dollars have been spent on publicity abroad to attract more tourists from richer countries. So, they are using scarce financial resources to promote tourism that is not sustainable at all. Which issues are playing a role here?
From the point of view of tourism
management, there seems to be a ‘use-and- discard’ policy. You open up a region and, when tourists have left, you just open up a new one. As a result, a country eats into its own resources. As we will see, people are often neither educated about the needs and tastes of tourists nor about tourism-related problems.
So just to recap for a moment: as we have seen, countries opening up for tourism often make fundamental mistakes in their drive to boost their national or regional economies. Investment focuses on attracting tourists, but not on building a tourist destination. It’s true to say that this is not unique and happens all over the world.
Secondly, and this always happens when an area is already overflowing with tourists, considerable energy and resources are spent on so-called ‘improvements’. These are ‘quick-fix’ changes to the environment that actually spoil the atmosphere of a place. We see modern, ugly, concrete tourist accommodation among beautiful traditional local houses. These probably cost twice as much to build as it would take to build a local house in local style with locally available materials. The tourism operator fails to realize that what he builds is a poor copy of cheap, tasteless accommodation which, in the countries where the tourists come from, is generally used by poorer people.
Thirdly, there is the influence tourists have on the local population. The difficulty is that different players in the market may have different aims. Some are worried about the visible impact of tourism (housing, traffic, retail development, and so on) while operators who are trying to build a business only see the profits ahead. What they often don’t realize is that there are two things at stake and they can clash. One is about strengthening local culture, and the other is about the growth of consumption. In many cases, these two turn the country into an uneasy mix of traditional culture and (let’s admit it) Westernized business models. Globalization has a lot to answer for …
Unit 9, Lesson 2, Exercise C 2.2
Part 2 Let’s now turn to our imaginary country again. As we shall see, tourism development had a profound impact on it. It was opened to tourism in the 1970s, in the sense that it allowed international exposure. In terms of cultural change, it started to understand global developments beyond its own borders. There are aspects of tourism that had a positive effect on the country when it first opened up to tourists. But first, let’s take a look at what attracted the tourists to the country in the first place.
Like many of the undiscovered places on our planet, our imaginary country was a difficult and inaccessible place, and therefore only those with a genuine interest in its people, culture and religion visited it. Hmm, this is interesting. I’ve just remembered a Tibetan proverb that says, … let me think: ‘If a valley is reached by high passes, only the best of friends and the worst of enemies are its visitors.’ There’s certainly some truth in that, because that is what it was like at first. Only those who were really interested came to visit.
If we move on now to the second factor, we realize that timing was very important. It could be argued that in the seventies, many people in the West had become disillusioned with the price of economic growth. Environmental disasters, pollution and fears about nuclear power and weapons were having their effect on people. So when the first travellers came to our country, they were impressed by its natural and pollution-free condition. They were impressed by the lifestyle of its people. Research has shown that they were also impressed by the way people with limited resources were able to support their lives and their culture without damaging the environment.
And you know what else? It did the local population’s self-confidence and cultural pride a lot of good. They realized that their way of life was meaningful to other people – people they had always been looking up to. So from the point of view of tourism development we need to remember that it was through tourism that they learnt about the environmental, social and emotional problems that were part of the Western consumerist lifestyle.
An important point about the relationship between tourism and culture is that in countries that are developing tourism, there is often a strong indigenous culture that has not yet been washed away by the tsunami of modernization.
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