In late May 2019, the 41st annual ISO/COPOLCO Plenary meeting was held in Harare, Zimbabwe. One of the representatives of the Standards Council of Canada was EBI’s vice-president Joël Marier who presented on the need for a new international standard on Managing Risk/Incidents for Youth on Organized School Trips. The project to develop a standard was unanimously endorsed by representatives of the 41 countries in attendance
What is ISO/COPOLCO? ISO (the International Organization for Standardization) is a worldwide federation of national standards bodies (ISO member bodies). The work of preparing International Standards is normally carried out through ISO technical committees. Each member body interested in a subject for which a technical committee has been established has the right to be represented on that committee. International organizations, governmental and non-governmental, in liaison with ISO, also take part in the work. One of the international committees is ISO/COPOLCO, which deals with consumer policies.
According to the UNWTO, international arrivals have grown from 0.52 billion in 1995 steadily to 1.34 billion in 2017. The Secretary-General of the World Tourism Organization (UNWTO) estimated 20% of world travellers in 2010 were young travellers. The Executive Committee Chair of WYSE Travel Confederation has stated that in 2010, young travellers generated 165 billion dollars (USD) toward global tourism receipts. But there is very little agreement on how to ensure the safety for school trips and a new ISO standard could save lives.
To take a concrete example: in Canada in 2017 a school trip to Algonquin Provincial Park in Ontario resulted in the drowning death of a high school student, Jeremiah Parry. After investigation, in 2018 the supervising teacher was charged with criminal negligence and the case is pending. This sort of tragedy could be avoided altogether with a stronger risk management approach.
EBI has taken the initiative of promoting a new ISO standard as a solution, based on our expertise in risk management in the tourism sector.
Next steps: the national standards bureaus of ISO/COPOLCO will be asked to vote later this year on the terms of reference of the international workgroup that will be charged to develop this new ISO standard, a process that could take two to three years
If you have any questions or want to know more about the process, please contact us at: joel.marier@ebiconsulting.ca
