member destinations in The New Key, ACTUAR and I have worked to develop ways in which I could help them market their unique form of tourism. In 2003 I started planning customized itineraries for the many readers and web browsers who contact me for travel planning advice. I always try to offer ACTUAR destinations as part of these itineraries. I am now the North American sales representative for ACTUAR and I answer their 800 number in the US. People who contacted me for travel planning advice have generated over $250,000 in income for ACTUAR over the last year and a half. That income allows ACTUAR to serve as an interface between the communities and tourists, and provides income for ACTUAR members and their families.
Your idea
This will be the address used to plot your entry on the map.
Street Address
Barrio Amón
City
San José
State/Province
San José
Postal/Zip Code
1000
Country
Costa Rica
Year innovation began
2003
Geotourism Challenge Addressed by Entrant
Quality of benefit to the people of the desitination
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Indicate sector in which you principally work
Tourism-related business
Geographic location
Rural, Mountain, Rainforest, Multiple locations.
Plot your innovation within the Mosaic of Solutions
Main insight addressed
Market authenticity
Name Your Project
An alliance between a guidebook author and community-based tourism
Describe Your Idea
Community ecolodges funded by the Small Grants Program in Costa Rica banded together in 2001 to form ACTUAR, the Costa Rican Association for Rural Tourism. I have formed an alliance with ACTUAR in which I use the knowledge and reader trust that I have developed over the 26 years that I have written and updated The New Key to Costa Rica, to familiarize tourists with the benefits of community-based tourism, thus generating sales for ACTUAR member businesses.
In addition to featuring ACTUAR member destinations in The New Key, ACTUAR and I have worked to develop ways in which I could help them market their unique form of tourism. In 2003 I started planning customized itineraries for the many readers and web browsers who contact me for travel planning advice. I always try to offer ACTUAR destinations as part of these itineraries. I am now the North American sales representative for ACTUAR and I answer their 800 number in the US. People who contacted me for travel planning advice have generated over $250,000 in income for ACTUAR over the last year and a half. That income allows ACTUAR to serve as an interface between the communities and tourists, and provides income for ACTUAR members and their families.
Innovation
What is the goal of your innovation?
Connecting travelers with community-based tourism, thus creating sustainable livelihoods for agricultural communities and memorable experiences for travelers.
How does your approach support or embody geotourism?
Each ACTUAR (Costa Rican Rural Tourism Association) member community presents knowledge gained from the generations before them. Examples:
sharing the traditional uses of rainforest trees, flowers and plants at Los Campesinos Reserve,
telling how they stopped hunting and became conservationists at Cerro Escondido Lodge, showing how they protected their coral reef in order to bring back fish stocks in Isla de Chira,
local children playing with visiting children and learning to make tortillas at Nacientes Palmichal,
BriBri women demonstrating the ancient method of processing their sacred fruit, cacao, at La Casa de las Mujeres in Yorkín,
In all the above examples traditional culture becomes alive for visitors. The fascination in the eyes of the visitors shows the value of knowledge previously taken for granted. This kind of tourism encourages and supports agricultural communities to remain on their land and conserve their rivers and forests. It helps their children appreciate the values of traditional country life. Thus the flavor, beauty and richness of rural life are fostered and become inspirational to visitors, giving them the authentic experiences that they seek.
Describe your approach in detail. How is it innovative?
ACTUAR CONSERVacations are customized itineraries that combine community-based destinations with privately-owned destinations. The itineraries are developed from my 26 years of experience as a guidebook writer. I use the confidence that readers and web browsers have in my recommendations to introduce the concept of community-based ecotourism. By carefully listening to the needs and desires of the travelers who consult me, I can customize itineraries that give people the unique, authentic natural and cultural experiences that they ask for. By and providing excellent guides and drivers, we make it easy for travelers to include ACTUAR’s community-based destinations in their vacations.
What types of partnerships or professional development would be most beneficial in spreading your innovation?
Marketing for our guidebooks (The New Key to Costa Rica and ACTUAR’s bilingual publication “Costa Rica Auténtica”) and our travel planning services. Long term commitments to teaching English and other languages in ACTUAR communities. Government cooperation in improving road access to ACTUAR destinations.
Impact
In one sentence describe what kind of impact, change, or reform your approach is intended to achieve.
Marketing rural tourism by using the confidence that the traveling public has in guidebooks and guidebook author recommendations
Describe the degree of success of your approach to date. Clearly define how you measure quantitative and qualitative impact in terms of how your approach contributes to the sustainability or enhancement of local culture, environment, heritage, or aesthetics? How does your approach minimize negative impacts? 200 words or less
Because ACTUAR member destinations are owned and operated by community conservation organizations, all revenues go directly to the communities. Revenues from tourism supplement farming incomes and provide jobs for farming families. Profits are reinvested in improving infrastructure, marketing and training. Income from CONSERVacations also goes to pay the expenses of maintaining an office and staff that are the interface between the rural tourism destinations and tourists. ACTUAR has developed into a full service travel agency, and it also organizes training programs for its members. international and internet marketing, and liaisons with government and NGOs that support the development of community-based tourism. ACTUAR CONSERVacations has generated $253,866 in income for ACTUAR since May of 2006, representing 47.8 percent of ACTUAR’s total income.
How does your program promote traveler enthusiasm, satisfaction, and engagement with the locale?
Each ACTUAR tour includes time for interactions between hosts and guests. ACTUAR members often have inspiring stories of how their tourism efforts have improved their lives and provided opportunities for their families. They tell of how their conservation consciousness has grown over the years and how they see rivers flowing again and animals coming back. They also learn about the lives of their guests. Many memorable moments of heartfelt inter-cultural exchange flow from these interactions.
ACTUAR provides a customer satisfaction survey to each of its guests. The feedback is used to improve services and to show which experiences visitors especially liked.
Describe how your innovation helps travelers and local residents better understand the value of the area’s cultural and natural heritage, and educates them on local environmental issues. How do you motivate them to act responsibly in their future travel decisions?
The experience of visiting tourism destinations where the owners are people who might be only gardeners or maids in a regular hotel, gives tourists the opportunity to hear the stories of real people that they might not hear otherwise. ACTUAR members are often leaders on the forefront of the environmental, political and economic challenges facing their communities, so visitors also learn about these issues. Once they have had the experience of community-based tourism, visitors are prone to request this kind of experience when they visit other countries.
In what ways are local residents actively involved in your innovation, including participation and community input? How has the community responded to or benefited from your approach?
ACTUAR was created by the network of community-based tourism businesses. and is governed by a board of directors made up of representatives from the community organizations that are its members. The communities are happy to have the business that ACTUAR CONSERVacations provides.
This Entry is about (Issues)
Sustainability
Is your initiative financially and organizationally sustainable? If not, what is required to make it so? What is the potential demand for your innovation?
Our innovation is precisely that ACTUAR has become financially sustainable through the sales of CONSERVacations customized itineraries and through being featured in The New Key to Costa Rica. This financial stability allows ACTUAR to be a viable interface between tourists and member communities, all of whom have their own community-owned lodges and tours.
How is your initiative currently financed? If available, provide information on your finances and organization that could help others. Please list: Annual budget, annual revenue generated, size of part-time, full-time and volunteer staff.
ACTUAR earns 47.8 percent of its income from CONSERVacations clients and another 40 percent from groups sent by European and North American travel agencies. 12% percent of ACTUAR’s income comes from internet sales and sales to Costa Rican clients.
In the last two months, ACTUAR has experienced a 60% growth rate. Its income goal for 2008 is $361,535. Its projected expenses for 2008 are $261,375. ACTUAR has a fulltime director, an accountant and two sales and operations personnel. As the North American sales representative, CONSERVacations receives a 10% commission on sales as do all other agencies who sell tour to ACTUAR member destinations.
What is your plan to expand your approach? Please indicate where/how you would like to grow or enhance your innovation, or have others do so.
It would be good if other guidebook writers in other countries would take the time to get to know the community-based destinations in the regions they write about, and help local travel agencies design customized itineraries that include those destinations. Guidebook writers can also invite people from community-based tourism projects to accompany them as the writers visit hotels in areas close to community-owned destinations. This helps the communities get to know the hotels in their area and make connections with the hotel staff members that help hotel guests figure out which tours to take.
What are the main barriers you encounter in managing, implementing, or replicating your innovation? What barriers keep your program from having greater impact?
The travel guidebook industry is dominated by a few large, well-known companies who sell lines of guidebooks to many countries. The New Key to Costa Rica became a best seller in the era of mom-and-pop bookstores and travel bookstores, before the larger companies had guidebooks to Costa Rica. Dramatic changes in the business of book distribution have greatly reduced the number of locally-owned and travel bookstores. Big box bookstores buy very limited numbers of each title, making it easy to run out of a small title like ours. It would be great if The New Key could be more effectively distributed. It would also be good if the publishers of travel guidebooks would allow their writers the time and budget to experience off-the-beaten-track destinations like ACTUAR communities. These destinations cannot be evaluated on the appearance of their installations alone. The interactions and tours take time to experience—time that most travel writers do not have.
The Story
Please provide a personal bio. Note this may be used in Changemakers' marketing material.
• BA UC Berkeley, Social Sciences and Spanish, 1969
• Author of The New Key to Costa Rica now in its 18th edition. Co-author of the Key to Costa Rica Sustainable Ecotourism Rating System 1990-1998. The New Key to Costa Rica was the first guidebook to rate lodgings on their commitment to conservation, to preserving local culture, and to fostering local economies. In 1998, Costa Rica became the first country to adopt a similar system, the Certification of Sustainable Tourism.
• Green travel planning consultant for independent travelers to Costa Rica since 1996.
• North American representative of ACTUAR
What is the origin of your innovation? Tell your story.
I inherited the guidebook, The New Key to Costa Rica, when my mother, Jean Wallace, passed away in 1982. She had published the first edition in 1976, when there were no other guidebooks to her adopted country. I am currently working on the 19th edition, to be published in October 2008 by Ulysses Press in Berkeley, California.
When the book became a best seller in 1989, I was afraid that it might be aiding and abetting the destruction of the natural wonders it was extolling. So, with co-author Anne Becher, we developed a system that rated lodgings on their commitment to conservation, to preserving local cultures and fostering local economies. As far as I know, it was the first “green rating” to be published in a guidebook. A rating system similar to ours was adopted by the Costa Rican government in 1998.
In the last ten years, the Small Grants Program of the Global Environmental Facility has funded campesino and indigenous conservation organizations in Costa Rica to build their own ecolodges and create trails and other nature tourism attractions within their forest reserves. These destinations represent what I had always wanted to see in Costa Rican tourism: locally-owned lodges that preserve natural resources, provide great adventures, and give visitors a chance to meet real Costa Rican campesino conservationists. Now I feature these lodges in my book.
The community ecolodges that had been funded by the Small Grants Program banded together in 2001 to form ACTUAR, the Costa Rican Association for Rural Tourism. I have formed an alliance with ACTUAR in which I use the knowledge and reader trust that I have developed over the 26 years that I have written and updated The New Key to Costa Rica, to familiarize tourists with the benefits of community-based tourism.
In addition to featuring ACTUAR member destinations in The New Key, ACTUAR and I have worked to develop ways in which I could help them market their unique form of tourism. The first idea was for me to lead groups to visit ACTUAR destinations. I gathered the first “pilot” group together in 2003 and led two other tours in 2004. By the end of 2004, ACTUAR started hiring excellent bilingual naturalist guide/drivers, and I started planning customized itineraries for the many readers and web browsers who contact me for travel planning advice. I always try to offer ACTUAR destinations as part of these itineraries. I am now the North American sales representative for ACTUAR and I answer their 800 number in the US. People who contacted me for travel planning advice have generated over $250,000 in income for ACTUAR over the last year and a half. That income allows ACTUAR to serve as an interface between the communities and tourists, and provides income for ACTUAR members and their families.
Please write an overview of your project. This text will appear when people scroll over the icon for your entry on the Google map located on the competition homepage.
Community ecolodges funded by the Small Grants Program in Costa Rica banded together in 2001 to form ACTUAR, the Costa Rican Association for Rural Tourism. I have formed an alliance with ACTUAR in which I use the knowledge and reader trust that I have developed over the 26 years that I have written and updated The New Key to Costa Rica, to familiarize tourists with the benefits of community-based tourism, thus generating sales for ACTUAR member businesses.
In addition to featuring ACTUAR member destinations in The New Key, ACTUAR and I have worked to develop ways in which I could help them market their unique form of tourism. In 2003 I started planning customized itineraries for the many readers and web browsers who contact me for travel planning advice. I always try to offer ACTUAR destinations as part of these itineraries. I am now the North American sales representative for ACTUAR and I answer their 800 number in the US. People who contacted me for travel planning advice have generated over $250,000 in income for ACTUAR over the last year and a half. That income allows ACTUAR to serve as an interface between the communities and tourists, and provides income for ACTUAR members and their families.
| Attachment | Size |
|---|---|
| ACTUAR director Kyra and Don Félix.jpg | 164.74 KB |
| ASEPALECO dancers.jpg | 35.78 KB |
| conversation with statues San José.jpg | 35.29 KB |
| campesinos puente colgante_2.jpg | 59.79 KB |
| Don Miguel at Los Campesinos reserve.jpg | 173.16 KB |
| Guias MANT dolphin tours, Manzanillo.jpg | 39.37 KB |
| Iliana at Isla de Chira.jpg | 97.8 KB |
| Jumbo shrimp at Costa de Pájaros.jpg | 120.5 KB |
| making cacao paste, Yorkin.jpg | 48.89 KB |
| El Copal rainforest reserve near Turrialba.jpg | 157.85 KB |
| making thatch yorkin.jpg | 84.73 KB |
| Mascaradas at El Encanto de la Piedra Blanca.jpg | 36.11 KB |
| Nacientes Palmichal Lodge.jpg | 295.2 KB |
| Waterfall, Yorkin.jpg | 69.61 KB |
| Swimming hole at Los Campesinos.jpg | 57.58 KB |
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Comments
I was reading Beatrice Blake book last summer and I was enticed about the challenges and opportunities for rural tourism in sustainable local communities in Costa Rica.
I recommended this project to a friend in Brazil, to copy her advice and replicate this kind of experience in this country that really need a conservationist practice and also a better income distribution.
As a business this kind of tourism is great for families traveling together in holidays and under a budget.
I strongly recommend Actuar project,
Oscar Ruiz,
Recife Brazil
Dear Oscar,
Thanks for spreading the word about ACTUAR in Brazil. I know there are similar projects there. It would be wonderful to do an exchange between the Brazilian and Costa Rican community-based tourism groups!
Beatrice Blake arranged a "bird watching adventure" for my wife and I for eight days in Costa Rica. Our trip involved an opportunity to have a close association with the people of Costa Rica and their daily lives. The birding was fantastic as were the opportunities to enjoy the untarnished natural surroundings of some of Costa Rica's forests and jungles. Close-up meetings with the Howler and White faced monkeys were an unexpected treat. The irridescent Blue Morpho showed its blinking flashes at numerous locations. At times the birds came so fast we couldn't keep up. Our "Birds of Costa Rica" now have many well worn pages.
Dear Nobi,
ACTUAR wouldn't exist without people like you who really want to include local culture in your nature trips. I have heard complaints about birders--that they only care about the birds and not about the people who live and work in these pristine areas. But the neat thing about ACTUAR sites is the campesinos who by nature are excellent birders and are preserving their forests and rivers so that the birds and animals will be there for their children.
Kudos to Beatrice and the good people of ACTUAR. I was one of the first ecotourists visiting Costa Rica in 1989 with my own copy of 'New Key,' the classic eco guidebook. It is great to see how the current edition highlights agrotourism and conservation efforts in Costa Rica's rural communities.
Congratulations to you, Ron, for being a great catalyzer of innovative thinking for people all over the world, in the years when these project were just ideas, not yet manifesting. We are part of a giant network of people passionate about the place where rural communities, conservation and tourism meet. And you almost singlehandedly wove that web! On the web!
I am the general manager of La Cusinga Eco Lodge, a community based and ecological preservation, a small lodge in the southern pacific of Costa Rica. TO me Beatrice Blake has been a source of inspiration and a guide. I had the honor to travel with her around Costa Rica in one of the editions of her book, and that trip was to me better than any formal education that I will ever get, her care for what she does, she is not one of those people that cut and paste her work from other places, she works hard to make sure her info is correct and she not only talks to the hotel people but has put a great deal of effort into making sure she get to know the situation of every community. When she started to work with ACTUAR to me it was perfect fit. ACTUAR is an organization that has a great leader; Kyra is to me a younger version of Beatrice… both of them have the same passion for the communities and the environment.
Beatrice Blake has helped us in so many ways; she was the first one to add us in her book, which has brought a significant increase in business. She always visit us and takes the time to see the lodge completely and spends some time given us her recommendations to improve from small details to overall strategies. She has also helped us in creating stronger relationships with ACTUAR, her believe in our project has help bring ACTUAR closer to us and to create a better business relationship.
Community based tourism has taken off in Costa Rica thanks to Beatrice and ACTUAR, they are pioneers in the area and they put their heart to doing things right! We are proof of their work. La Cusinga Eco Lodge (www.lacusingalodge.com ).
Thank you and if you need more information we will be glad to talk to you!
Geinier Guzman, MBA General Manager, La Cusinga Eco Lodge
Dear Geinier,
Thank you so much for your recognition of all that Kyra and I are trying to do. I remember the first time I saw the main building of La Cusinga rising up in its unique shape. I felt that seeing it was aligning my own spine, that there was a special energy there of love for nature in all its forms. The rocks showed me that. The beauty of rocks was brought out in every creative way possible so one could really appreciate the shapes and colors of the tiniest to the biggest. That love for nature made La Cusinga what it is today. I hope that as more and more people learn about La Cusinga you can preserve that special wildness that is so rarely found.
Beatrice Blake has been a shining light in field of sustainable tourism in Costa Rica. Beatrice was kind enough to list my tourism center since her 15th edition. She did this because of my committment to eco, rural and community based tourism. She was inspriational in in my "true" discovery of Costa Rica, and I must thank her because I have since returned to graduate school to focus on community based ecotourism. Had I never bought a copy of "New Key", who knows where I would be...All the best to ACTUAR and Beatrice.
Bobby Chappell
Hi Bobby,
It's good to hear what you are doing after so many years. I am pleased to know that the New Key helped you discover the true Costa Rica. It is definitely there, and worth being discovered. I was just in Jacó and saw the huge gray hulks of unfinished condos towering over the town. Would love to know what your thoughts are about that. As the huge gray hulks get hulkier, ACTUAR is helping its members create healthy communities out in the countryside. And it is happening. The farmers of the earth, and the huge wave of organic farmers in Costa Rica, are going to be the preservers of life in the future.
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