The Tourist Trap: An Alternative View of Tourism in the Global South

The Great Escape

It is very easy to fall in love with the notion of travel as it is packaged and sold to us from the very lucrative world of advertising. Since birth we have been receiving innumerable messages that have fortified a vision of a paradise that awaits us. From naked virgin beaches, to beautiful, exotic locals, to the seemingly endless adventures of the backpacker’s trail, travel seemingly has something for everyone. It is not a difficult task for the advertiser to lure people away from the painful uniformity of life in the Western workforce.  We are sold a thousand blindfolds by the time we even set foot on foreign land.  We are so blinded by our yearning to flee to paradise that we overlook the consequences of the industry that has been built in order to satisfy it.

The Culture of Tourism

One of the most bizarre consequences of tourism is its extraordinary homogenizing power over tourist spaces.  While tourists set out to presumably take a break from the monotony of their tired, uneventful lives, they contradictorily look for a place that allows them to live out a one-size fits all fantasy amidst all the same types of people they knew back home.  It is an opportunity to meet other privileged people from across the globe to discuss how foreign everything is and to talk about how great it is to live a life of luxury, to have this great opportunity to ‘escape’.

The locals that tourists confront, hotel workers, bartenders, tour guides, etc., are inevitably themselves a homogenous group, in so far as they contrive a disposition somewhere between the clichés of their specific culture and those of the Western one.  Local tourism workers are trained to a specific standard and consequently behave a particular way towards tourists that simultaneously draws feelings of comfort and exoticism from the visitors. 

The adventure into the unknown landscape is more of a well-structured mirage than a place that is attainable to the traveler. Even for the most courageous traveler, the tourist trap, like a straight jacket, is very tricky to escape. The more developed tourism becomes in any particular country the more the traveler’s ‘adventures’ are preordained by the structures of tourism. 

Tourist spaces are a product of extensive market research, which inevitably arrives at what has always worked in the past.  There is little creativity, just the bottom line.  Creativity is just a question of how old pleasures can be repackaged and sold fresh.  And so a beach resort in Thailand mirrors the beach resort in Guatemala.  A thrilling tube ride down the Mekong River in Laos has all the appearances of the drunken orgy of Mardi Gras celebrations.

The culture of tourism is a culture of excess.  It is an excess of food and drink, an excess of lustful desire, an excess of trinkets and souvenirs, and an excess of carefree living.  In short, the culture of tourism is an excess of excess.

Cultural Voyeurism

Those few who are brave enough to venture off the resort, or go as far as to backpack through smaller towns and other off the beaten path destinations, still rarely achieve any ‘real’ adventure.  The most their exploits realize is what can only be characterized as cultural voyeurism.  It is to take a quick glance at a culture through a looking glass.  Without any significant, prolonged interaction, what really takes place is a visit to the zoo rather than the kind of meaningful, life-changing dialogue that the adventurer had imagined would impact them forever.

Tourism as Colonialism

What the tourist industry achieves alas is the disbursement of large tracks of land for colonial interests, earmarking the most beautiful land in the world for exclusive access by the rich, privileged few.  For the wealthy, every tourist space on earth has become an extension of their kingdom.

Locals are diminished to the status of servants.  After a hard days work serving the insatiable thirst of ‘all inclusive’ demands, playing the role of the exotic, and plastering on a thousand plastic smiles, they go home.  For many it is a home far removed from the luxuries of resort life.  Tourists are forewarned not to venture too far from the resort.  For they might accidentally witness that the servant’s quarters do not match the picturesque, utopia that they intended to visit.  A trip outside the fantasyland of tourist compounds might awaken the tourist to real issues and real people, the real world that they so desperately wanted to escape.

Like most industry in so-called developing nations, tourism is modeled onto a dependent relationship with wealthy nations.  As adept students of capitalism, we ignorantly pat ourselves on the back for the great contribution that tourism has made to the local economy (as though the act of tourism were charity itself).  We overlook the structures of global trade that allow us, the privileged, to go where we please, to consume what we want, to name every beautiful place on earth for ourselves, and to turn local people into servants.  These are the true consequences of global tourism.  And until we challenge the global relations of power that tourism is premised upon, tourism will remain a wholly unethical practice.


Note

"And I’m still as stupid as anyone, but I know my mistakes." - Propagandhi.  This quote has stuck with me since jr. high school.  I, for the record, adore seeing new places, learning from new cultures.  But I have found that it is very easy to travel unethically.   Many of these criticisms were first spoken looking directly in the mirror.