South Florida Sun-Sentinel Palm Beach (Sunday)
F Immersed in heritage
Travelers look to go beyond superficial interactions with Indigenous cultures to have deeper experiences
or visitors to
New Zealand, the chance to see a haka, the ceremonial Maori dance, has long been as much a part of the country’s allure as its glaciers, geysers and glowworm caves.
But increasingly, instead of merely catching a cultural performance en route to New Zealand’s Fiordland, travelers are going deeper, seeking out more immersive ways to engage with the country’s Indigenous heritage.
“We’re seeing a shift from the checkbox mentality to a hunger for deep, transformative experiences,” said Sarah Handley, general manager for North America and Europe at Tourism New Zealand, the country’s tourism marketing agency. “It’s not just about witnessing a haka.
It’s about understanding the meaning and stories behind it.”
That shift is happening not just in New Zealand but around the world, particularly as more travelers want to experience the planet’s natural wonders by way of the people and traditions indigenous to those places.
“Put simply, travelers want more out of their vacations,” said Jamie Sweeting, vice president of sustainability for the tour company G Adventures, whose itineraries include overnight accommodations ranging from an Indigenous-owned eco-lodge in the Ecuadorian Amazon to a community homestay with Indonesia’s Tengger tribe. Since the pandemic, Sweeting said, people are looking for “experiences that help them change the way they see the world.” Indigenous-owned and
-led tourism experiences — a sector of the global tourism market valued at $40 billion in 2022 and forecast to grow to $65 billion by 2032 — are increasingly the answer.
Slow travel, Maori-style
On New Zealand’s North Island, visitors hungry for culturally immersive wilderness experiences are spoiled for choice.
In the Bay of Plenty region, which has a long tradition of Maori-guided nature tourism, the Maoriowned Te Urewera Treks offers single and multiday guided wilderness walks through the Te Urewera rainforest, the first in the world to be granted legal personhood status (meaning the forest now effectively owns itself ) in recognition of the traditional Maori worldview.
An hour’s drive north, Kohutapu Lodge offers a similarly immersive alternative to some of the packaged Maori cultural experiences available in nearby Rotorua, whose dinner-and-a-show Maori evenings have helped it live up to its nickname, RotoVegas. In contrast, Kohutapu encourages guests to embrace slow travel, Maori-style, with a menu of cultural, nature-based and culinary activities highlighting the region’s Indigenous history and contemporary Maori life.
“We invite our visitors into our community, our home, our way of life — and it is very natural,” said Kohutapu Lodge co-owner Nadine Toe Toe. Travelers are “seeking more authentic and intimate experiences, out of the main centers, that are based on real life.”
Australia’s travel firms join
Across the Tasman Sea, Australia is also witnessing a surge in demand for Indigenous-led travel. Mark Olsen, CEO of Tourism Tropical North Queensland (the majority-Indigenous region that includes the Great Barrier Reef ), has observed an uptick in the number of domestic travelers participating in Indigenous experiences and the average number of nights spent doing so. Tourism Australia, the Australian government’s tourism marketing agency, has recorded a similar trend among international visitors over the past decade.
The intersection of tourism and Australia’s Indigenous peoples, the Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders, hasn’t always been so promising. In 2017, Australia made international headlines when it banned people from ascending Uluru, the iconic monolith in Australia’s Red Center that’s one of the country’s most visited tourist attractions. But the ban came only after decades of pleas from the local Aboriginal community not to climb the site, which is sacred to them.
Today, though, in addition to a growing number of Indigenousowned-and-operated tourism businesses in Australia, Olsen noted that even large tour companies are making efforts “to involve traditional owners in their tours.” Operations such as Dreamtime Dive & Snorkel, “which employs Indigenous guides who share their culture and stories during the trip to the Great Barrier Reef,” are a rebuttal to the notion that Australia’s natural sites and Aboriginal culture should be experienced separately.
A global societal trend
These developments reflect a larger trend. “Globally, there has been a push to recognize Indigenous rights and attempts are increasingly being made to right past wrongs,” said Julia Albrecht, an associate professor in the Department of Tourism at New Zealand’s University of Otago.
Such initiatives, together with the creation of Indigenous networks such as the World Indigenous Tourism Alliance and enhanced visibility through conventional marketing and social media, have created “a case of supply and demand complementing each other,” said Anna Carr, an associate professor and colleague of Albrecht’s at the University of Otago.
Like G Adventures, tour operator Intrepid Travel is expanding its Indigenous tourism portfolio, introducing Indigenous experiences in the U.S., Australia, Taiwan, Canada, Nicaragua and Costa Rica this year. A constant has been the “particularly emotive” feedback from customers, said Sara King, general manager of purpose at Intrepid.
Erin Rowan, 32, of Boulder, Colorado, chose British Columbia’s Klahoose Wilderness Resort, owned by the Klahoose First Nation, for her honeymoon in September. In Canada’s remote Desolation Sound, the resort offers “all-inclusive wildlife and cultural tours,” including Indigenous-guided grizzly bear viewing during the annual salmon run.
Rowan and her husband, Matt Allegretto, wanted a trip “that felt intentional and in line with our values,” and after coming across Klahoose Wilderness Resort “on TikTok, of all places,” she said, “a light bulb went off.”
“We felt welcomed into a world that is completely different from our day-today,” Rowan said, adding that she and Allegretto hope to make Indigenousled experiences “a major throughline of our future travels.”