Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
of marketing communications as a process of 'discursive struggle' (Livesey 2001) between various
tourism agents represented in the discourse. In the remainder of this chapter we highlight two
axial relationships that might prove fruitful for tourism researchers with critical research agendas:
relations of power between
tourists
-
markets
and between
tourists
-
others
.
Power in tourist-market relations
Of the research that has been undertaken in this area, there has tended to be a focus upon how
tourism constrains
others
, principally local people, guides and the environment. This section
considers the less frequently debated power relations to which the tourist is subjected. For, whilst
Cheong and Miller (2000: 371) suggest power relations are 'omnipresent in a tripartite system of
tourists, locals, and brokers', they note that the tourist is 'frequently vulnerable'
.
To what, though,
are they vulnerable and how does a discursive perspective on marketing communications help
illuminate this 'vulnerability'? In the context of the ideas forwarded in this chapter, two key,
connected points can be illustrated here. Firstly, tourists themselves can be subjected to power
relations, which though varied in source, often stem from the market and potentiate certain
limiting effects on them. Secondly, in the process of constituting tourism knowledge, the
discourse of marketing communications both contributes to and obscures these constraints.
As a social practice tourism is uniquely promoted as a form of freedom. Yet you only have
to sit in a crowded airport, watch an episode of
Holidays from Hell
or read a travel magazine
deriding the package tourist, locked away in their mainstream hotel, enclave or tour bus, to
recognise that tourism is also a potentially constraining activity. Scholarly research is beginning
to reveal a paradox between the liberatory, transcendental properties presented within the
tourism view (gaze) and the potentially incarcerating and alienating realities hidden within
(Bruner 1991; Caruana
et al
. 2008). An interesting case in point is the 'Independent Traveller'.
As an icon of travel heroism, autonomy and adventure, this segment of the tourism market is
often promoted as being one of the most liberating, least institutionalized, forms of tourism.
A whole range of travel texts from postcards to diaries to billboards and certainly guidebooks
(e.g.
Rough Guide
,
Lonely Planet
,
Fodors
,
Footprints
) will attest to this. However, whilst texts
promoting this type of tourism often frame Independence in terms of freedom from institutional
environments such as home, work and/or classically, from commercial tourists, they may conceal
new forms of coercion for the tourist, 'Though the backpackers repeatedly express a desire to
distance themselves from fellow Israelis and from state-related organizations, they routinely
follow similar itineraries during the trip, fi nd themselves in, or seek, the company of other
Israelis, and spend a good deal of their time in Israeli “enclaves”' (Noy 2004: 81).
Whilst 'independent travel' - like other forms - is promoted as a practice about shaking off
institutional constraints, this suggests the mere substitution of one set of institutional constraints
for another. It is not uncommon, according to Huxley (2005), to fi nd backpackers hanging out
in 'backpacker ghettos' reproducing backpacker culture, visiting the same places, doing the same
things and sharing the same commoditized cultural stories about their 'off-the-beaten track',
'on-a-shoestring' experiences. In sum, actual tourism realities deviate from tourism representa-
tions of tourism discourse promoted through marketing communications. How though are these
contradictions and constraints not problematic for the tourist?
Bruner (1991) points to a discrepancy between representations of tourism in discourse and
the reality of the tourist experience:
Tourist discourse promises the tourist a total transformation of self, but the native is
described as untouched by civilization and as frozen in time. The hypothesis here is that
