The virtual seminar was recorded and the link to that can be found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S6CY12SqP_4

On Tuesday the 26th of May, I attended a live virtual seminar held by Bill Bensley as he spoke through his most recent hotel project Wild World, the project focuses on spreading awareness of animal welfare and flips the idea of a conventional zoo but incorporating aspects of a safari as has been coined in the media as a “human zoo”. Bensley describes his work as with a cause, with a meaning. He believes that in today’s age of global issues, every hotel or project in the tourism industry must be driver with some sort of cause behind it. He focuses mainly on environmental and animal wellbeing, with a slight lack or is of the social aspects of sustainability. And interesting point he made was that COVID 19 he hoped, would act as a catalysts for the realisation of how we treat our wildlife and how that will come to impact us.

He explained how a large part of generating interest in sustainable practises was in the delivery to the public, the marketing and presentation of project that uses sustainable practises is just as important as the execution. He stated that “If you can get the right person talking about the right thing – you can make a snail sound as interesting as a tiger jumping through a hoop”.

Some important factors he described in sustainable development included:

• Protection of native vegetation
• Inclusion of experts in the field for example agricultural specialist and zoologist.
• Hotel operators must adapt to sustainable products example – inclusion of vegetarian restaurants.

Strategies that he described to use in his work are:

• Be off grid of electricity – solar panel fields
• conservation of water above ground and under ground
• Plans for room – key thing is all of them have light from both sides so you don’t need to turn on any lights during the day
• Open windows in the front open in the back to let in wind so no need for ac
• Very minimal amount of energy
• Maintaining habit – move away from the need to create special environment that will put animals at risk because you want the “shock factor”
• The mind set of “if I don’t have the best of the best or the most interesting thing or most shocking, people won’t come” this is not the case and this is dangerous because this is when people start to over compensate and destroy the habits around them

Attending the seminar allowed for me to better understand the ways in which sustainable tourism can be implemented, it was very interesting perspective as Bill Bensley is a big stake holder in the architecture world and has been exploring innovated ways to bring sustainability to the public for many years. My thinking was shifted from the mind set of sustainability will always be left in the showdown of the elite hotel world, to theree are ways to bring sustainable practises into the forefront of the tourism industry.