Everyone has a good travel story, but reimagining the collective travel story and its far-reaching consequences can be complex work. Vaila Erin Bhaumick speaks to Debbie Clarke and Josie Major of the GOOD Awaits podcast to find out how storytelling around responsible travel is offering inspiration and motivation for the industry.

Debbie Clarke of New Zealand Awaits (a tour company for LGBTQ+ travellers) and Josie Major of GOOD Travel (a travel company striving for positive environmental, social and economic outcomes) started the GOOD Awaits podcast together. They first met at a tourism design challenge event in 2020 and connected straight away. Both grew up in rural areas in New Zealand with community firmly at the heart, and both developed a passion for travel, which led them to their current careers.

Their career choice comes from the realisation that the time of carefree and often thoughtless travel has long since been over. “Travel has such power to open our minds, get us out of our comfort zones and gain a deeper understanding of others in the world,” Debbie tells ALHAUS.

She also sees travel as “a powerful means of understanding our connectedness, which is so desperately needed right now”. She adds, “We also have to begin to understand that travel is a privilege and with that comes responsibility. Gone are the days of jumping on a plane to go for our own self-gratification.”

It is, however, challenging to have these conversations about the industry. Responsible travel is something of a paradox in our VUCA (Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, Ambiguous) world. The benefits for the traveller are infinite, as any traveller will tell you, and Debbie describes the transformational quality of travel and its ability to bring about deep-cultural exchange with powerful adjectives. But how does the industry move forward? Josie outlines her vision for the future of tourism, hoping that its purpose will be “to serve the regeneration of communities and of other sectors—that it is the connector and storyteller and host for places, or for industries such as food systems, education, etc.”

The big question for many in the industry is ‘How do we travel responsibly in practice?’ The GOOD Awaits podcast aims to answer that question by telling stories. In the podcast Josie and Debbie admit that they didn’t initially see themselves as storytellers, but that is what they are. Josie shares some insights on the evolution of the podcast: “GOOD Awaits is about storytelling. We saw a need to share the stories of people doing regenerative work in tourism.” 

People always ask them about a regenerative approach to tourism and say, ‘Yeah that sounds great, but how do I do that in my business? Where do I start? What does it look like?’ “We don’t think a regenerative approach can have a checklist or approach that applies to everyone. What we can do is share the stories of people doing amazing work to provide examples and inspiration for others on the journey,” she says.

Stories matter, and GOOD Awaits tells stories that portray the host community as protagonist rather than in a supporting role. Josie shares a “penny-drop moment” from season 1 in which Michelle Holliday, author of The Age of Thrivability, explains that the industry is asking for “community wellbeing to be the primary deliverable for tourism”. 

The comment has influenced the direction GOOD Awaits is taking in season 2 and has brought to light the stories that need to be told. This realisation that tourism must contribute to lifting a community up—which is at the heart of both the GOOD Travel and New Zealand Awaits philosophies and has led to the design of their new tour—is what will define the industry’s evolution.

The storytelling in the GOOD Awaits podcast is a valuable part of the industry’s hope for a better future. Only by having these conversations that dig deep into the whys and hows, that help us find solutions, can we create a narrative for change. The new season’s first episode inspired Debbie and Josie in their quest for a new story: “Alina Siegfried [an author, storyteller, narrative strategist, social innovator, systems change advocate, and spoken word artist based in Wellington, New Zealand] said to us ‘We can’t have a different future if we can’t imagine it first.’ We see our role as helping our sector to imagine this different future through storytelling and education.”