The Moralisation of Tourism

Sun, Sand... and Saving the World?

Jim Butcher

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• Print ISBN: 9780415296557
• eBook ISBN: 9781134435081
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Scienze fisiche
• Subtopic: Geografia

Tourism is no longer an innocent pleasure. It has been interpreted and reinterpreted as an activity which is ultimately damaging to receiving cultures and the environment. 'New' forms of tourism, such as ecotourism, alternative tourism, community tourism and ethical tourism, have been presented as morally superior alternatives to the package holiday, yet ironically, even advocates of these new, ethical tourism brands are increasingly subject to criticisms, not dissimilar to those they themselves level against package holidays.

Using a host of international examples from the industry, the media and non-governmental organisations, this intriguing book examines what the advocates of 'new tourism' see as being wrong with mass tourism, looks critically at the claims made for the new alternatives and makes a case for guilt-free holidays.

The only book on the market to provide a sustained critique of conventional mass tourism's own critics, Butcher offers a counterpoint to the moral rhetoric steadily turning travellers into guilty tourists.

1 Mass Tourism and the New Moral Tourist

• New: ‘Markedly different from what was before Changed, especially for the better Up-to-date; fashionable’¹
• Moral: ‘Concerned with goodness or badness of character’²
• Mass: ‘an aggregate in which individuality is lost’³

This chapter identifies and outlines a New Moral Tourism – tourism that is justified less in terms of the desires of the consumer and more from the perspective of its perceived benign influence on the natural world and on the culture of the host. This ‘tourism with a mission’ is explored and contextualised. The chapter gives an overview of the moralisation of tourism, and identifies the main themes of the succeeding chapters.

Mass Tourism – the problem

Modern tourism could be said to have emerged with modern industrial society in the nineteenth century. In this century, industrialisation both spawned the means to travel – initially the railways – and created a growing market amongst the new industrial and professional classes, and amongst the working class, the masses, too. Thomas Cook pioneered leisure travel amongst the middle and working classes in this century. He and his son, John Mason Cook (whose initials JMC are now a brand of Thomas Cook tour operations), took an increasingly broad spectrum of the population to ever more distant destinations. Over the last century and a half the achievement of the industry has been nothing less than the democratisation of leisure travel, from the few deemed worthy, and wealthy enough to partake, to an everyday activity for the majority in developed societies.

The growth of the tourism industry has been driven by economic development. Greater affluence has opened up the possibility to travel for leisure to greater numbers of people. Technical progress – notably the car and air travel – has consistently enabled greater speed, comfort and scope for leisure travellers. Whereas even as recently as forty years ago back-to-back charters were a new innovation, initially confusing to hoteliers and customers, today they are the staple of the big tour operators. The UK’s ‘big four’, Thomas Cook, Airtours, First Choice and Thomson (now part of TUI, the first European-wide package holiday brand, owned by German conglomerate Pressaug) dominate a market that takes annually some thirty-five million British tourists abroad for their holidays. By supplying en masse, such companies have lowered the real cost of holidays, and alongside growing incomes, this has contributed to what Vladimir Raitz, founder of Horizon holidays (the first post-war package holiday company to develop charter flight-based packages) refers to as the package holiday revolution. This growth has been mirrored worldwide, with today some 700 million travelling internationally per year for no other reason than leisure. It is estimated that by 2020, there will be some 1.6 billion international tourists.

Flight to the Sun, written by Raitz, and co-authored by travel expert Roger Bray, reflects on the optimism of the post-war boom in tourism. For travel pioneer Raitz, Wordsworth’s often quoted lines captured the mood:

• Bliss it was in that dawn to be alive
• But to be young was very heaven.⁴

This optimism was shared by the growing number of customers, for whom a shrinking world represented the opportunity to enjoy snow-capped mountains and sun-soaked beaches.

Tourism has become big business – by some measures the biggest. It employs 74 million people directly, with tourism-related activities estimated to provide some 200 million jobs. It provides the largest source of export earnings for countries as diverse as Spain and Barbados. By 2020 it is predicted that tourism expenditure will top US$ 2 trillion, or US$ 5 billion per day. The industry’s contribution to global wealth, measured from Gross National Products, is estimated to be 4 per cent directly and 11 per cent including indirect effects.⁵ It has also enjoyed consistent growth in recent decades, decades in which some countries have experienced relative decline in some of their traditional industries. Indeed, attracting tourists has increasingly become a preoccupation of politicians and development planners, evidenced by the rise of ‘place marketing’ and the intense competition to attract sporting and cultural events, World Heritage Status, City of Culture status and a host of other events and designations that can assist in improving a country’s share of international tourism receipts.

In economic terms, then, Mass Tourism seems self-evidently vitally important. However, it is increasingly discussed less as an economic phenomenon linked to the creation of jobs and investment, or indeed simply as enjoyment, adventure and innocent fun. Rather tourism has increasingly become discussed as a cultural and environmental phenomenon, and more often than not as fraught and destructive. In this respect the figures for tourism’s growth are more likely to be raised in the context of an angst-ridden discussion of its harmful effects than in the celebratory tones characteristic of Thomas Cook 150 years ago, or Vladimir Raitz forty years ago. Wariness rather than celebration typically accompanies accounts of the growth of travel for leisure. It is this emphasis on tourism as a cultural and environmental problem that informs the moralisation of tourism.

This in turn is manifested in a constant denigration of mass package tourism and mass package tourists amongst those for whom such things are deemed unethical. For some, post-war tourism is like Frankenstein’s (or perhaps Thomas Cook’s) monster, having seemingly run out of control, with dire consequences. The optimism of Raitz, and the association of tourism with innocence, fun and adventure, have been challenged by a mood of pessimism and a sense that moral regulation of pleasure-seeking is necessary in order to preserve environmental and cultural diversity.

The moralisation of tourism involves two mutually reinforcing notions. First, Mass Tourism is deemed to have wrought damage to the environment and to the cultures exposed to it, and hence new types of tourism are proposed that are deemed benign to the environment and benevolent towards other cultures. Second, this ethical tourism is deemed to be better for tourists, too – more enlightening, encouraging respect for other ways of life and a critical reflection on the tourist’s own developed society. There are a plethora of terms that academics and those in the industry have applied to this more moral tourism such as ethical tourism, alternative tourism, ecotourism and responsible tourism. Perhaps the term that covers them all, and helps to identify what is distinctive about them taken together, is that coined by industry specialist Ahluwalia Poon – ‘New Tourism’.⁶ She argues that New Tourism is both an appeal to a certain sense of enlightenment about one’s effect on others, and an environmental imperative.

New Tourism – the solution

Poon outlined the marketing aspects of New Tourism thus: the holiday must be flexible and must be able to be purchased at prices that are competitive with mass-produced holidays; holidays are not simply aiming at economies of scale, but will be tailored to individual wants; unlike Mass Tourism, production will be driven by the wants of consumers; mass-marketing is no longer the dominant ethos – holidays will be marketed differentially to different needs, incomes, time constraints and travel interests; the holiday is consumed on a large scale by more experienced travellers, more educated, more destination oriented, more independent, more flexible and more green; consumers of New Tourism consider the environment and culture of the destinations they visit to be a key part of the holiday experience.⁷

Poon clearly considers the New Tourist to be the ‘thinking tourist’ – more educated, independent of mind and aware. Also, from this definition New Tourism could be regarded as post-fordist tourism – tourism that moves away from a standard, mass-produced product towards a flexible, individually tailored one, led by individual demands rather than a homogenous mass market.

Poon’s identification of post-Fordist production in holidays has resonance. She quotes the marketing director of British Airways who claims we are seeing ‘the end of mass-marketing in the travel business… we are going to be much more sophisticated in the way we segment our market’.⁸ Large tour operators have adapted accordingly. The big four have bought smaller, niche operators to tap into the new markets. In addition, despite the squeeze on so many medium sized tour operators, there has been a large growth in small, specialised operators, claiming to cater for the specific needs of their target market. These operators are often keen to identify with a more moral notion of tourism in their marketing and advertising.

But for Poon, and for many other advocates of New Tourism, it is far more than dry marketing for ‘thinking tourists’ – it is an ethical imperative; it is ethical tourism. As such it is not simply suggested as an option for prospective tourists, but is advocated as a solution to problems caused by Mass Tourism. Advocacy, by NGOs, campaigns and New Tourism oriented tour operators, is a key feature of New Tourism.

For Poon: ‘The tourism industry is in crisis […] a crisis of mass tourism that has brought social, cultural, economic and environmental havoc in its wake, and it is mass tourism practices that must be radically changed to bring in the new.’⁹ The charge that Mass Tourism has had a generally destructive impact on host societies is widely asserted in the context of this advocacy. However, advocates of New Tourism argue that there is a growing market of more ethical tourists who are rejecting mass-produced, homogenous tourism products in favour of tailored holidays that are kinder to the environment and benign to the host culture. These people perhaps constitute a new school of ‘ethical’ tourism – the New Moral Tourism. The key features of their moralised conception of leisure travel are a search for enlightenment in other places, and a desire to preserve these places in the name of cultural diversity and environmental conservation.

New Moral Tourism – a pervasive agenda

New Moral Tourism is evidenced and expressed in a number of different types of organisation: governments; companies; and a variety of non-governmental organisations. It is also influential within both popular and academic discussions of contemporary tourism. As such, it is a pervasive agenda.

The commitment of global government to reforming the tourism industry, and the tourist, was formalised through the documents that came out of the 1992 United Nations Earth Summit in Rio. Agenda 21 documentation for the tourism industry asserts that, ‘the travel and tourism industry has a vested interest in protecting the natural and cultural resources which are the core of its business’.¹⁰ Elsewhere, the document argues that: ‘Travel and Tourism should assist people in leading healthy and productive lives in harmony with nature’, the industry should ‘contribute to the conservation, protection and restoration of the earth’s ecosystem’, ‘environmental protection should constitute an integral part of the tourism development process’ and ‘tourism development should recognise and support the identity, culture and interests of indigenous peoples’.¹¹ Agenda 21 for the Travel and Tourism Industry also reflects an impulse for education of tourists. It suggests that publicity for the tourist should promote education for ethical tourism, including in-flight videos, magazine articles, and advice on sick bags.

Whilst the efficacy of Agenda 21 is much debated by grass roots environmentalists, this perspective on tourism has been widely taken up by governments and NGOs. Aid agencies around the world have increasingly financed NGOs engaged in ethical tourism development, seeking to generate a rural development sensitive to the natural environment and culture of recipient communities. In the UK the Department for International Development pioneer ‘pro-poor’ tourism as a means of relieving rural poverty in the Third World. They also support schemes to enlighten prospective tourists, for example, through a recent schools video that portrays package tourists in the most unflattering light.¹² USAID, the aid arm of the United States government, also back up the ethical claims of ecotourism by funding it as a means of generating limited development through ecotourism revenues alongside conservation of the natural environment in the Third World. Promoting an appreciation of the value of conservation for the prospective tourist and their hosts are key aims too.

A host of other quasi-governmental organisations concerned with the environment have also developed a commitment to ‘sensitive’, sustainable tourism development over the last ten to fifteen years. Their definitions of sustainable tourism are general, but often suggest a preservationist emphasis with regard to the environment and culture. For example, the Federation of Nature and National Parks in Europe, in their influential publication Loving Them to Death?, define sustainable tourism as an activity which ‘maintains the environmental, social and economic integrity and well-being of natural, built and cultural resources in perpetuity’ (my italics).¹³ This begs the question, central to this critique of tourism’s critics, that if they propose to protect nature from the excesses of development, how do they address the poverty and inequality arising from a dearth of development in many parts of the world? Maintaining a society’s relationship to its natural environment ‘in perpetuity’ is hardly likely to tackle this.

Opposition to the perceived excesses of Mass Tourism has been evident in recent years, too, amongst religious and cultural organisations. One event often considered to mark the advent of the global critique of tourism was a conference held in Manila in 1980, convened by a group of religious leaders from developing countries worried about the impact of tourism on local cultures. The ‘Manila Statement’ boldly asserted that, ‘tourism does more harm than good to people and societies in the third world’.¹⁴ The conference also founded the Ecumenical Coalition on Third World Tourism, which has remained highly critical of the tourism industry. A former executive director of the coalition, Koson Srisang, argues that tourism:

does not benefit the majority of people. Instead it exploits them, pollutes the environment, destroys the ecosystem, bastardises the culture, robs people of their traditional values and ways of life and subjugates women and children in the abject slavery of prostitution… [It] epitomises the present unjust world economic order where the few who control wealth and power dictate the terms.¹⁵

Ecumenical antipathy towards tourism has long been a common theme. The clergy in Britain were vocal in their criticism of the wanton behaviour of early package tourists in the mid-nineteenth century. The Catholic church in Franco’s Spain worried about the influence of decadent tourists on Spaniards. Even the Pope recently condemned tourism as ‘a kind of subculture that degrades both the tourists and the host community’.¹⁶ However, the criticisms of modern tourism that hold sway are not those seen as conservative and religious, but rather those presented as radical and secular; they are criticisms expressed through a defence of culture and nature. Hence rather than religious organisations, it tends to be conservation NGOs, campaigns, radical academics and journalists who are in the forefront of criticising Mass Tourism and proposing new, ‘ethical’ alternatives.

There is a diverse range of NGOs involved in the promotion of what they perceive to be ethical tourism. Global conservation NGOs such as the World Wide Fund For Nature (WWF), the Audubon Society and Conservation International increasingly view ecotourism as a means of winning support, both amongst local populations and more widely, for conservation aims. Ecotourism is at the cutting edge of conservation initiatives as it seems to proffer opportunities for people to benefit from preserving thei...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• The Moralisation of Tourism
• Contemporary Geographies of Leisure, Tourism and Mobility
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Mass Tourism and the New Moral Tourist
• 2 What’s New? Traveller, Tourist and the Moral Debate
• 3 The Host Fragile Places, Fragile People?
• 4 Tourists Too Much freedom?
• 5 The Cultural Sensibilities of the New Moral Tourist
• 6 Travelling for a Change Global Culture and the Ethical Tourist
• 7 New Moral Tourism, the Third World and Development
• Postscript Re-Presenting Tourism
• Notes
• Select Bibliography