Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
holidays are hard to change, and this will be a factor when shifting people to
slow travel infrastructure. The authors conclude that unsustainable behaviours
need to be 'disembedded', and new behaviours embedded in a new tourism
context.
In summary, a social practices perspective confronts the 'consumption as
choice' perspective; they argue that it is inappropriate. Chappells et al (2004,
p148) suggest there is a need to:
•
rethink concepts of choice in the context of arguments about the embed-
ded,
routine
and
interconnected
basis
of
social
practices,
and
the
ideological construction of 'the consumer' and 'service options';
•
take into account the role of social and technical intermediaries and how
they reshape contexts for environmental action at different scales of
organization;
•
appreciate the extent to which infrastructural legacies continue to rein-
force or reproduce certain practices and patterns of demand;
•
recognize that consumption patterns and practices are dependent on the
organization of specific systems of service provision and how they inter-
face with other regimes of everyday life.
To date there has been limited application of a social practices perspective
within tourism (see, for example, Verbeek and Mommaas, 2007) or a travel
context (see, for example, Randles and Mander, 2009a). The focus has been
on household consumption practices, particularly energy and water use, and
how this might be reduced. Dickinson et al (2010a) have explored how
tourism structures enable and constrain different modes of travel. In general,
the existing structures of provision support car use and flying, as modes of
tourism access, to a far greater extent than slow travel modes. Physical struc-
tures have evolved in conjunction with tourism such that, for many
destinations, the obvious choice is to fly. At the same time, rules and expecta-
tions have evolved in tourism which overlook slow travel in many contexts.
There has also been policy support for aviation. For example, in the UK the
Aviation White Paper has supported aviation expansion that arguably under-
mines environmental interests (Mander and Randles, 2009). It can therefore
be difficult for people to both envisage slow travel alternatives and to engage
in slow travel should they desire to do so (Dickinson et al, 2010a).
Physical structures in tourism
As passenger transport has improved, it has opened up new tourism opportu-
nities. Indeed, the development of some tourism destinations can be directly
linked to improved access (Prideaux, 2000). At the same time, increasingly
competitive travel cost structures have enabled people to travel further and
faster, through what has been described, perhaps inappropriately, as the
democratization of air travel (Nilsson, 2009). Typically, tourism travel has
been analysed using the travel cost method; that is, travel distance reduces as
costs increase (Clawson and Knetsch, 1966; Prideaux, 2000; Steiner and
Bristow, 2000). As low-cost air carriers reduced the cost of travelling long
