Who Ir. Wouter de Waal, director of the VVV Texel
Why Mr. de Waal can be seen as a representative of the Texels leisure industry and has much knowledge about local tourism and therefore proberly about the lifestyles of tourists
What The aim of the interview is to verify the assumptions made in the YUPTA model, to explore possibilities to reach the goal of a self-sufficient Texel 2065 and the opinion of the interviewee about sustainability.
Introduction
Wouter (W) has been closely related to the initaitives of Texel Duurzaam 2020. He supports this initiatives but thinks that after the municipality counsil had approved with this sustainability goal, no real action was taken to reach these goals. The momentum for a real transition is now lost.
- The booklet Planet Texel is one of the first products and gives an inspiring way of how to reach a sustainable Texel by 2020, however not much real action is undertaken. Partly W thinks this is due the strict regulations of the province regarding renewable energy production.
- Still there are some initiatives ie the Urgenda projects but he is unaware of the current position of these initiatives.
Tourism
- There is no such thing as Eco-tourism on Texel. There are no ‘Ecolodges’ or something like that.
- Marketing research underlines that there is no need for this sort of tourism on Texel.
- W stated that tourists in their decision-making process to pick a holiday-location don’t choose to go to Texel for its sustainable character. He states that tourists primarily go on a holiday to spend time together. The place / location is of secondary concern. Therefore, Texel is just a stage to which people can travel in order to be together away-from-home.
- The TESO plays an important part in setting the stage to be away-from-home. It really stresses the fact of being ‘disconnected’ to the mainland.
- Tourism is a complicated product wit a lot of stakeholders involved:
o Municipality
o TESO
o Water board
o (Leisure) Entrepreneurs
o Locals
- Texel distinct itself from other locations because it is:
o Easily accessible
o Offers high number of facilities (more then ie Terschelling or Vlieland)
o Has a high ecological value.
- The tourist-capacity of Texel is limited by law (# of beds).
- The leisure-entrepreneurs want to know first: what’s in it for me? They are aware of the need for sustainability measures but only apply them when for instance new houses have to be build. They do innovate but not proactively but reactively.
- According W there are even no real sustainable leisure examples known in the complete Netherlands.
Environment
- Tourist do come to Texel for the nature. Therefore, being more conscious to the environment is an important value for them but is more or less an ‘understream value’.
- If leisure entrepreneurs do not take this value into account they will lose market share, however, it does not work the other way around W thinks.
- Basically the Tourist follows the environmental-way-of live what is supplied by the entrepreneurs. It is supply-push instead of demand-pull.
- In 2005 there was an initiative of the Milieu-barometer, which was a (national) reward for sustainable entrepreneurship. Some organisations on Texel got this label, however there is not paid much attention to it recently.
Implications for the sub-system:
- Our assessment of the tourist being dependent on the leisure entrepreneur is in general true. This means that change in the (unconscious) behaviour of tourist is reached by the supply-side of the goods and services that are offered on the island.