You are the communication director of an international travel company, Top Notch Tours, which specialises in arranging overseas holidays for young people who have just graduated from university. Top Notch has its headquarters in your capital city. For many years, one of the favourite your young clients wanted to visit was Maya Bay in Thailand. This is not surprising, given the beautiful beach in this serene cove. And it has been one of Thailand’s most popular tourist destinations.
However, Maya Bay was described as the beach that was loved to death, such was the impact of tourists on the beach, coral and the waters of the cove. When they became concerned about damage to the Bay in 2018, Thai authorities closed it for tourism so it could be rehabilitated. Maya Bay re-opened for tourism in 2020.
You CEO wants advice on how Top Notch Tours can responsibly and ethically re-start its business taking university graduates to Maya Bay.
Research the issue by first reading the story at https://edition.cnn.com/
travel/article/maya-bay-thailand-recovery-c2e-spc-intl/index.html Find out more about Maya Bay and tourism with further desk research.
Then, to prepare your advice to the CEO, answer these questions:
1. What should we tell our customers about Maya Bay’s recent environmental history?
2. Should we offer advice on how customers should behave at the Bay?
3. Do we have a professional ethics requirement to explain as much as we can about the Bay’s history of environmental damage?
4. How should we tell our customers?
5. Would Top Notch’s reputation be damaged if we did not disclose what has happened to Maya Bay, and why?
6. How serious would that damage be—and how long would it take to repair that reputational damage? What would we need to do to repair the damage?