ICTP meets on the sidelines of ITB in Berlin

Three of the four founding members of the International Coalition of Tourism Partners (ICTP) – Juergen Steinmetz, Alain St.Ange, and Geoffey Lipman – met as they were together at ITB 2019 in Berlin.

Juergen Thomas Steinmetz has continuously worked in the travel and tourism industry since he was a teenager in Germany, beginning as a travel agent up through today as publisher of eTurboNews (eTN), one of the world’s most influential and most-read travel and tourism publications. He is also Chairman of ICTP.

Professor Geoffrey Lipman is the President of ICTP & Founder of Greenearth.travel. He is also the former Assistant Secretary General of UNWTO and first president of the World Travel and Tourism Council (WTTC). Professor Geoffrey Lipman is presently the Director of greenearth.travel, a global think tank network promoting green growth and travelism – strategy, innovation and funding. He is President of the International Coalition of Tourism Partners (ICTP) and Associate of Cosmos China.

Alain St.Ange is the Vice President of ICTP and the former Minister of Tourism, Civil Aviation, Ports and Marine of the Seychelles. He was formally the Seychelles People’s Progressive Front (SPPF) directly elected Member of the People’s Assembly for the La Digue Constituency (1979) and the Seychelles National Party (SNP) directly elected Member of the National Assembly for the Bel Air Constituency (2002). In 2009, he was appointed as the Director of Marketing for Seychelles, and in 2010, promoted to the position of CEO of the Seychelles Tourism Board. St.Ange was elected the first President of the Indian Ocean Vanilla Islands Regional Organization in 2012. This organization comprises the islands of La Reunion, Madagascar, Mauritius, Comoros, Mayotte, and Seychelles.

The three ICTP founders discussed many new areas of cooperation ahead of World Travel Market (WTM) Africa where they will be meeting and announcing many new avenues that are set to help tourism as the vital industry for Africa.

“For the past 5 years, ICTP has acted as a commentator on these kinds of developments with a central focus on advancing Green Growth and Quality. Created and financially supported by a small group of involved industry, media, and government friends, it has tried to be a consistent and coherent sounding board targeting destinations and their stakeholders. Thanks to the broad reach of eTurboNews and our established network contacts, we believe our views have been aired and understood. The reality is, however, the mainstream Travel and Tourism systems have been unaffected… Growth is still king. Numbers are used to support this – highlighting the very real benefits in wealth, jobs, and trade. Operational systems are aligned. Media information is channeled.

“But on the other side of the balance sheet, action has been marginal – impacts are at best acknowledged but scarcely responded to – whether it’s inadequate security, outdated entry processes, mounting taxes, and certainly there has not been any transformational environmental shifts. We have had the summits that produced the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals – a massively complex heroic roadmap for everything, with hundreds of targets and indicators – plus the 2050 Paris Climate Agreement, which is a fundamentally important lowest common denominator for existential no carbon energy shift.

“New initiatives include a Bloomberg-led coalition of 7,000 cities to respond to Climate Change, a World Bank-led Low Carbon Financing Drive, and the World Economic Forum’s “4th Industrial Revolution.” We have started an International Year of Sustainable Tourism for Development – which will focus attention on our sector, in ways that have never been seen before. Our leadership organizations UNWTO, WTTC, and IATA as well as the activities they support are preparing for these developments with an extensive list of programs and events – and if the views of those supporting genuinely transformative Sustainability and Green Growth are to be heard so must we…at the global and local levels,” said the Founding Members of ICTP.

ICTP will become a genuine partnership coalition, reaching out to other groups who believe in its Green Growth and Quality vision for the Travel and Tourism sector, engaging them to advance basic shared principles, encouraging them to participate in industry events set up to advance sustainable tourism in a coherent way, and most importantly providing them with the established information channels of eTN to air their views freely.