Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Current business models and practices
As tourism has evolved, at least in a western context, the sector has seen fairly
consistent growth (UNWTO, 2009c), although there is no certainty that this
growth will continue as predicted. As populations have become wealthier,
tourist numbers have grown and tourists have increasingly been able to take
holidays more often, and further away, as travel costs have decreased. The
result has been a trend for regular short trips at an increasing distance.
However, in the context of climate change, the trend is going in the wrong
direction (Ceron and Dubois, 2007). Short, regular and longer-distance trips
result in greater GHG emissions. Instead, it is argued that we should be mov-
ing to longer stays, closer to home, and holidays less often (Ceron and Dubois,
2007).
Travel has also become increasingly easy to organize through web-based
intermediaries. This has led to a rise in independently organized travel where
travel and accommodation can be booked with ease. Here there is a potential
opportunity for slow travel as individuals can more easily select a preferred
travel option, whereas previously most holidays were sold as packages.
Packages, however, still have an important role to play in the sector and typ-
ical resort holiday options are difficult to organize other than through a travel
agent intermediary who tend to package holidays together with a flight. It can
be difficult to break this pattern. Travel agents offer choice but a commer-
cialized choice, essentially variations of the same thing. Tourism has also
created structures that implicitly link destinations with source markets via air
travel. It can be difficult to organize an alternative or it can be impossible to
separate out components.
Urry (2007, p278), in his discussion of the car, refers to 'locked-in insti-
tutional processes', where the car and everyday life have become so interlinked
that it can be hard to participate in mainstream social life without a car. In
tourism, too, tourists are often locked in to flights, airport transfers, car hire
or self drive. While there are other options available, these often require
extended decision-making processes to organize and there are societal norms
that direct tourists to travel in particular ways. As Randles and Mander
(2009a) conclude, it is unlikely that tourists' decision-making will shift to any
extent while the industry is locked in to air travel.
In this respect tourism is driven by powerful actors, notably the airline
industry, which sets up linkages that are difficult to break. There is a mutual
relationship between air travel and tourism to the extent that much air travel
growth would not have been possible without tourism (Høyer, 2000). In this
way patterns of tourism become institutionalized. It is also to the advantage
of the tourism sector if consumers are locked-in to particular patterns. For
instance, frequent flyer programmes aim to promote loyalty to a particular air-
line and habitual behaviour. Not only does this perpetuate air travel, but it
may also indirectly result in longer flights as customers use air miles accumu-
lated with a particular airline rather than the airline with the most direct flight
(Gössling and Nilsson, 2009). Gössling and Peeters (2007) also show how the
aviation industry endeavours to create a positive image of air travel and its
environmental performance through careful presentation of science and 'facts'.
