Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Questions that might be asked here are how do the tourism practices promoted by marketers
expose tourists to risk, exploitation, violence and other forms of vulnerability. This might well
be applicable, for example, in the promotion of hedonistic ('youth/pleasure') holidays where
risk-taking, promiscuity and heavy drinking are key features of the hedonic ethos being
promoted.
In addition to concerns in tourist-market relations, tourist relations with other human and
ecological constituents represent new avenues of refl ection and critique. Marketers may consider
how alluring representations of 'pristine', 'unspoilt' and 'wilderness' destinations (e.g. Galapagos
or Maldives) provoke high demands for such spaces which may, paradoxically, pressurize and
destroy them. Equally, marketers may refl ect upon the ways in which marketing communications
misrepresent human subjects and relationships, for example, by subverting poor labour practices
or promoting exploitation of local communities. Framed in this broader way, tourists may
increasingly view marketing communications not only in terms of personal trust and deception
(their consumer rights) but in terms of how marketers can be trusted to represent a destination's
broader socio-political and environmental characteristics in ways that sustain and protect them.
This last point may encourage a heightened discourse in the industry concerning an ethics
of representation. One obvious area of focus here would involve ethical issues surrounding
representations of the other (Cave 2005), given the potential to render them vulnerable to forms
of exploitation, risk and harm. Akin to arguments set out above, Borgerson and Schroeder (2002)
have suggested ethical issues arise when 'representations of subordinate groups facilitate the
erasure of identity and domination of that group' (2002: 584). They recommend critical refl ection
by marketers upon how their representations contribute to the creation and sustaining of
domination (e.g. sexual, racial and colonial) of one group over another (e.g. male/female, black/
white, civilized/native, Western/non-Western). Here, marketers might usefully consider not only
how their representations dominate others but also how others lack the resources and/or access
to media and advertising through which to control how they are represented. Such introspection
is also important in representations of non-human 'others' such as the natural environment
whose continued exploitation is partly facilitated through touristic representations. Here,
marketers are urged to consider the potential risks to the ecosystems of their representations to
tourists (e.g. of 'the wild', 'untamed nature', 'unspoilt' or 'virgin territory'). Whether tourism
marketers will do this voluntarily and altruistically or for more instrumental reasons (i.e. because
their customers support sustainability and good labour practices or merely want a clean, pristine
destination and a 'service with a smile') remains to be seen.
Implications for tourists
It can, of course, be argued that the tourist doesn't have to accept the representations offered to
them in marketing communications and indeed, some have argued that in practice tourists (and
locals) can challenge or rework them (Norton 1996). However, as key (and sometimes sole)
repositories of cultural meaning for tourist knowledge, marketing communications play a
signifi cant role in mediating how a tourist understands a place, a group of people and their
relations to both. A critical, discursive perspective enables tourists and other tourist constituents
(e.g. labour) to refl ect upon the mediated nature of their taken-for-granted realities, offering a
resource for responding to (Bramwell 2003), contesting and reconstructing prevailing identities,
relations and practices circulated in tourism discourse.
A discursive perspective on marketing communications is of increasing importance in
contemporary tourism, not least because of the continued global tensions around issues such as
climate change, labour relations, poverty, pollution and the like but due to the accelerating
