Manic Monday | What's your IMPACT?

By definition, the word IMPACT means "to have a strong effect on someone or something". Without question, Tourism does just that. It has a major impact on our residents, communities, wildlife, watershed, lands, and ecosystems.

Developed well, it can provide visitors and locals alike with a lifetime of memories, heightened knowledge of history and culture, unleash great emotion and can effect transformative change. Left unchecked, it can do all this but at great cost and great damage.

Our Association’s steadfast strategic journey into responsible and sustainable tourism development and delivery was undertaken to ensure that there was a focus on growing a healthy visitor economy for the long term. One that recognizes the tremendous economic opportunity and benefits that tourism brings to an area, coupled with an appreciation of the potential negative impacts.

This week, we gather as a Tourism Industry in Victoria to continue the dialogue on this critical topic.  As we watch the growing tourism demand worldwide it is more important than ever to take steps to manage our industry properly.  The annual IMPACT conference has been designed to help us do this.  Bringing speakers from around the globe and providing a forum for discussions that can and will help us make important industry decisions, decisions that will IMPACT us all well into the future.

I am honoured to be speaking - and TOTA is pleased to be a sponsor - at this year’s IMPACT event and I look forward to meeting with many colleagues.

Glenn Mandziuk, TOTA President & CEO