A Day To Celebrate

UNWTO-daily

Get ready to party. World Tourism Day (WTD) 2014 will celebrate the theme of Tourism and Community Development as it highlights tourism’s ability to empower people and to provide them with skills to change their lives and that of their communities.

WTD 2014 is a major opportunity to raise awareness of how tourism can be an engine for community development, one of the building blocks of a more sustainable future for all. The official WTD 2014 celebrations will take place in Guadalajara, Mexico, on Sept. 27, 2014.

Taleb Rifai, UNWTO Secretary-General, observed: “Tourism is a people-based economic activity built on social interaction, and as such can only prosper if it engages the local population by contributing to social values such as participation, education and enhanced local governance. At the same time, there can be no real tourism development if such development damages in any way the values and the culture of host communities or if the socio-economic benefits generated by the tourism sector do not trickle down to the community level.”

For more on World Tourism Day 2014, go to http://wtd.unwto.org .