China's Exploding Tourism Economy: Three Examples

Few things demonstrate the rapid rate of modernization and postmodern tourism consumption in China as does the rise in tourism activity and the country's tourism economy. I just returned from a couple of weeks in China attending a conference, a field trip and giving some guest lectures at a university.  

The trip took me to Zhangjiajie National Park in Hunan Province for a tourism conference, and post-conference field trip by tourist bus to the old city of Feng Huang (Phoenix) in Hunan Province, and to the city of Weihai in Shandong Province where I visited Shandong University.  Here are few comments on what I learned from each of these places.

The cable car at Zhangjiajie National Park, Hunan Province, China

(1) Zhangjiajie - This tourism conference is held every two years in different locations in China.  This was the seventh meeting, and the sixth one in a row that I have attended.  It was also the largest event yet, with almost 300 mainland Chinese participants.  We only had about 20 international participants, do I think to the poor global economy and the lack of Zhangjiajie's lack of international renown (though it is a UNESCO World Heritage Site).

More than ever before, I was amazed and pleased at the quality of research papers that Chinese students presented, as well as their increased English speaking capabilities.  I remember the first conference that I attended in Guilin in 2000, and the few painful efforts that a few Chinese scholars made to present in English.  By contrast, this year about half of the paper sessions were in English and half were in Chinese, giving international participants a wider range of sessions to attend than ever in the past.

Lesson: The quality of academic scholarship in China is growing rapidly, and the newest crop of students and lecturers will soon be making a significant mark internationally.

Tourists line up for the boat ride at Feng Huang old city in Hunan Province, China

(2) Feng Huang - On Google+ I commented that Feng Huang was a Chinese version of Rothenburg ob der Tauber in Germany. This is both in terms of the atmosphere (old buildings renovated and filled with tourist-oriented shops and foods), and the masses of tourists that are found there during the peak summer season.  I had never heard of Feng Huang (Phoenix) before this conference, and the photos that I could find of it when I put the conference website together showed old buildings and almost no people! (see http://www.geog.nau.edu/igust/China2011/)

First, it took us 7 hours, instead of four, by bus to get there due to the massive traffic jam as we approached the city.  The crowds in the old city (which is along a river and surrounded by a new city) were like Disneyland on a crowded summer weekend!  I had seen this in several popular tourist destinations in China in the past, including at Zhangjiajie National Park during a one-day conference field trip.  It seems that all of the top tourist attractions in China these days are overrun with tourists during the summer season. Most are on group tours, and, interestingly, many Chinese tourists also complain about the over crowded conditions.

Lesson: "Carrying capacity" has always had a very different meaning in China compared to other parts of the world.  As the world becomes ever more populated (approaching 7 billion), issues of capacity, visitor experience, and economic motivations will increase, and China's rapidly growing middle class may be at the cutting edge of this.

More photos of Fenghuang can be found here: https://picasaweb.google.com/alanalew/FenghuangChina

The "international beach" (popular with Russians) at Weihai, Shandong Province, China.

(3) Weihai - I have never seen a Chinese city like this one. It has a population of about 150,000 people (very small by Chinese standards) spread out along a series of long, sandy swimming beaches.  Traffic jams are almost non-existent, and the pace of life is much slower than in I am used to seeing in China. About a third of the people at breakfast at my Shandong University hotel were Russian families who come here from Siberia to enjoy the beach.

Speaking of China's growing wealth, however, I have never seen more constructions taking place in one location in my entire life of travel -- and that is saying a lot!  Almost all of the construction (90% perhaps) is for vacation homes and timeshares.  People from all over China, as well as from nearby South Korea, are wanting to buy a piece of life on the beach in Weihai. I really wonder what is going to happen over the coming few years as thousands of new vacation units (mostly apartments, but also some villas) come onto the market.  It seems like there will be a glut of units, which could push down prices and put a crunch on maintenance and upkeep.  One other issue is that the weather in Weihai, while great in the summer, is very windy in all of the other seasons, and very cold in winter!

Lesson 3: Never underestimate the ability of the real estate industry to sell paradise to tourists.  Weihai is the ultimate experiment in this, though I have heard that a similar real estate market is also found on Hainan Island in southern China.

More photos of Weihai can be found here: https://picasaweb.google.com/alanalew/WeihaiChina

As usual, China never ceases to amaze -- especially from a tourism perspective!

Us and Them among Tourists in Taiwan

Tourists are humans and tend to behave as any other human social animal.  One human behavioral characteristic is to form social groups that include some (“Us”) and exclude other (“Them”).

I saw this recently during my second visit to Taiwan in the past eight months.  I went to Sun Moon Lake in the central Taiwan mountains which is possibly the biggest single tourist attraction in Taiwan for mainland Chinese tourists.  In the last couple of months, mainland Chinese tourists have become the largest single source of tourists to Taiwan, replacing Japanese tourists who have declined considerably following the earthquake and tsunami. Almost all Chinese tourists tour Taiwan on package group tours, and it seems that most of those tours include Sun Moon Lake.  We saw the following statistics on display at the new, post-modern Sun Moon Lake Visitors Center:

Growth in Mainland Chinese to Taiwan & Sun Moon Lake

Year – Number – % visiting Sun Moon Lake

2008 – 89,970 – 74.2%
2009 – 600,969 – 92.5%
2010 – 1,165,549 – 98.8%

The growth has been quite phenomenal, and there was a news story a couple of weeks ago about how the Taiwan stock market is has been strong due to the large number of mainland Chinese tourists expected this year.

What I was told by my hosts/guides was that because so many mainlanders now go to Sun Moon Lake, other tourist groups have stopped going there. The two other groups, in particular, that have largely (not completely) stopped going to Sun Moon Lake are the domestic Taiwan tourists and the Japanese tourists. There are some districts and sites in Taipei that I have been to that are mostly Japanese, including a Cantonese restaurant where we had to wait to with mostly Japanese people out on the sidewalk to get a seat.  Many of them were holding Japanese guidebooks of various kinds that recommended the restaurant.  I really liked the food, which had a uniquely Japanese delicacy to it.

There are other places in the world where visitors segregate based on culture and ethnicity.  There are Mediterranean resort islands that are almost all German-speaking next to an island that is all French-speaking, for example.  And most of the tourists to Barbados in the Caribbean are British and Canadian, while visitors to nearby Martinique is mostly French, and St. Lucia is mostly American.

Most of this segregation is due to business efficiencies, though there is also some desire among some tourists to congregate with their own, which gives them a bubble of security, even when in a different country.  My hosts/guests, for example, told me that Taiwan domestic tourist avoid Sun Moon Lake because (1) it is too crowded and (2) occasional political conflicts between mainland and Taiwan Chinese. It seems to me that in some ways, Sun Moon Lake has become a sacrificial site for increased mainland Chinese tourism. 

Off hand, I do not know of similar examples here in the US where such ethnic separation in tourism is so clearly defined.  I would be interested to hear about such places if you know of any.  And I wonder if we might see this in the future as the US becomes ever more culturally diverse.

(Geography Note: Sun Moon Lake is actually a reservoir that was created on top of a wetland area with a smaller lake in which the local aboriginal Thao people fished.  The Japanese added some dams to make the original lake larger and to generate hydroelectric power when they ruled Taiwan (1989 to 1945), and the R.O.C. Taiwan government created the current version of the lake around 1970.)

The Sustainable Tourism Conundrum: Would you Stop Traveling to Save the Planet?

Would you stop traveling to save the planet? That is the challenge of sustainable tourism! #aag2011


I posted that on Twitter on April 13, 2011 while listening to a presentation at the annual meeting of the Association of American Geographers.  It was my most re-tweeted post at the conference, and one of the most re-tweeted of all of the #AAG2011 tagged posts.
The comment was written in response to a presentation by Antti Honkanen (University of Eastern Finland), titled Sustainability and the democratization of tourism - The limits of growth in travelling abroad.

Antti presented the essential conundrum for all of us who love to travel, but are also concerned about the major negative impacts that humans are having on the environment. That it was re-tweeted by several other people indicates, to me, that many of us are troubled by this issue.
Here is a edited and shortened version of Antti's presentation abstract (from the online AAG 2011 program) -

• Does everyone, if wealthy enough, need to be a tourist? Or are we starting to reach some limits of growth for tourism?
  
  This paper asks whether the propensity to spend a holiday abroad has reached its limit for growth in some social or geographical groups, based on age, income, socioeconomic status, education, gender and country of residence. The study is based on survey data from Eurobarometer 25 (1985), Eurobarometer 48.0 (1997) and Flash Eurobarometer 258 (2008).
  
  According to the results, while differences exist, travelling abroad has become more common among all groups over the years 1985-2008. The democratization of tourism appears to be continuing, even if some lower societal groups are left out due to increasing social inequality. The propensity to travel abroad for their main vacation holiday has increased in almost all countries. Some limits of growth, however, may be seen among the upper classes.

Basically, her study of Europe found that more and more people are traveling internationally (at least through 2008), except maybe at the very bottom of the economic ladder (where they cannot afford it), and at the very top of society (maybe because they have already been everywhere?).  And this data was for Europe, which is generally far more environmentally conscious than most of the rest of the world!

The apparent answer to my Twitter post is "No" - we (including myself) are not willing to stop traveling to save the planet.

We are willing to tweak how we travel (using hybrid cars or developing alternative airplane fuels), and we are willing to pay a little more to try and compensate for our impacts (staying in ecolodges or paying to plant trees), but we are not willing to stop traveling -- which would have the biggest impact on reducing CO2 levels.

Of course, if we stopped traveling we would also have a huge impact on the livelihood of all the workers and businesses that are involved, to varying degrees, in the the fifth or sixth largest industry worldwide (which is what I have estimated the size of the tourism industry to be).

And that is the Sustainable Tourism Conundrum -- how to balance the Economics impacts of tourism (usually considered good) with its Environmental impacts (mostly considered bad). There are a lot of other cultural ans social issues related to sustainability and tourism, but I believe that the economic-environment tension is its most fundamental challenge.

The Best Tourism Places

I just returned from the annual meeting of the Association of American Geographers in Seattle, WA.  This annual geography-love-fest drew some 7000 geographers (mostly university and college teachers and students) and included some 3,500 presentations.  Among those presentations were 107 papers that included the keyword "tourism".  You can search and view the abstracts for those 107 papers here: http://www.aag.org/cs/annualmeeting/pastprograms.  

These numbers are typical of past AAG meetings and makes this conference among the largest tourism conferences in the world.  I, personally, was involved in 10 sessions in one way or another -- as a session organizer, chair or presenter.  In fact, in addition to the 107 papers with the keyword "tourism", there are discussion panels on tourism-related topics and many more papers that cover tourism in peripheral ways (such as the papers in a session on "Creating Sense of Place").  Given the large number of concurrent presentations, what I typically do is just look at the tourism sessions and try to attend as many of those that I can.  I will be blogging about the AAG more in the future, as I work through all my notes.  

For this blog, however, I want to talk about one of the discussion panels that I organized.  Panel sessions are different from paper sessions in that the presenters do not submit a formal abstract, but instead put out ideas that generate audience discussion.  The panel session that I am focusing on here was on the topics of "The Best Tourism Places".  It was run in a Pecha-Kucha (http://pecha-kucha.org) format, which allows 20 slides and 20 seconds of talking per slide. The format forces the presenter to be highly focused on the presentation (preventing tangents) and highlights the most important themes of their talk.  I first saw this presentation format at last year's meeting of the American Planning Association in New Orleans and though I would try it at this year's AAG.

The Best Tourism Places session turned out to be a blast!  I had asked everyone to make the last slide in their presentation a list of what makes the best tourism places, though not everyone actually read or remembered my instructions. I went first and found it very demanding, exhilarating, and fun. I talked about Kota Kinabalu, the capital of Sabah, Malaysia, which is one of my favorite places.  I selected KK because it is a major tourist destination that offers a range of opportunities for different types of tourists, from the recreational-leisure tourist to the avid cultural and environmental explorer. My own conclusions were that the best tourism places had the following characteristics:

1. Sensual Diversity: Sight, Taste, Smell, Touch
2. Landscape Diversity: Physical and Human
3. Experiential Diversity: Both Predictable/Safe and Unpredictable/Risk
4. Mixed Accessibility: Mostly Easy, Some Challenges
5. Local Authenticity: Local Tourists and People at major sites
6. Tourism Incognita: More mysteries around every corner

Much like what I did with Kota Kinabalu, Jamie Gillen (Auburn University) presented the sights, sounds and tastes (in photos, at least) of Singapore, the diversity of which made it one of the best tourism places. And similarly, David Truly (Autonoma Universidad de Guadalajara, Mexico) talked about a recent trip he made to Bali, arguing that the best tourism places are those that support and enhance the "vacation" experience, which he associated with the concept of markers specific to the destination: landscape markers, cultural markers and lifestyle markers.  These markers, or iconic symbols and landscapes, reinforce the special qualities of the tourist destination.  (It was just a coincidence that Southeast Asia appeared so prominently in this Pecha-Kucha session, though as one of my major research areas, I can see why!)

Somewhat contrary to the examples of KK, Singapore and Bali, Dallen Timothy (Arizona State University) defined the best tourism places as those without any tourists, for which he used trips he has made to Bhutan, the Shan State of Myanmar (which I was also on), and a private tour of the back-region of the Vatican as examples where tourists never go.   Entrance into the "back-region" has long been argued to be one of the ultimate goals of most tourists because it is considered to offer a more "authentic" experience.

Authenticity, however, is a very personal experience.  Sanjay Nepal (University of Waterloo, Canada) described a trip that he made to the walled city of Lo Manthang in Upper Mustang in Nepal.  For him, this was one of the best tourism place because of its blending of dramatic natural and cultural landscapes, a sense that this was an ancient and timeless place, elements of sacred geography, and feelings of uniqueness, exclusivity (visited by few other tourists), and adventure (in just trying to get there).  In a similar vein, Albina Pashkevich (Dalarna Univesity, Sweden) talked about her research into seasonal workers at the Kiruna Ski Resort in Sweden, and how Kiruna has become a special place for her through her research encounters and personal experiences there.  For both Albina and Sanjay, the places they described became special through their personal existential encounter with a destination.

Dan Olsen (Brandon University, Canada) interpreted my task for this panel as a focus on how we create lists of different types of Best Tourism Places, showing a wide range of examples from the Internet, from the most green destinations to the best travel photographs.  He concluded with the questions: Who creates these lists? Who chooses the criteria upon which these lists are based? Who is the intended audience? Why are these lists developed in the first place? Do these lists “work”?

These questions could also, of course, be asked of all the presenters on this panel session.  And that is exactly what David Weaver (Griffith University, Australia) did as he led a lively discussion of the presentations. A good part of the discussion focused on how we, as tourism geography researchers, perceive and define the places we study and visit.  We tend to be biased toward "allocentric" destinations -- trying to avoid mass tourism and seeking out back regions -- and one wonders how that might bias our research and writing.  I also wonder if the same type of session by business school academics would have resulted in more mass tourism examples?

This blog is cross-posted on the BlogNotions - Hospitality Blog

Tourism Incognita Part 2: Terra incognita and Topophilia Presentation Video

If you've half an hour to spare, here is my recent talk in Martinique on the topic of Tourism Incognita:

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Terra incognita and topophilia : the importance of remoteness and the unexpected in the tourist experience

Contributeur(s) majeur(s) : Lew, Alan, A. Date : 2011-01-27
Production : Université des Antilles et de la Guyane ; CEREGMIA : Centre d'études et de recherche en économie, gestion et modélisation informatique appliquée
Extrait de : Conférence Internationale du Tourisme "The changing world of coastal, island and tropical tourism", 27-29 janvier 2011. Université des Antilles et de la Guyane, campus de Schoelcher, Martinique .
Provenance : Université des Antilles et de la Guyane. Service commun de la documentation 

Permalien : http://www.manioc.org/fichiers/HASH21b79090710bd0474a25b1

Click Here to view and hear most of the papers from this conference.

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Tourism Incognita - The Importance of the Unexpected

My email inbox these days seems to be overflowing with more "all-inclusive" travel deals than I have seen in a long time. All-inclusive experiences are certainly attractive -- no need to think about anything other than getting to your destination resort. They are also very popular -- as evidenced by the continual growth in cruise ships, the ultimate all-inclusive experiences. Unfortunately, they are also the ultimate in predictability, efficiency and control -- the hallmarks of hypermodernity, and what George Ritzer and Allan Liska (1997) called "McDisneyization". While I appreciate efficiency, because it often costs less, and I try to avoid bad surprises as much as possible, I find that what I most enjoy and rememver about travel are experiences that are unexpected , unplanned and sometimes out of control.

A couple of years ago I took an Alaska inside passage cruise, from Vancouver, BC to Anchorage, Alaska. We were on one of the major cruise lines, which my wife loves because we only need to unpack our bags once. For our daily port experiences, however, I wanted to try to get away from the cruise mobs, but I still wanted to make the most of my limited time in each port of call. So I used an company that specialized in working around the cruise lines in booking local tours for cruise ship passengers. I did this for two of our three stops, Ketchikan and Skagway. In Ketchikan we did a rainforest natural area hike with a small group of people (8 to 10), which was nice, but also something that I think could have been easily done on one's own. In Skagway we took the obligatory (and scenic) White Pass and Yukon Train ride, for which I do not think there is a way to bypass the cruise mobs. However, the most memorable experience of the entire cruise was our stay in Juneau. 

Being a relatively larger place, I was determined to rent a car and explore Juneau on my own. They do not make it easy for cruise passengers to rent cars in Juneau! The car rental places are nowhere near where the cruise ships dock. I was too cheap to take a taxi for this one day rental, and instead took a public bus, which got me close, but I still had to hike a ways to get to the rental place. Having the ability to explore Juneau on our own, however, made a world of difference. We visited the Mendenhall Glacier, but we were on our own schedule, and beyond that we just drove north out of town looking to see what we could find. It was an overcast day, with some rain and drizzle now and then, but the scenery was fantastic and there were hardly any other people in sight! Among our stops was the Shrine of St. Theresa, which is a very unique old church on a small island connected to the mainland. And we also found some good, local food places.

So why was Juneau so special? What Juneau offered, that Ketchikan and Skagway did not was an opportunity to explore what geographers have long referred to as Terra Incognita. In the Age of Exploration (16th and 17th centuries) European cartographers marked the yet-to-be-explored places on maps as Terra Incognita. In 1947, the geographer John Kirkland Wright opened his presidential address to the Association of American Geographers with the words:

Terra Incognita: these words stir the imagination. Through the ages men have been drawn to unknown regions by Siren voices, echoes of which ring in our ears today when on modern maps we see spaces labelled "unexplored," rivers shown by broken lines, islands marked "existence doubtful."
 

Today, Terra Incognita still holds an important role in the travelers experiences of place. Travel and tourism today are usually taken to places we know. However, even in these known places, there are many geographies and experiences that are beyond the tourism mob, that are unknown and that offer opportunities to experience Terra Incognita. 

While we focus on the all-inclusive known when we purchase our travel experiences, it is equally important to make room for the unknown and the unexpected. I argue that it is even vital to have such experiences to have a full and deep experience and appreciation of a place. This requires an openness to risk, to serendipity, to personal transformation, to a special kind of Tourism Incognita, which those of us who study and promote tourism need to be more aware of.

As the author and poet Carl Sandburg once said, "Nearly all the best things that came to me in life have been unexpected, unplanned by me". After all, isn't this why most of us, both tourism professionals and tourism consumers are drawn to travel in the first place?

 

References

Ritzer, G., and A. Liska. 1997. "'McDisneyization' and 'Post-Tourism': Complementary Perspectives on Contemporary Tourism." In Touring Cultures: Transformations of Travel and Theory, edited by C. Rojek and J. Urry. London: Routledge.

See also: Robinson, M.B. 2003. The Mouse Who Would Rule the World! How American Criminal Justice Reflects the Themes of Disneyization. Journal of Criminal Justice and Popular Culture, 10 (1) 69-86. http://www.albany.edu/scj/jcjpc/vol10is1/robinson.html

Wright, J.K. 1947. Terrae Incognitae: The Place of the Imagination in Geography. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 37(1): 1-15. http://www.colorado.edu/geography/giw/wright-jk/1947_ti/1947_ti.html

Nostalgia for the Family Holiday Vacation

Nostalgia for the Family Holiday Vacation

by Alan A. Lew, Department of Geography, Planning and Recreation, Northern Arizona University, USA

A Literature Review of:

Are We There Yet? The Golden Age of American Family Vacations by Susan Sessions Rugh (University of Kansas Press, 2008, ISBN 978-0-7006-1588-9)
- and -
Theme Park by Scott A. Lukas (Reaktion Books, 2008, ISBN 978-1-86189-394-9)

One of the stories that I tell people about how and why I became a scholar of geography and tourism has to do with my childhood upbringing. Summer family vacations were an important part of my early experiences, and may have contributed to my adult interest in tourism and travel as both a vocation and an avocation. ...

Access the full article for free at InformaWorld 

Published in: Tourism Geographies, Volume 12, Issue 4 November 2010 , pages 568 - 571

A Review of “Tourism in the USA: A Spatial and Social Synthesis”

Tourism in the USA: A Spatial and Social Synthesis

by Dimitri Ioannides & Dallen J. Timothypublished by Routledge, London and New York, 2010, ISBN 0-415-95685-4 

Reviewed by Patrick Brouder, Department of Social & Economic Geography, Ume University, Sweden 

This 222-page book sets out to give a comprehensive overview of tourism in the USA. The title hints that the book is not only about tourism studies but includes many elements of geography, in particular, and social sciences, in general. Ioannides and Timothy state that their 'aim is to provide an overview and detailed account of the workings of tourism as a modern-day phenomenon in the United States of America' (p. 3). Their rationale is, at least in part, an attempt to address the fact that 'despite all the fuss about tourism in the USA, it is more than clear that it is a misunderstood phenomenon' (p. 3). In short, Tourism in the USA: A spatial and social synthesis offers an excellent overview of its subject and makes the phenomenon of one of the largest tourism economies in the world better understood. 


Access the full article for free at InformaWorld  


Published in Tourism Geographies, Volume 12, Issue 4 November 2010 , pages 575 - 577

Time as a Major Barrier to Sustainable Development

Author: Alan A. Lew, Department of Geography, Planning and Recreation, Northern Arizona University, Arizona, USA

Published in: Tourism Geographies, Volume 12, Issue 3, August 2010, pages 481 - 483

There are many barriers to sustainable development, including

    * just defining what sustainable development is;
    * trying to making connections between sustainability issues that exist at different scales (from personal to community to global);
    * trying to make connections between sustainability issues that exist in different industries and activities (total life-cycle costing issues); and
    * deciding how to properly balance environmental, social and ecological issues.

Most of these issues are mentioned in the literature on sustainable development (including my study area of sustainable tourism) in some way or another. One major challenge, however, that seems to never come up is the limitation of the human perception of time. 'Be here now' is, unfortunately, how most of us behave too much of the time. ...

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To cite this Article: Lew, Alan A. (2010) 'Time as a Major Barrier to Sustainable Development', Tourism Geographies, 12:3, 481 - 483

Landscape, Tourism and Meaning

Book Review of: Landscape, Tourism and Meaning by Daniel C. Knudsen, Michelle M. Metro-Roland, Anne K. Soper & Charles E. Greer (Eds), Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008, ISBN 978-0-7546-4943-4

Reviewed by : Brian Graham, School of Environmental Sciences, University of Ulster, UK

Published in: Tourism Geographies, Volume 12, Issue 3, August 2010, pages 484 - 486 

This book, which is a contribution to Ashgate's 'New directions in Tourism Analysis' series emerges from the sometimes unfortunate engagement of tourism studies with cultural geography and its convoluted and pretentious lexicon. The provenance of the volume lies in two sessions at the 2004 meeting of the Association of American Geographers (AAG) in Philadelphia, the purpose of the book being explicitly ambitious in that its role 'is to re-theorize tourism' through an examination of the intersection between landscape, identity and tourism. ...

Access the full article for free at InformaWorld  

To cite this review article: Graham, Brian (2010) 'A Review of “Landscape, Tourism and Meaning”', Tourism Geographies, 12:3, 484 - 486

Publishing Tourism Geography Research

Author: Deborah Che

Published in: Tourism Geographies, Volume 12, Issue 2, May 2010, pages 324 - 328

At the 2009 Annual Meeting of the Association of American Geographers held in Las Vegas, Nevada (22-27 March), geographers shared their experiences as participants in a stimulating and thought-provoking panel on 'Publishing Tourism Geography Research'. I organized this session in order to elicit recommendations from geographers with extensive publication records and with experience editing, reviewing, developing book projects, founding journals and experience with department and university administration where institutional research standards for tenure and promotion decisions are developed and put into effect. ...

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To cite this Article: Che, Deborah (2010) 'Publishing Tourism Geography Research', Tourism Geographies, 12:2, 324 - 328  

The 4 Best Tourism Journals!

Shaul Krakover sent the photo above, saying:

“I attach here a photo taken at our Tourism Destination Development and Branding Conference, held October 14-15, 2009, at Ben Gurion University of the Negev, Eilat Campus, Israel.

The photo presents the 4 best tourism journals!  It was taken in a session on "Publishing in the Academic Hospitality and Tourism Literature: Trends and Challenges" with the participation of the following (from Right to Left):

- John Tribe, Editor in Chief of the Annals of Tourism Research
- Rick Perdue, Editor of Journal of Travel Research
- Abraham Pizam, Editor in Chief of the International Journal of Hospitality
Management, and
- Shaul Krakover, Associate editor of Tourism Geographies.”

Learning To See Through Travel

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Can We 'Learn To See?': Study Shows Perception Of Invisible Stimuli Improves With Training

ScienceDaily (Oct. 21, 2009) — Although we assume we can see everything in our field of vision, the brain actually picks and chooses the stimuli that come into our consciousness. A new study in the Association for Research in Vision and Ophthalmology's Journal of Vision reveals that our brains can be trained to consciously see stimuli that would normally be invisible. [Click Here to read full story]
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Many years ago (many, many, in fact), I attended a meditation retreat in the hills near Clear Lake north of the SFO Bay Area.  There was a young guy on this retreat, in his early 20s, who was able to see aura around people’s bodies.  He did not need to do anything, this ability was just natural. 

Now in those days, when I was younger, I had a pretty good ability to see things at night – much better than almost anyone else I had met. So I kind of envied his aura seeing ability.  But he thought nothing of it – he told me that it really doesn’t mean much, he is just able to see them.

So, a few decades later, I still can’t see auras, and might night vision has declined as my need to wear glasses has increased (since I started using computers).  But now comes this story on ScienceDaily about how German researchers have shown that the eye can detect objects even though the brain does not recognize the object as being seen. This has a couple of fascinating possibilities:

(1) Our eyes may be detecting objects and fields of view just beyond the visible spectrum, in the infra-red and ultraviolet range, or in a dark field with no visible light, that we are totally unaware of, but which may still impress our brain, behavior and experience.

(2) We may be able to learn to see these objects of fields of information if we are trained or practiced in doing so. (This is the direction that the German researchers are moving – to help people with blind spots.)

As cool as that sounds, I no longer have my old meditation patience that I think it would probably take to master such skills.

However, I do see implications of this phenomenon – of learning to see what we otherwise would not – in my interests in the tourism and travel experience. These implications are:

(1)  People travel to see parts of the world, parts of the human existence, parts of the planetary geography that we otherwise would not be able to see.  We drive to travel because our monkey curiosity wants to fill in the blind spots of terra incognita.

(2) We use guidebooks, online video guides, and local human guides to help us to see what we would not see if we were to visit a place without any interpretation.  This is what semiotics refers to a the “sign” or “signifier” – it is the name and meaning that we humans assign to sites and sights that, in turn, gives us deep, existential experiences of those sites and sights.

(3) We also reject the guides and the guidebooks in an effort to gain a pure and direct experience of places – especially of the spontaneous and unplanned surprises that new places have the potential to offer us.  And related to this, are new identities and roles that arise in ourselves, that we may never knew were their, but which the liminal experience of traveling away from home, can sometimes show us.

(4) Some of us learn about broader issues of travel and tourism, especially sustainability issues, to make us more aware of our impacts and to better understand how tourism shapes places and people (both the hosts and the guests).

All of these are exercises in geographic visioning – of stretching our normal vision (and understanding) of the world, its places, its environments and ourselves – and to see and understand them in ways that we may never have considered were possible.  (Although, tourism advertisers also know this and flash images of possibilities that are often tempting, if fundamentally shallow.)

So, here we are.  At one level we are curious monkeys wanting to see what is hidden behind the peek-a-boo of distant places. At another level we are stretching our cognitive skill, stretching our brains, perhaps to lead us to a more aware planet that is hopefully able to manage, if not solve, the global issues that we all share today.

Are you a Tourism Extremist?

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Extremists More Willing To Share Their Opinions, Study Finds - ScienceDaily (Oct. 21, 2009) — People with relatively extreme opinions may be more willing to publicly share their views than those with more moderate views, according to a new study. [Click Here for the full story.]
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The story linked above is about a study at Stanford University in which students with extreme views on an issue were more vocal in expressing their opinions when they thought that the majority of their peers leaned in their direction.  There were generally silent if they thought that their peers held moderate or opposite views to theirs.

While we all have met people who are willing to express their "extreme" views even if they are clearly in the minority, they are the exception. The problem is that human nature assumes that the most vocal are expressing the dominant opinion of a group, whereas in reality, they actually represent an extreme position.  Thus, we (those of us on the left) assume that the talking heads on Fox News represent the typical Republican Party views in the US, when they really are a marginal extreme.

So what does this have to do with tourism?  Off the top of my head, I see the following implications:

We (tourism professionals) often assume that everyone want to travel and everyone is supportive of tourism because that is what seems to be the majority. In reality, there people's opinions on travel and tourism run a continuum from no interest in travel to travel as a lifestyle, and from no support for tourism to tourism as a foundation of the new service economy (cf. Urry's discussion of the "service class").  Making the pro-tourism and pro-travel perspective dominant has enormous impacts on macro economic priorities (such as transit and destination branding), community development decisions (where and what to spend tax dollars on), and human behavior (defining the range of possible leisure time activities). 

And this has resulted in major sustainability challenges, from the massive greenhouse gas emissions of long haul air and cruise ship travel, to change in traditional cultures from tourists visiting remote destinations.

Do we ever seriously even consider a no-tourism option as a lifestyle, as a form of community development, as what might be best for a destination? What kind of world would that be like ... possibly a more sustainable one?

 
 

Blogging Two Years Later

In June 2007 I wrote a blog post titled "Why Don't We Blog? University Faculty Blogging about Travel & Tourism". So two years later I took a look back at that blog post, and to my surprise there were 36 comments! That was strange, because I do not remember receiving any notices to moderate that many comments on any of my blog posts. A quick scan showed that there were three legitimate comments, posted soon after I wrote the blog entry, and 33 spam comments. Yikes! – I had not turned on the comments moderation, nor even the word verification, so any robo-computer could post a comment to not only this blog post, but to any other post on my Tourism Place blog.

So now I need to go through all my posts to find and delete the junk comments. Bummer!

I started blogging in 2005 and got quickly hooked on this form of self-publishing and self-expression. I have always fashioned myself as having strong non-hierarchical and egalitarian values, and even though I too play the academic publishing game, I really resent the haves (book writers) and have-nots (book users) that are created in that process. I also do not like the high cost of poorly written textbooks and the sometimes political nature of the academic review process. And I loved the opportunities for self-expression that blogging enabled.

So blogging, which allowed me to write and publish online whatever I wanted, was an incredibly liberating experience. I loved it and started several blogs, and a couple of related podcasts. But I did not see many other academics blogging, especially in the tourism and geography fields that I found of interest. So I sent a query to several tourism email lists and compiled the result in my "Why Don't We Blog?" post.

By 2009, however, my own blogging has fallen off considerably – though I still do blog. I have heard that blogging growth, in general, has flattened out, though micro-blogging on Twitter (@alew) and Facebook has taken off and continues to grow. This has happened to me, as well. I mostly moved from my long blog posts to micro-blogging on Twitter (which is then automatically forwarded to Facebook). 140 character messages are a lot less time-consuming to write than 140 to 1400 word blog posts. I guess have gotten lazy.

I stopped podcasting at the end of last semester, though I hope to start up again soon (once I get over some technical difficulties). I still blog – occasionally – when I feel an urge to write more than 140 characters. Most of these either go on my "Tourism Place" blog (anything related to tourism) or my "Outside Looking In" blog (most anything else that I want to talk/rant about).

And, of course, I still have my academic articles and books, which I also enjoy writing – when I have time, which is not very often. So, perhaps what micro-blogging and blogging do for me is to allow the writing fluids to have an outlet during the school year when I am mostly consumed by teaching, which is what I should be doing now … instead of deleting spam comments on two-year old blog posts!