Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Agency (EEA, 2003) estimated that of the 100 million tourists who visit the
Alpine region of Europe, some 80 per cent travel by car, and that there has
been a considerable increase in car travel during the past decade. The impact
of the slow travel destinations, the Alpine Pearls, will be small, but it offers a
model for other destinations to follow.
Slow travel as a set of principles applied to all types of tourism
A third scenario is that the values and approaches to slow travel will be
adopted on a far wider scale than at a number of progressive destinations. The
transition to a low-carbon tourism system would encourage both markets and
suppliers to change the production and consumption of tourism, in line with
the principles set out in Chapter 4, but principally involving those outlined in
the next section. Here we propose a slow travel paradigm, drawing inspira-
tion from the conceptual development of sustainable consumption (Jackson,
2005). It offers a way of decoupling speed, distance and unacceptable levels
of environmental degradation from the tourist experience.
Some authors suggest that this mainstream approach will happen through
a process of reflexive shared mobility (thinking about the consequences
of travel on others), leading to what has been described as ecomobility
(Beckmann, 2002; Nielsen, 2005). It has the potential to deliver core elements
of the tourist experience, such as wellbeing, relaxation and social relationships
(including hedonism), without enduring the externalities of high-carbon
mobility. It is a scenario which hinges on the design of travel experience,
which is characterized by being local and pushed forward in a bottom-up
manner by transitional communities; it would be bounded within ecological
limits and offer greater social equity.
A new paradigm of slow travel
There is an argument, drawn essentially from ecology, that dominant forms or
systems are eventually replaced by sub-systems and this, in turn, strengthens
a new or modified system. However, Weaver (2009, p35) notes that the dom-
inant paradigm can often absorb selected elements of an emergent paradigm
and hence deflect consequential change. He describes this process as 'a para-
digm nudge that diabolically reinforces the incumbent worldview'. This
perspective could well happen in the transition from high- to low-carbon
tourism; the way to avoid this negative symbiosis is, among other factors,
through greater consumer power within the system (Lane, 2009). In this final
section, attention is paid to how a slow travel paradigm might form the basis
of a new tourism system. This would involve changes to the current assump-
tions, values and principles discussed throughout the topic.
The system would have a goal of achieving sustainable tourism, but it
would remain in the form of an ideal; in reality, ideals are difficult to achieve,
but they are essential in providing aims and direction. The system would be
designed as a coherent entity with tourists, as agents of consumption, inter-
acting with new structures of provision (Verbeek and Mommaas, 2008). The
processes imbued in the system would reverse the current emphasis on intense
