Modern Mass Tourism

Tourism research looks today like an open scissors whose jaws keep veering away from each other.

On a corner mostly populated by economists and business schools, it has become an unambitious appendix to microeconomics. It tinkers with the manifold aspects of the travel industry pondering how to make it more profitable. Their short-range arguments take for granted the world as it is. They have no further ambition than understanding some of its recesses a bit better and do not venture outside this box. Small strategies and decisions are all they want to know, and they marvel why bolder people question their logic and even their very right to exist as academic subdivisions.

On the opposite side camps a large number of researchers who see their job as a mission-decrying everything the other side holds holy. Markets use a limited notion of rationality that produces and reproduces inequality, exploitation and hegemonic narratives. This post-romantic streak has become the golden section of most academic thought. In its most pessimistic avatar, tourism colludes with other devious sides of modernity in a rush to the evil side of human nature.

Disciplinary crossbreeding cannot heal this mismatch of interests, visions and methodologies, so both sides happily ignore each other in a strategy of Mutually Accepted Disregard.

As this crisis deepens. Modern Mass Tourism (MMT) remains misunderstood by academic research. Both domestic and international travel will keep on growing, but MMT is pronounced unsustainable. It gives people more choices, however they are seen as lacking authenticity or brimming with shambolic promises of liberation. Increasing millions of people the world over enjoy travel-just to accrue blame for their banal tastes and their reliance on contrived commodities. Their desire to see by themselves the world yonder conceals a childish reverence for the alchemy of marketing. Millions more want to enter the tourism industry as big or small providers in spite of academic warnings against unequal exchanges, post-colonialism, Western hegemony, cultural losses, or environmental destruction.

This book maintains that so many people refuse to heed well-meaning academic advice because they see it as flawed or out of kilter. The scissors crisis in tourism research pushes us to ponder whether they may be right. More than other people's minds, it is their own views of MMT that academics should challenge.