My last post about the misunderstood merits of Local Travel appears to have hit a positive nerve. It seems there’s a choir out there of local travellers who welcome a little preaching. Amen.

So from my fine pulpit, let me crack open the Great Explorers’ Almanac and thumb to the right page for a decidedly un-academic but nonetheless historical sermon about the kind of travel you may find meaningful.

Early interactions: flawed but frank
Until about 175 years ago, when the first travel guide publishing companies turned travel into an industry, adventurers rarely had accurate information about the places to which they were going; the Ericsons, Polos, Battutas and Magellans had no up-to-date and unbiased primers on foreign cultures. Of course, there were also few hotels and restaurants as we know them, caravanserais and the equivalent notwithstanding.

For the most part, travellers instead relied on local welcome, on long-standing traditions of hospitality and generosity.

In retrospect, we know that many early emissaries and their native hosts weren’t exactly open-minded. From their mistakes, the lingering echoes of which we hear even today, we’ve learned heaps. I therefore wouldn’t dare to defend many actions, but I believe there are vital lessons to be learned about the fundaments of their early person-to-person interactions.

Contemporary travel: safe but soulless
Today, the ubiquity of travel guides, group tours and all-inclusive resorts has convinced many in tourism that the old days are gone forever. Yearlong round-the-world excursions certainly no longer require royal patronage and swapping a briefcase for a backpack comes with far fewer risks.

Unfortunately, though, along with the improved ease and security of global travel has come a loss of connection between people. Many visitors to a country never get to know a place any better than the image projected by that country’s travel tsars because many travellers never get to meet the people who could present it differently, arguably as it really is.

So too have the economic realities been hidden from travellers. What may once have been generous in intent – opening travel to the world and the world to travel – has become avarice in practice. Revenue from tourism is not fairly distributed. By some estimates, “economic leakage” in tourism sees as much as US$80-90 of every US$100 spent on travel banked by deep pockets with little connection to those countries.

Local travel returns
Which is why there’s a new movement afoot. It’s still small but it’s gaining momentum. It’s called Local Travel. It aims to redress the soullessness of contemporary travel by bringing back the people-to-people connections of the past.

It asks you to:
* put yourself in locals’ shoes and discover what they really think;
* put yourself in the local environment to feel its power and your place within it;
* put yourself in the local mindset to think about what makes a place unique and experience it as the locals do; and
* put your money into local business to ensure that your tourism benefits the right people.

Two local-travel companies with global reach have united to give oomph to this effort. Spotted by Locals and the WHL Group will soon be announcing how you too can rediscover a misplaced spirit of adventure: Get lost! Go local.

Care to try?

This article originally appeared on the now-defunct Lonely Planet Travel Blog hosted by Yahoo!7. It followed an earlier lead-in article on the same topic.