The Travel Foundation and 4VI (formerly Tourism Vancouver Island) have agreed to a deep, multi-year partnership founded on a shared mission: to demonstrate new approaches in the global tourism industry that address the impacts and challenges of climate change and inequity.

The new partnership will see the Travel Foundation and 4VI working as extensions of each other’s teams, delivering on both global leadership and local impact. Together they will focus on solutions that enhance 4VI’s new business model, while helping to ensure tourism is a force for good on Vancouver Island — forever. They will also explore the wider challenges and opportunities the global tourism industry faces as it navigates toward a future that centres the needs of communities and the environment.

“This partnership is all about showing that innovation beyond business as usual is not just needed, but possible,” said Jeremy Sampson, CEO, The Travel Foundation. “It’s critical that we support trailblazer organizations which are ready to evolve and explore new models. By doing so we’ll prove that new approaches are beneficial, and ultimately will make the status quo obsolete.”

“When we launched 4VI as a social enterprise, we identified that the tourism industry impacts communities, in some cases to their detriment,” said Anthony Everett, President & CEO, 4VI. “This partnership is the first step toward tackling these challenges as it aligns our expertise in the region with an organization that is focused on change at a global scale.”

The partnership has specific and concrete aims under three pillars:

Innovate: The partnership will create innovative systems-based solutions to the biggest challenges in the global travel industry through the development of scalable initiatives.

Invest: The organizations will secure new sources of funding to power our efforts toward the development and scaling of these initiatives.

Impact: Partners will jointly develop tools to measure and report on initiatives and ensure that successes and lessons learned are highly visible and widely disseminated.

The two organizations will continue exploring the idea of an innovation hub that will apply solutions at the destination level. They will also co-develop a set of sustainable impact key performance indicators (KPIs) for the Vancouver Island region, and build a business case based on these new measures of success. Both organizations will continue to seek opportunities to showcase best practices.

The Travel Foundation and 4VI began discussing a formal partnership in late spring, following the announcement of 4VI as a social enterprise, a shift away from the previous model as the 60-year-old destination management organization known as Tourism Vancouver Island. Through conversations, Sampson and Everett identified the close cultural and mission alignment between the two organizations, including commitments such as the Glasgow Declaration on Climate Action in Tourism. The Travel Foundation is the UN World Tourism Organization’s (UNWTO) implementation partner for the Glasgow Declaration initiative and is currently working on a broad range of global projects, including supporting business and governments to collaborate on destination stewardship plans in destinations in North America and Europe.