 I think the most important thing for communities and tourism is that it enables communities to think of a different way of providing income and it provides a secondary income and this enables communities to invest in infrastructure that they might not otherwise have had, so often it could be solar energy, so bringing power into communities, improving water supply and sanitation, infrastructure such as roads and often you find when communities become involved in tourism the local municipal government helps them with those investment and those infrastructure. It also helps communities, particularly the women in communities to have a voice, very often it's the women in the communities who are supporting the homestays or accommodation for the travellers and through interaction with our travellers it enables women to really feel empowered. So we see a real transition that occurs in communities through tourism as the women become more active. The other thing that happens with tourism in communities is that it really has a lot of secondary benefits, so for example one of the stories of women in Myanmar in our community tourism project we have there we're talking about is initially we as a business help the women to understand around food preparation and hygiene needs and we don't as travellers like to have MSG in our food and so the women started to also take some of those practices in the way that they prepared their food around hygiene and taking MSG out of their food in their homes as well and so that started to have a health benefit for them in their own homes so it's really interesting that you see these secondary benefits similarly in a lot of the community based tourism projects we have whilst not everyone in the community can be employed directly in supporting tourism we often create a community fund and so the whole community is able to decide how to use that fund so again in this project in Myanmar three of the communities decided to save the money over a two-year period and it meant that they eventually had enough funds to match what was required by the government to bring electricity into their villages so the three villages now have electricity and the good thing about that is that now our travellers have hot water as well in their showers whereas previously they just had a Mandy style shower and water would be boiled similarly it might be that enables them to bring in investment into things like biogas for example which also helps conserve the environment because it takes away either the use of kerosene or wood fires so again other health benefits that come through that building the accommodation or the infrastructure can be fast but actually building the capacity of the community to become an enterprise can take a long time building community based tourism can take up to two or three years before a community is actually self-sufficient and running their own business I think community tourism isn't a new thing you know companies like ourselves have been staying in communities for a really long time other companies in Africa there's some amazing companies such as wilderness safaris who have built lodges and the community has been employed in those lodges and in some cases over time the community has taken full ownership of those lodges so there's all sorts of different models of community service based tourism I think the challenge now is how do we take a sustainable model and actually implement that in more places in the world because I think both government and authorities particularly in areas where you've got amazing natural resources recognize that it's a great way of conserving the environment by providing an income for local communities that goes hand in hand with protecting that environment but actually implementing it and building a structure in different parts of the world where we need to do this is not a fast job so it's really requires a lot of partnership often it requires the partnership of a NGO that's been working in a community for a while because it's really important that the community is well consulted and involved in the project from the beginning it often requires funding from external outside and it often requires expertise and tourism from consultants or businesses like ourselves and more than anything else it has to be interesting enough for tourists to want to go there so getting all those things working in harmony to really create a well run viable and sustainable over the long term ecotourism project takes a lot of partnership work and so it takes a lot of planning I think that there's huge opportunity through ecotourism to also educate travelers and the world about the importance of preserving the world's great heritage and national parks and forests but we need to be careful about how we go about that it's not necessarily the kind of thing that you can do where you have large numbers of people coming into communities because potentially that can be very damaging to local culture as well so we just have to find it's a delicate balance