The Bhutan Sustainable Tourism Society (BSTS) will serve as a platform for all tourism sector agencies to come together to support and promote the growth of sustainable tourism in the country.
This common forum will help foster collaborations and partnerships among relevant agencies or individuals in their efforts to collectively shape the future of tourism in Bhutan.
The BSTS, launched in Thimphu recently, is an initiative of Dr Karma Tshering, who is an eco-tourism specialist.
He said lack of coordination among the tourism sector associations remains a major hurdle to the development of tourism in Bhutan.
The BSTS, he said, will bring the tourism sector associations like the Association of Bhutanese Tour Operators (ABTO), Hotel and Restaurant Association of Bhutan (HRAB) and Handicrafts Association of Bhutan (HSB) under one roof, improve coordination among them, and enable them to work together and better.
The BSTS also aspires to encourage and support research on tourism. The forum would upload all researches on tourism in Bhutan.
“Through our website, we will upload all studies done on tourism in Bhutan so that any student, individual or anyone interested can just download and read the reports of tourism development in Bhutan. That’s one way of trying to help support research on tourism in Bhutan,” Dr. Karma Tshering said.
The society is also seeking to help the government come up with informed decisions.
“The role of the government is to make decisions. Sometimes, decisions could be wrong because they do not have the capacity to understand the field reality. They may not have the resources to really figure out what went wrong where,” he said.
Tourism is multi-sectoral and working in isolation, he said, is a potential threat to sustainability.
