TOURISM BECOMES AN INDUSTRY - Overbooked: The Exploding Business of Travel and Tourism - page 13

at Angkor that the rare temples are sinking because the surrounding water table is being
drained by hundreds of new tourist hotels. In Venice, with a native population of less than
60,000, over 20 million tourists descend on the city every year, an onslaught that is push-
ing the locals out of their homes and emptying the city of essentials like neighborhood
greengrocers and bakeries.
In the globalized economy—with cheap transportation, the Internet and open bor-
ders—travel has become the ultimate twenty-first-century industry, which means these
problems are not going away.
• • •
It is difficult to find issues of travel and tourism debated in public. Historians, political
scientists and economists routinely omit tourism from studies about how the world works.
Foreign policy journals and experts rarely touch the subject.
Normally the media would ask routine questions about whether the right to travel also
included the responsibility to respect a country, its environment, people and culture. But
my profession often gives travel and tourism a pass. Unlike the oil industry, which is scru-
tinized at all levels, travel writing has become an extension of the industry. With few ex-
ceptions, travel writing and travel sections share the singular goal of helping consumers
spend their money pursuing the dream of a perfect trip. They seldom write critical reviews;
only articles about what to do and what to buy and how to experience a destination. This
“feel-good” approach is rare even in lifestyle journalism, which is where to find the travel
sections. Other lifestyle or back-of-the-book journalists thrive on critical reviews, explain-
ing how and why they judge movies as great or miserable; whether the food at a restaurant
is mediocre or exquisite; and describing music concerts as electric or boring. Imagine if
movie reviewers only discussed their favorite films, if restaurant critics only wrote about
their preferred haunts and music critics never wrote a scathing review of a badly performed
opera. That is what travel writing has become.
As unsettling, many travel writers accept free transportation, lodging, food and enter-
tainment from the very destinations they write about. That is forbidden in nearly every
other form of journalism. This adds up to a largely pliant media that has become an ex-
tension of the industry it is supposedly covering, blocking the public from seeing both the
larger picture and the problems inherent in any industry, and preventing travel and tour-
ism from being taken seriously.
It wasn't always this way. Modern travel writing took root in the late nineteenth cen-
tury—the age of ocean liners and trains—when writers took it for granted that travel meant
adventure, not comfort, and that anyone making a month-long trip overseas wanted to
dive into foreign lands and cultures. In those days writers rarely specialized in travel alone.
They saw themselves as the gatekeepers to the world, noting all that was miserable as well