Tourism Marketing: Producing Places/Consuming Places

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Tourism Marketing Producing Places/Consuming
Places
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Lecture Outline

• Elements of Tourism Industry
• Historical Development of Tourism
• Theories for Understanding (Post)Modern Place
  Marketing
• Examples Tourism Marketing as Representation

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Concepts of Tourism

• A complex phenomenon
• A human experience
• A worldwide industry

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Characteristics of tourism

• Time
• Distance
• Travel
• Away from home
• Purpose in non-work related (leisure)

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Components of the tourism industry

• Transportation
• Accommodation
• Tourist attractions natural, built, created
• Travel agents
• Tour operators
• Travel-related services
• Government bodies national and international

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Experience Economy Tourism as consumption

• Tourism, like leisure, can also be thought of in
  terms of CONSUMPTION!
• The tourist product e.g., a package holiday

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Tourism and Leisure

• Tourism can be considered to be a form of leisure
• Tourism (as leisure activity) has developed as a
  commercial activity
• Is now a major earner, makes major contribution
  to the economy

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Development of tourism

• Can trace its progressive development
• from INDIVIDUAL TRAVEL
• through groups and expeditions
• to MASS TOURISM
• to (INDIVIDUALIZED) MASS TOURISM (postmodern
  tourism)

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Developmental factors

• Tourism requires people with
• ABILITY (money and time)
• MOBILITY (transport) and
• MOTIVATION (desire, determination)
• to travel
• A history of tourism is a history of the
• development of these three factors

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Travel in Ancient Societies(Egypt and Greece)

• Empires grew, and business travel increased
  (administration of the regions)
• Evidence also of pleasure trips - festivals,
  and Olympic Games
• Pyramids, tombs and temples were the wonders of
  the ancient world
• Prompted travel to see them gazed upon

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Travel in the Roman Empire

• Travel flourished
• Trade and military activity encouraged excellent
  roads (some still in existence)
• Common language and currency
• Romans sought to escape the cities in summer heat
• Moved to seaside and hillside villas

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Travel in the Middle Ages

• 500 AD - Fall of the Roman Empire - roads
  fell into disrepair
• Travel became dangerous and difficult
• Undertaken largely on foot
• Undertaken for purposes of trade or religion only
  - e.g., pilgrimages
• Endured rather than enjoyed - travail!
• Most ordinary people would spend their lives in
  one fixed locality

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16th 17th Centuries

• Establishment of The Grand Tour - an
  aristocratic concept
• Taking a year out
• Aristocratic young men in the presence of their
  tutors
• Cultural and political education on a prescribed
  route
• France, Italy, Switzerland, Germany and the
  Netherlands
• Befitting men for life in politics at court

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17th 18th CenturiesMain focus Development of
Health Tourism

• Health resorts evolved across Europe
• Based on the supposed health-giving properties of
  the sea and mineral waters
• Led to the growth of seaside and spa resorts
  still popular today
• Spa towns - primarily for invalids
• e.g., Baden-Baden (Germany), Bath (England)
• Became fashionable resorts for those with
  leisure, money and transport

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18th 19th CenturiesPeriod of Industrialisation

• Major effect of industry on leisure and tourism
• Prior to this period, only the upper classes had
  ability, mobility and motivation to travel
  (horses and carriages)
• INDUSTRIALISATION created
• Working class with income
• Desire to escape from the city
• Steam transport for travel (trains, boats)

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18th 19th CenturiesMass Seaside Tourism

• Began due to
• Development of steam boats and trains (1832)
  linking urban and coastal areas
• First for freight, later, passengers
• Introduction of holidays (intended to improve
  productivity)
• Public holidays - when whole communities would
  travel en masse to the coast

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Portugal
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South-East England
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East-German Seaside Resort
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Mass Seaside Tourism

• Development of a tourism infrastructure
• Small fishing villages developed into resorts
• Blackpool, Ruegen, Biarritz
• Promenades
• Accommodation

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Mass Seaside TourismPackage Trips

• Development of package trips
• 1841 - Thomas Cooks first package trip

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Mass Seaside Tourism in England Social
differentiation

• Social differentiation of resorts depended on
  transport links
• Resorts linked to the northern industrial base
  were mainly working-class - Blackpool
• Southern resorts mainly middle-class -
  Bournemouth, Torquay
• Middle classes also discovered Europe - the
  Alps, the Riviera

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Early 20th Century

• 1920s and 30s saw legal holidays acts all over
  Europe - ensured week-long holidays, stimulated
  mass tourism
• Also, development of holiday camps
• Development of countryside holidays
• In 1939
• 30000 weekly campers on English camp grounds.
• Even more in Germany (although numbers difficult
  to decipher)

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Post Word War IIFurther growth in Tourism
Activity

• Social change
• War experience widened perspectives
• Stimulated desire to travel
• Increased leisure time and income
• Growth in car ownership
• Spread of five-day week
• Invention of the weekend
• new unit of free time

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Post Word War IIFurther growth in Tourism
Activity

• Development of hotel chains
• 1960s and 70s in Europe
• Tourism Acts
• Created national tourist boards for domestic and
  overseas tourism promotion
• The Canadian Tourism Commission was founded in
  1992

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Post Word War IIFurther growth in Tourism
Activity

• Increased foreign travel
• 1950s - 2 million Europeans took holidays
  abroad
• 1970s - 10 million abroad
• France and Spain (Costas) made up 1/3 of the
  market
• Product - sun, sea and sand

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Trends in the 1980s and 1990s

• Move towards more flexible holiday formats
• Villas, timeshares, self-catering
• Diverse Travel Formats
• Specialised Interest Areas
• Further technological improvements in
  Transportation

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Trends in the 1980s and 1990s

• Personalised packages
• Long-haul destinations for mass package holidays
  (e.g., Florida)
• Eco-tourism - environmentally aware tourism
• Growth in cultural and activity tourism
• Growth in short-break tourism
• demise of the two-week summer holiday
• postmodern lifestyles

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Late 90s and 21st Century

• Novelty and specialist tourism
• New destinations, man-made resorts
• Greater segmentation of the market
• ABILITY has increased - many have more free
  time, greater disposable income
• MOBILITY has increased - improved and cheaper
  travel technology
• MOTIVATION has increased

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Late 90s and 21st CenturyTourist Motivation

• MOTIVATION to participate in tourism has
• increased due to
• Substantial media exposure - has greatly raised
  consumer awareness
• Perceived need to escape the stress of
  postmodern urban lifestyles
• Recognition of frequent holidays as a necessity,
  rather than a luxury

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Postmodern Tourism

• Postmodern culture, leisure and lifestyles new
  forms of consumer-orientated, commodified leisure
  
• Leisure users are defined by their consumption
  patterns

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Characteristics of Postmodernismand Postmodern
Leisure and Lifestyles

• Simulation and hyperreality
• Fragmentation
• Individualisation

• Commodification
• Consumer sovereignty
• Time compression
• Style replaces substance

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Characteristics of Postmodernismwith leisure
examples

• INDIVIDUALISATION
• Central leisure institutions disappear
• Postmodern leisure focuses increasingly on
  individual consumption at the expense of
  traditional social group and community activity
• Relationships fluid. Networks instead of
  community. Socialities void of emotional
  dependence

• Leisure example
• Individualistic sports
• Independent and single travelling
• Electronic leisure games (Playstation, Nintendo,
  GameBoy, X-Box)
• Videos and interactive DVDs
• Home computing
• Much home-based leisure home is compartmented
  into individual leisure spaces

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Characteristics of Postmodernismwith leisure
examples

• Lifestyle advisers
• Solitary consumption of fast food replacing
  traditional communal family meal-times
• Relationships until further notice

• INDIVIDUALISATION
• Leisure examples (cont)
• Children having their own rooms, TVs and PCs
• Leisure shopping as personal consumption
• Personal trainers and individualised fitness
  workouts

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Characteristics of Postmodernismwith leisure
examples

• FRAGMENTATION
• The inability to maintain established boundaries,
  categories and relationships
• Consumption and production
• Work and home
• Private and public
• Vast amounts of leisure choice (20-screen
  multiplex cinemas numerous TV,satellite and
  cable channels)
• Built-in obsolescence (fast cars, designer
  clothes, consumer electronics and software)
• Ever more specialized consumer products

• Leisure examples
• Shopping as leisure
• Homeworking, housework, DIY and leisure
• Arts/entertainment continuum
• Leisure spaces in the home
• High, low and popular culture blurring of
  boundaries

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Characteristics of Postmodernismwith leisure
examples

• Leisure examples
• Virtual reality in leisure
• Man-made tourist attractions and resorts (Center
  Parcs, Sun City)
• Modern theme parks
• Disneyland
• Paintball
• Gladiators

• SIMULATION AND HYPERREALITY
• In postmodern leisure, simulated, man-made,
  contrived and inauthentic experiences predominate
  over the traditional and authentic

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Characteristics of Postmodernismwith leisure
examples

• COMMODIFICATION
• The transformation, packaging and marketing of a
  leisure-related service into a saleable product
• Arts products, leisure products, sports products,
  tourism products, etc.

• Leisure examples
• Tourist package holidays
• Gym fitness packages
• Celebrity signings of CDs at concerts
• The sale of sports packages by cable, satellite
  and internet
• Shopping as leisure

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Characteristics of Postmodernismwith leisure
examples

• COMMODIFICATION OF TIME
• Time in postmodern life is always in short supply
• Time can be exchanged for money through the
  purchase of labour-saving devices, employing home
  helps, buying convenience foods, etc
• This frees up time for use for leisure
• Time can be bought
• So time itself becomes a commodity

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BREAK!
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Postmodern Tourism Staging Authenticity

• Catering to the postmodern tourist who
• Seeks rapidly changing art/enter-/edutainment
• Seeks extraordinary and individualistic
  experiences
• Who expects experiences to be produced but
  presented as real
• Has not always time to cross the globe to visit.
• Who has been socialized into consuming by gazing
  - the tourist gaze is demanding

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The development of the tourist gaze

• Tourist landscapes are consumed by the tourist
  who gazes upon them
• The idea is of
• seeing as discovering
• interpreting the seen as aesthetically
  significant
• and determine its difference to the mundane.

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The tourist gaze

• The gaze is defined in terms of difference
• Perceived strangeness (but only to tourist)
• Exotic, pleasurable
• Distinguished by semiotics - signifiers and
  symbolic icons e.g., Eiffel Tower, the
  Pyramids, Taj Mahal
• rational work and seeks efficiency

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Authenticity

• The gaze is a construct
• How authentic are the images consumed?
• Tourism as pilgrimage a quest for the authentic
  
• Authenticity versus staged authenticity
• Staged authenticity protects hosts from
  intrusion, yet allows commercial benefits of
  tourism
• Can any form of tourism be totally inauthentic?

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Caves at Lascaux
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Caves at Lascaux
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Caves at Lascaux
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Romeo and Juliet in Verona
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Still there

• Capello and Montecchi, the families that
  Shakespeare turned into the Capulets and
  Montagues

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Evidence is overwhelming

• Shakespeares characters are fictitious.
• Most scholars believe that Shakespeare simply
  reworked an old drama by an Italian playwright.
• Lack of factual basis offset by imagination to
  fill in the gaps left by documentation.
• Entire package tours of tourists insist to see
  the site of the most romantic episodes in all of
  literature the immortal balcony scene.

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Casa di Guilietta, situated at No. 27 Via Cappello
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Authenticity?
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Authenticity?
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Staged Authenticity?
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Hawaii
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1920
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Today
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Also Today Hula Contest
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Staged Authenticity and Pseudo-EventsTourism as
the Production and Consumption of Simulation
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Producing the Lake District

• Nothing natural about it says beautiful tourist
  site
• So how come it is?
• Answer symbolic construction of difference
  though signs and images and cultural production
  in general.

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The place myth in three stages

• Discovery
• Interpretation (capacity of being in, seeing, and
  experiencing the site)
• Management of the discourse
• What activities are allowed or appropriate
• Physical and perceptual capacity
• Aesthetic dimensions
• Cultural hegemony (of taste, of language,
  mobility)
• Create attractions

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Established place myths

• Stonehenge
• Lake District

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Place myth under construction
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Summary

• History of tourism as the formation of the
  tourist gaze
• The patterns of tourism consumption TODAY are
  indebted to the forces socializing the tourist
  gaze.
• The production of place requires symbolic and
  cultural work!
• Authenticity is a historical and cultural
  construct.
• Authenticity as attraction superseded by staged
  authenticity as the attraction.
• Authenticity is a floating (ie., non-essential)
  concept