Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
the tourist's interpretation of holiday implicates certain absences and marketing communications
can play a key role in creating and managing these. The recent growth of the ethical travel
market, for instance, has seen marketers employing pictures of tourism spaces that appear empty,
wild, untrammelled, pristine etc. Despite marketing holidays to tourists, in these representations
there are no tourists or locals depicted and certainly no groups - just 'untouched, pure' nature.
This effectively idealizes the absence of the tourist (and thus tourist impacts), contributing to the
popular 'tread lightly' view of this 'ethical' tourism practice (Shepherd 2003). Similarly, Caruana
and Crane (2008) fi nd that in the marketing of 'responsible tourism' the potential impacts (e.g.
of long-haul fl ights) are easily hidden within a discourse that is promoted as self-evidently
harmless and vehemently morally self-affi rming. In sum, across a wide range of tourism products
marketing communications enable tourists to understand their holiday but, because they can
only ever 'stand in' for reality, they may well subvert fuller interpretations of tourist-other
relations.
Conclusion
This chapter has adopted a discursive perspective in order to understand how marketing
communications infl uence tourists' knowledge of their holiday. Rather than informing tourists
of what attributes are involved in their tour product, this lens suggests marketing communications
actually organize the meanings of tourism. Taking the tourism 'text' (brochure, postcard, advert,
guidebook, diary etc.) as the culturally constructive sites where these meanings are produced and
interpreted, elaborates on how tourism subjects - tourist, locals, guides, communities - are
organized around sets of identities and relationships that culminate in ideal representations of
tourism practice. On the one hand, these ideal interpretations provide a plausible and desirable
view of the tourist's cultural milieu and the position(s) that they can adopt within it. In particular,
a discursive lens helps demonstrate
how
these interpretations operate within these key texts,
allowing researchers to see how marketing communications defi ne 'how to be' and 'how to do
tourism' for different tourist audiences.
On the other hand, this process engenders implicit relations of power between subjects
included and excluded from the tourism discourse being promoted. These power relations
implicate tourists' relations with the market, with other tourists and with other constituents
involved more or less directly in the tour product. Specifi cally, in seeking to create a certain
representation for the tourist (e.g. 'authentic' Silver 1993), marketing communications displace a
fuller set of discourses that a destination may be subject to (e.g. poverty, war, exclusion, slavery),
limiting the potential interpretive repertoire of the tourist. Whilst it is arguably the case that
tourists themselves want idealized representations of escape, rather than more candid depictions
of reality, it is still worth considering some refl exive points provoked by a discursive approach to
marketing communications.
Implications for marketers
Marketing practitioners have traditionally been concerned with issues of honesty and accuracy
in the representations of places and experiences. This has essentially framed tourists' concern
with marketing communications as one of tourist trust in marketers' representation of the
product offering. This has tended to limit representational concerns not only to tourist-market
relations (despite other relational agents), but also to issues fairly limited in scope (i.e. consumer
rights, deception, sovereignty). As has been identifi ed, a potentially far wider range of constraints
upon the tourist may well be engendered, and indeed subverted, in representations of tourism.
