Time as a Major Barrier to Sustainable Development

There are many barriers to sustainable development, including

1. Just defining what sustainable development is,
   
2. Trying to making connections between sustainability issues that exist at different scales (from personal to community to global),
   
3. Trying to make connections between sustainability issues that exist in different industries and activities (total life cycle costing issues), and
   
4. Deciding how to properly balance environmental, social and ecological issues.
   

Most of these issues are mentioned in 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 (please correct me if I am wrong) is the limitation of the human perception of time. "Be here now" is, unfortunately, how most of us behave too much of the time. It is extremely difficult to keep a long term time-horizon in mind in our day-to-day behavior and in our short-term, and even long-term, decision making.

For example, when we study major issues related to the environmental or social changes that the communities and the world in general have experienced, no matter what the methodology that we use, we are always limited to looking at one or more single slices of time. We take snapshots of the climate, of a glacier, of an ethnic group, of a city, and of an experience. We then assume that these snapshots from the past have some continuity and can, therefore, inform us of the current and future situation.

There are many problem with this approach.

First, the same problem can (and will) change over time. Problems do not exist in isolation. They are part of a larger ecosystem of influences, that are themselves influenced by external, and usually unpredictable, forces. All of these shape and influence the problem we are studying, morphing the it to something that could be very different from the time that the original data was collected.

Second, change is rarely linear. While we can hope that a linear regression formula of past data points will project in the same way into the future, we can never really know this. Unknowable catastrophic event are relatively common in the natural, social and business sciences (as any amateur economist would to attest to these days, if they were honest).

And third, human perception is inherently time horizon limited. We can probably make a pretty good prediction of the impacts of most of our actions over a very short time period -- say one day to one month or a little more. We can try to plan out activities for a year, but beyond that many people do not even think about it. (For some, even a year is such a challenge that they do not attempt it.) The reason for our lack of confidence in our planning time horizons is because we know that things change over time, and they usually change in a non-linear (i.e., non-predictable) manner.

The result of three time barriers is that we are better at seeing and acting upon short-term problems, and we are very bad at comprehending long term challenges, with the result being that we almost never take action on long term problems, even when most people agree that doom is impending. The largely unpredictable future freezes us in our tracks, and out of fear we cling to a belief that the long-term will be the same as today.

Unfortunately, issues of sustainability are almost always long-term, but the most common sustainability efforts tend to be short-term. Examples include making a decision whether or not to have your hotel towel washed or to reuse it, and trying to decide whether or not to install a very expensive home solar electrical system, even though you will earn your money back in the long run of ten years or so. We have made great progress in developing green certification programs that address immediate, short-term sustainability issues in different economic sectors (such as for hotels and travel providers). But we are at a loss as to how to deal proactively with global warming at a societal level.

We can think of sustainability issues at different time scale horizons. For example:

Short-Term / Immediate Emergency Issues

• Environmental Sustainability : More Pandemic Diseases
  
• Economic Sustainability : Job Losses; Windfall Profits
  
• Social Sustainability : Lack of Social Safety Nets
  

Near-Term Sustainability Impending Issues

• Environmental Sustainability : Loss of Coral Reefs
  
• Economic Sustainability : Shift in Job Locations & Types
  
• Social Sustainability : Increase in Global Internet Access
  

Long-Term Sustainability Visionary Issues

• Environmental Sustainability : Flooding of Coastal Cities
  
• Economic Sustainability : Need for New Types and Areas of Education
  
• Social Sustainability : Need for New Types and Forms of Governance
  

Long-term issues can be addressed at less cost and in a more gradual and less shocking manner if they are address early on. Over time, however, long-term issues will gradually become near-term and then short-term emergencies. Short-term and immediate issues are the most expensive and can require dramatic and sudden changes in policies, practices and behaviors.

Unfortunately, long-term solutions are also (1) the most difficult to project, because, as stated above, the problem will change over time, and (2) the most difficult to address because the limited time horizon of human perception makes political action almost impossible. But that does not mean that we should not try to think in terms of long-term sustainability in our personal behavior, our community actions, and our global outlook.

Alan A. Lew, Northern Arizona University. Originally posted on my Tourism Place blog.

On the Use and Abuse of Tourism Satellite Accounts

I posted a link to my blog post on Tourism is Not the World's Largest Industry! to the TRINET email discussion list, which is the largest email list for tourism academics worldwide. It generated a fair amount of discussion. One of the arguments used to support the importance of tourism as an industry was the Tourism Satellite Accounting system, which estimates the total economic and employment impact of tourism, taking into account the proportions of other industries that rely on tourism and travel in some way. (A satellite industry is any industry that is no part of the traditional core industries that comprise the System of National Accounts, which is the economic data commonly collected by all countries.)

An example of the statements that people made based on the TSA is seen in this post, which was also emailed to, and reposted on, eTurboNews:

• May 05, 2008: eTN Mailbox: Tourism is NOT the world's largest Industry, so stop saying it is!
  
  "Tourism is not an industry in the definition of "industry" as per the System of National Accounts (SNA) the measure of contribution to an economy (GDP). Tourism is a consumption group (all tourists, domestic & international) and hence the set up of the TSA, (Tourism Satellite Account) which is apart from SNA but draws data from SNA.
  
  So when one says one should exclude transport for example when comparing Tourism to say Transport, one of the worlds biggest industries, one is denying the contribution towards transport made by Tourism (consumption group) By definition Tourism overlaps a number of industries and is a combination of partial outputs of many industries. most only partially associated with tourism. Put another way, if Tourism consumption were to cease, this will result in a reduction of the output of a number of industries, the biggest of which is probably the transport industry.
  
  The development of the TSA has been very important in understanding the economic impact of an "industry" defined by tourists and their consumption for the 'industry' in getting recognition by the community and public sector, for planning purposes.
  
  At the end of the day, it might not be the biggest industry in the world, but it is one of the biggest both as an employer and economically speaking. We could not say this with confidence prior to the TSA."
  
  (Click Here to see the original article on eTurboNews.)

Well, I think we could easily say that tourism is one of the largest industries in the world prior to the TSA system. The World Trade Organization data clearly shows this, and their data is based on the System of National Accounts (SNA), which is the core economic data collected by each country. In addition, I am not sure who wants to exclude passenger transportation from tourism, though I would argue for excluding cargo transportation, as I did in my previous post.

Anyway, in response, I posted my own assessment of the Tourism Satellite Accounting System.

• "Well, of course I have my issues with how people use the TSA, as well...
  
  The TSA approach provides alternatives to traditional GDP and employment calculations, and which is probably more accurate in estimating the economic role of passenger travel and tourism in an economy. The best source [that I have seen] for understanding how this is done is this publication from the WTTC:
  
  http://wttc.travel/download.php?file=http://www.wttc.travel/bin/pdf/original_pdf_file/2008_methodology.pdf
  
  There are a couple of caveats to this approach. First, while it is based on the best available data, there are holes in that data and assumptions must be made on how to fill those holes. These assumptions may or may not be valid in reality.
  
  Second, the data only looks at travel and tourism. It does not provide a comprehensive input-output model that compares travel and tourism (however it is defined as a partial industry) to other industries. Given the fuzzy nature of the partial-industries that the satellite accounting system is designed to address, I am not sure how this could ever be done. But more importantly, it means that you can not say that travel and tourism is the largest industry, or that it is second or third etc., based on the satellite accounting system. You can not compare the results of a TSA exercise with the results of GDP exercise based on traditional national accounts. They are related, but different beasts.
  
  What you would need to do is to run a satellite accounting exercise on other industries, some of which may claim large parts of the core of passenger transportation and tourism -- which I think would decrease the totals that people are currently coming up with in the TSAs. Short of that, you can only say that t+t makes a certain contribution to a certain economy based on certain assumptions.
  
  A quick review on Google found that Tourism appears to be the only partial-industry that has whole heartedly adopted the satellite accounting approach. The only other hits that come up are suggestions to use the satellite accounting approach to develop a green accounting model.
  
  As I said before, please let me know what I am getting wrong here.
  
  Cheers, Alan"

To further clarify the limits of the TSA, let's say you want to compare Tourism with Food and Entertainment and Education. All of these are what Neil Leiper (2008) refers to as "partial industries" because they all overlap (see reference below). You can come up with a total economic impact for tourism, using the TSA, but that number includes portions of Food (e.g., restaurants), Entertainment (e.g., amusement parks), and Education (e.g., museums). But a Satellite Accounting System for each of those industries would also include profits and employees that are in the tourism economy. This is why adding up the total profits and employees of all possible industries would probably 10 to 100 time larger than the real economy - depending on how the different industries are identified and defined.

Furthermore, I would guess that a satellite accounting system for Food would result in economic and employment impacts at least as large as tourism, if not larger. It all depends on definitions. Food could include all agricultural production, investments and transportation, along with all places and ways that food is sold and served, and portions of all other businesses that support the production, selling, transport and disposal of food in the world. Also included would be research and development of food, dietitians and other medical and quasi-medical diet clinics, food related television shows and books, and everyone employed in all of these roles. This is a huge economy and has a huge overlap with tourism.

My conclusion is that a satellite accounting system should NEVER be used to compare one industry with another because: (1) defining the boundaries of a satellite industries is subjective, flexible and easily changed; (2) anything can be defined as a satellite industry; and (3) the overlap between satellite industries varies and is not taken into account when comparisons are made.

TSA numbers can be used to benchmark industry changes over time, if definitions are fixed and not changed. They can also be used to see the degree to which tourism overlaps with different sectors of the economy. These are valuable planning tools. But, the TSA can not be used to claim that tourism is larger than any other specific industry, because under the satellite accounting system approach, each industry has a different definition.

One respondent in the "NOT Largest Industry" discussion on TRINET stated:

• "TSA provide insights into where tourists spend, the extent to which different sectors gain from tourist spending, and the extent to which individual sectors are dependent upon tourism.TSA can serve as a medium for public information helping to raise awareness of tourism and its contribution to national economies. They help tourism stakeholders to better understand the economic importance of this activity; and by extension its role in all the industries involved in the production of goods and services demanded by visitors. TSA thus help to legitimize or give credibility to the tourism industry as a main economic sector in the minds of politicians and the general public."

And another person stated that:

• "The technique is good but without the data it comes back to the rubbish in rubbish out syndrome. Also TSAs may show the significance of tourism they do not show the economic impact of tourism - for this you need the input-output model or CGE. But more fundamental to whatever model is used, the data collected relating to tourist expenditure globally is generally poor and without that the estimation of the size of the industry is impossible."

But I am still puzzled as to why passenger travel and tourism is the only industry that is using the satellite accounting approach to measure its impact...


PS: the following two related readings was posted in the TRINET discussion list:

• Neil Leiper, Why ‘the tourism industry’ is misleading as a generic expression: The case for the plural variation, ‘tourism industries’ - Tourism Management 29 (2008) 237–251
• UNWTO's "2008 Tourism Satellite Account: Recommended Methodological Framework" at: http://unstats.un.org/unsd/statcom/doc08/BG-TSA.pdf
• WTTC's Methodology for producing the 2008 WTTC/OE Travel & Tourism Simulated Satellite Accounts, World Travel and Tourism Council and Oxford Economics, March 2008: http://wttc.travel/download.php?file=http://www.wttc.travel/bin/pdf/original_pdf_file/2008_methodology.pdf

UPDATE (6May08):

The following list was sent to me today. These are a sampling of items that are included in the WTTC's calculation of the Global Tourism Satellite Account, collected from the WTTC document cited above. They demonstrate the subjectivity and arbirary nature of the satellite accounting approach, and what the sender called "the WTTC-everything-and-the-kitchen-sink method of estimating the contribution of travel and tourism to the global economy."

• 100% of boats with motor (even though the boat owner may never travel beyond the 50 mile distance perimeter, which is the criterion for being classified a 'traveler.')
• More than 29% of all towing charges
• More than 35% of all VCR and video disk players
• Almost a third (29%) of all vehicle purchases and vehicle insurance
• More than 38% of all treadmills (sports, recreation and exercise equip)

From the document: "Because the Federal Railroad Administration runs Amtrak, its entire budget was also counted as 100% Travel & Tourism."

• US Federal Aviation Administration 89.70%
• US Federal Highway Administration 22.47%
• US Federal Railroad Administration 100.00%
• US National Park Service 100.00%
• US Fish & Wildlife Service 100.00%

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[All of this was originally posted on the Tourism Place Blog]

Tourism is NOT the World's Largest Industry - So Stop Saying It Is!

(originally posted on my Tourism Place blog)

It is the end of the semester and I am marking term papers. Few things drive me more crazy in doing this than coming across quoted and cited claims that tourism is the world's largest industry. Tourism is NOT the world's largest industry. (see this, for example)

Tourism actually ranks about 6th in international trade, after trade in fossil fuels, telecommunications and computer equipment, automotive products, and agriculture (based on World Trade Organization data). It is just slightly smaller than agriculture, and given the fuzziness of all numbers of this kind, tourism at best might be 5th, just ahead of agriculture.

Tourism is the world's largest Service Sector Industry, in terms of international trade, as all of the other industries listed above are merchandise product industries. Note that this is for international trade and does not include domestic trade -- data for which is extremely variable from one country to the next. Also, there is no Tourism Industry in the World Trade Organization's data. Instead, I came up with an estimate of the Tourism Industry (see below) based on data for the (1) Travel Services, (2) Transportation Services, and (3) Personal-Cultural-Recreation Services.

For details, I provide the following from a draft version of a textbook that I am working on related to tourism impacts and tourism planning (should be out in late Summer/early Fall 2008). If someone can conclusively demonstrate that the analysis below is not correct, I will be grateful. ...

The travel and tourism industry is the world’s largest commercial service sector industry. The World Trade Organization (WTO, not to be confused with the UN World Tourism Organization (UNWTO)) is the leading international body that monitors international macroeconomic data. The data follows the value of imports and exports between countries and across major economic sectors that are grouped into either Merchandise or Commercial Services.
Travel and tourism are part of the WTO’s Commercial Services group, but is not encompassed under a single category. Intead, the WTO includes a Transportation category and a Travel category. The WTO defines these categories as:

• Transportation covers all transportation services that are performed by residents of one economy for those of another and that involve the carriage of passengers, the movement of goods (freight), rentals (charters) of carriers with crew, and related supporting and auxiliary services. (United Nations et al. 2002: 36)
  
  
• Travel covers primarily the goods and services acquired from an economy by travellers during visits of less than one year to that economy. The goods and services are purchased by, or on behalf of, the traveler or provided, without a quid pro quo (that is, are provided as a gift), for the traveller to use or give away. In addition, a traveller is an individual staying for less than one year in an economy of which he or she is not a resident for any purpose other than (a) being stationed on a military base or being an employee (including diplomats and other embassy and consulate personnel) of an agency of his or her government, (b) being an accompanying dependent of an individual mentioned under (a), or (c) undertaking a productive activity directly for an entity that is a resident of that economy. (United Nations et al. 2002: 38-39)

Although the WTO data includes both imports and exports, this discussion focused on exports as, from a destination community perspective, they have a more direct visible impact on a destination’s economy although in macroeconomic terms they are of equal importance. For tourism, exports are the receipts that a country received from the money that tourists spend at the destination (as discussed above), while imports are the expenditures that residents make when they travel outside of their home country. The difference between the two is called the tourism balance of trade or tourism balance of payments. In the case of the EU for example in 2005, tourism expenditure and receipts were nearly in balance with expenditure of €235.6bn, and receipts from tourism of €232.6bn. About two-thirds of EU Member States were in surplus. A measure of the economic significance of tourism to the countries concerned is that receipts exceeded expenditure by a factor of two or more in Greece (4.5), Spain (3.2), Malta (2.8), Portugal (2.6) and Cyprus (2.5) (European Communities 2007).

In 2006 Transportation Services (not all of them carrying tourists) accounted for 22.9% of international exports in commercial services, while Travel Services (mostly the hospitality industry, and excluding transportation) made up 27.1%. Compared to other commercial service sectors, the Travel Services sector has steadily declined in its relative importance since 2000 when it accounted for 32.1% of international exports in services. Transportation Services have remained roughly stable over that time period. All other Commercial Services (including communications, construction, finance, insurance, recreation, and computer services) comprised the balance of service sector trade (see also Coles and Hall 2008).

There were 704 million air passenger trips taken in 2006, and air and sea passengers together accounted for about 25% of the Transportation Services sector, though regionally it ranged from 20.1% in the EU to 33.3% in the US (WTO 2007b). The rest of this sector is mostly freight transportation. In addition, a record 842 million international travelers spent a record US$745 billion in 2006 (WTO 2007a, 2007b). International tourist receipts grew 9% in 2006 over 2005, and while not the fastest growing sector in international trade, its steady growth and relatively low entry costs make tourism an attractive option for countries and communities seeking to develop the service sector of their economies to expand job opportunities.

A Tourism Sector can be estimated from the WTO data for Travel Services, passenger Transportation Services (excluding freight), and the recreation portion of the Other Commercial Services sector. Together, this Tourism Sector makes up a third of all commercial services, and about 6.4% of all international exports, including merchandise products. The Tourism Sector is the sixth largest sector of the global economy based on the WTO’s categories, following trade in fossil fuels, telecommunications and computer equipment, automotive products, and agriculture (WTO 2007a, 2007b).


UPDATE (3May08):

I recently got my hands on some financial projections for 2008 from the World Travel and Tourism Council (WTTC, an international lobbying group mostly for airlines and hotels -- at least that is how I define them). They estimate that travel and tourism will comprise:

US$2,008 billion in 2008, which would be 3.4% of total global GDP
- This is about twice the total of US$916 billion for 2006 that I came up with above, though only about half the global percentage.

My number of $916 billion in 2006 is only for international trade, not for GDP, and not for domestic tourism and travel. So a doubling of my number to include domestic travel makes a fairly rough estimate of the total global size of the travel and tourism economy in dollars (or any other currency). (The World Tourism Organization, UNWTO, estimated that 15.8% of all overnight trips in 2005 were international, while the remaining 84.2% were domestic. Domestic trips typically involve lower per/person/day expenditures.)

However, the WTTC also uses what is known as the Satellite Accounting approach, which tries to estimate the degree to which other economic sectors contribute to and benefit from tourism and passenger transportation. Based on that approach, they estimate that in 2008, travel and tourism will comprise US$5,890 billion, or 9.9% of total world GDP.

A couple of caveats need to be considered here. First, the WTTC never clearly shows how it comes up with its numbers. I have been trying to find this, and have even emailed them requesting it. So I am not convinced that their numbers are anything more than very rough estimates.

In addition, my sense is that when an industry adopts a satellite accounting system (which originated in France as an attempt to show the size on non-traditional industries), that they approach this by basically keeping all their original core data, and then grabbing portions of sectors that are near them. As a result they all end up with larger numbers and larger percentages. Other economic sectors do the same, grabbing part of the core travel and tourism industry that might be better placed in financial services or advertising industries. In the end, of course, this all adds up to well over 100%, which can be addressed in an all-encompassing input-output model. But it is unclear to me that the WTTC, and others who use the satellite accounting system, take that broader perspective.

Now I could be totally wrong on this, but I have yet to see someone explain it with real numbers in any other way. So, I suggest that you take the $6 billion and 10% GDP numbers with a huge rock of salt -- and be wary of using it in any term papers that you submit in my classes.

UPDATE (4May08):

Sat, May 3, 2008 at 9:03 PM, Neil Leiper wrote (reposted here with permission):

G'day Alan

Tonight I read your item entitled "tourism is NOT the 'world's largest industry' ". Well Done! Tourism academe would be improved if there were more professors like yourself who can not only see thru the feeble-minded nonsense put about by WTO & its acolytes (in academe - notably dim-witted textbook writers, in government, in consulting, in the media) but are willing and able to challenge them in this manner!

I urge you to go further, please.

Tourism is not "an industry". Attempts to pin it down in that way are doomed to failure and every attempt I've seen is pathetically weak. Tourism is like all the other "isms". It's a form of human behaviour and the theories and ideologies that shape it. C/F idealism, communism, heroism etc.

As such, tourism is supported, partly, by distinctive industries - we can reasonable and realistically call them 'tourism industries'. They do not sum to one distinctive industry. See my article on plural industries which is in press at "Tourism Management". It dissects all known theories that might support the concept on one giant tourism industry and concludes that they are all defective, but various concludes that many tourism industries exist; each a collection of business organisations, some large and complex, most small and simple, some overlapping.

In fact you (anyone) can listen to my conference presentation on that topic. It's on the internet, recorded at CAUTHE 2006 by Martin Fluker in Melbourne. I don't have the site on hand, but I recall it's titled "Professor Leiper expounds ...".

I note above that tourism (the beahviour of tourists) is supported PARTLY by distinctive industries. It's always like that. It's a partially industrialised phenomenon. Like sex. Like sport. Like education, etc.

See a paper in press at Current Issues in Tourism ("Partial Industrialisation in Tourism: A New Model", by Neil Leiper, Lloyd Stear, Nerilee Hing and Tracey Firth. As you will see, it has detailed theoretical discussion, plus empirical evidence, from three researchers who have tested my theory of PIIT.

I put a note about these papers on the tourism strategic management discussion site set up by Fevzi. In the few months since, there has not been a single comment!! Is this more evidence of intellectual decadence in tourism academe? Or is it too soon to tell?

regards
Neil Leiper
Southern Cross University

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...And separately, Click Here for a recent news article that also states the world's largest industry claim.

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On the road to a moneyfree future?

Mark Boyle's project sounds fascinating. A few days ago he left his hometown Bristol to embark on a journey of 9000 miles, a pilgrimage to the birth place of Mahatma Gandhi in India. Boyle, 28, is expecting to walk for 2 and half years until he reaches his destination. What really stands out: Boyle plans to walk without any money, credit cards or exchangeable material values. He is planning to offer his skills to the people he meets in exchange for food. Money - he believes -destroys community. In his blog he explains:

From this point on I endeavour to never touch money again. A strong claim I know and one that seems unrealistic at best. And one I am sure I'll be lambasted for if I fail. And probably even get criticised for if I succeed. But why strive for anything other than your ideals in life, why aim for something less than that you believe in. I have compromised too much in my life so far, spending my time fighting against the symptoms of greed, insecurity and fear. From now on I will live my life the way in which I believe life becomes more beautiful. No more compromises. No more battling against symptoms. Now is the time for social homoeopathy.

Boyle used to be an entrepreneur with a dot.com business, but for a few years already he has been advocating for an economy without money. The Freeconomy community is about sharing skills and knowledge.

Freeconomy allows people to make the transition from a money based communityless society to more of a community based moneyless society, and to share the land they don't need or can't use to facilitate a local food community. In essence, freeconomy is about making dinner for a friend who was yesterday a stranger (...)

Freeconomy has over 3000 members in 56 countries offering skills, land and knowledge to other members.
Boyle's journey will be documented by the people he meets on the way. He will equip them with the password for this blog and thereby allow them to update it. He is also planning to regularly report from his trek.
I find this project truly amazing, because of its determination, its idealism and its gentleness, however I would like to raise two things I find worth reflecting here:
For one, he might get along without money, but he surely took a passport with him. As it seems unlikely that he is managing to charm the guardians of the diverse nation states he will have to cross into letting him through without identification. And if he tried? What kind of message would that be? Millions of people have to struggle with national borders in their pursuit of happiness; hundreds die every year, because they have to bypass the control of national borders. Surely nation states are as troublesome in our world as the existence of money.
Then, secondly, what do we know about money? Can we really blame the poor state of the world on the existence of abstract forms of exchange? Freeconomy puts it like this:

Birds don't have money, trees don't use money and as far as I know earthworms have never heard of such a ridiculous concept. Money, in any human language today, gets translated to mean security. It's insurance against the universe, nature and the rest of humanity letting us down and not providing for us. No money = No security.

His arguement is that the false security of money makes us strive for profit and credit, while real security comes from community, from living with people, sharing and loving each other.
This argument is based on a very modern fallacy. The picture of an ideal community in which people live together authentically is posited against the mediocre alienated state of the affairs we live in. This ideal community is likened to nature, to birds and earthworms, where a perfect harmonic balance exists. This balance of course is the cruel reality of natural live, in which the very human capacity of morality doesn't exist.
The critiques of capitalism often overlook, that - as Max Weber has pointed out - capitalism is not ruthless and without morals, but quite the contrary. Capitalism was founded on moralist arguments against ruthless profit-making and luxury. Moreover it is this quality that made it so successful. Capitalism is based on humans’ wishes to make the world a better place.

It is good to walk out and spread the word of human love and understanding. Boyle's pilgrimage will surely teach him and others a lot. Hopefully however it will also make him reconsider his basic argument: Money is not the issue: The most radical changes in the last 500 years, including the development of the global money based economy were caused by people with good intentions.

Interdisciplinary Workshop Series

Call for Contributions:
Interdisciplinary Workshop Series “Major Concepts in Tourism Research”
March to May 2008
Leeds/ UK

Much research in the field of tourism addresses at least one of the following concepts: Exchange, Memory, Representation and Experience. Although these concepts are very popular, it is not at all obvious what they actually refer to, and how we may be able to grasp them in our research.

Therefore, the PhD-students at the Centre for Tourism and Cultural Change at Leeds Metropolitan University are organizing four workshops. Each of these workshops will extend over two days during which we will discuss intensively one of the concepts. The discussions will be based to a large extent on the contributions of the participants. Thus, we invite PhD-students from all disciplines to present short papers. PhD-students may also contribute ideas and critiques of articles, which we will distribute before the workshops. The contributions do not have to be polished conference papers but can be presentations of ideas related to the particular workshop theme. The papers will be circulated among the other participants 10 days before the respective workshop to promote lively and engaged discussion. People can also attend without presenting any formal contribution.

Furthermore, we have invited an expert on the specific topic for each workshop to give an introductory keynote and lead the discussions. On the basis of their introductions we will explore meanings and different approaches to the concepts. This constitutes a unique opportunity for PhD-students to get feedback on their reflections and work in progress by leading academics and other PhD-students, sharing and developing ideas in relation to the four themes addressed.

Cost: £20.00 for one workshop. You can also register for all four workshops for £60.00.

Please register for one single workshop or the whole series not later than 17 February 2008 by either sending an abstract of about 200 words or stating by how you intend to relate to the topic of the workshop.

Please note that the deadline for submission of the papers and contributions for the first workshop is 29 February 2008. E-Mail: C.Mueller@leedsmet.ac.uk

Timetable of the Workshop-Series

13/14 March 2008 Workshop “Experience”
Keynote: Claudio Minca, University of London
“After the Island: the hard work of being (with) tourists”

3/4 April 2008 Workshop “Exchange”
Keynote: Keith Hart, Goldsmith College London
"On commoditization: exchange in the human economy"

17/18 April 2008 Workshop “Memory”
Keynote: Sharon MacDonald, Manchester University
“Memory, Materiality and Tourism”

8/9 May 2008 Workshop “Representation”
Keynote: David Crouch, University of Derby
“The Problems with Representation: Consumption, Space and Images”

Tourism as the last Utopia?

In an interview with the e-zine atopia, antropologist Marc Auge has agured that tourism might be the last Utopia. He explains:

Despite appearances, the everyday world already knows some utopias. Tourism is one of these. The tourist is the one who is able to imagine the whole of the planet as places of transition. This utopia can be judged in two different ways. Either one considers that this is the final stage of the consumer society, you are sold movement, displacement, with some sun or sand to boot. Individuals buy their capacity to move and one is therefore at the limit of the system. According to the utopian perspective, the individual who moves around, who is unattached or, more precisely, who plays with attachments, free to choose these bonds, seems to me to have a highly commendable value. Quite the opposite of solitude then, a freedom of choice that no longer roots itself in identity, a given culture.

Auge is well known and has been critized a lot for his notion of non-places, in which he described airports and shopping malls to be lacking of a distinct local quality. In his discussion here of tourism as utopian he repeats a fallacy that often governs the thinking of modernism from the perspective of a "post".
Tourism is used here, as it is frequently and by no way without sense, as a metaphor of modernism while the tourist becomes an expression, an examplification of modern man. Modernism is conceived as a condition in which the individual identity looses its authentic and genuine reference to one place. The tourist, that is the modern person, is able to imagine the whole of the planet as places of transistion, places to play, in which no attachment of any seriousness is needed anymore, no foundation in a given culture or identity.
The problem with this view is of course, that it doesn't understands the dialectic of attachment and play, or of necessity and freedom to use the concepts of Hannah Arendt. While the modern man is understanding himself as being homeless and uprooted, the promise of freedom that this situation seems to entail is seriously hampered by his own constant fear, that - really - this apparent freedom is an illusion. Auge's postulation of a tourist utopia has often been described by authors both in literature and in theory. For Adorno as much as for Guy Debord, the fun and spectacle of a modern society of tourists was the place of a dystopian horror of the same uncanny qualities as Huxley's brave new world: Drugged into consent by the cultural industries, human beings lost their capacity to critically reflect their condition and lost their freedom altogether.
Hannah Arendt has convincingly argued (in the human condition) that modernity is marked by a loss of understanding about the relation of necessity and freedom. The conditionality of human life is linked to its transcendence and therefore man cannot be free without an understanding of her conditions because freedom means nothing but the repeated transcendence of conditions and necessity. While modern man might feel free and uprooted, he really has lost the understanding and capacity to see the conditions that govern her life. This makes modern politics at the same time inherently utopian (a free society seems near) and paranoid (as a conspiracy is always threatening to spoil the promise).
The utopian value that Auge argues for is nothing new, but remains firmly in the realm of modern thinking and concepts. Naively he repeats that it would be nice, if everybody was at play with their identity and cultures. The modern play he rightly observed is at place not only in the tourist encounters with locaties but in as much in the invention of tradition, the construction of imagined communities and the extinction of the ones we identify as conspiring against us. The modern play is dead serious. In as much our capacity to understand where we are actually located in this world is limited, we should be rather sceptical about the utopian promise of our apparent homelessness.

China's Online Travel Industry

The China Web2.0 Review blog recently covered several new Chinese travel sites, comparing them to some of the more popular US travel sites.

Comparing Some New Chinese Travel Websites

The author of that blog post concludes that "Overall, None of these websites seems really impressive. They are still far behind Ctrip on user base. I think adding more innovative ideas like personalized travel plan similar to what Yahoo Travel and TripHub did may help them gaining ground in the online traveling market."

I have an article in this month's (Oct 2007) issue of the Far Eastern Economic Review. Unfortunately, my article (titled "China's Growing Wanderlust"), cannot be seen without a paid subscription. One of the topics that I cover in that article is the state of online travel in China. A few points that I make are:

1. Although online travel bookings in China grew 72 percent in 2006 to over 2.75 million bookings, valued at 1.54 billion yuan (US$204 million), it pales in comparison to the US, where the online travel market generated revenues of US$83 billion in 2006.
2. Chinese consumers have been wary of both online transactions and the use of credit cards (both on- and off-line).
   
3. Chinese travel agents discourage online bookings because they pay higher credit card fees online (1.0%) compared to in person (0.1%). So the approach to online travel in China is to direct the public to call centers for information and bookings, and to travel agency offices for cash transaction.
   
4. Successful online travel agencies in China negotiate special travel packages at favorable prices that are attractive to the middle and upper classes, who are also more willing to use credit cards and pay a little more for the convenience of online travel bookings.
   
5. The biggest online travel agency, by far, in China is Ctrip.com, which accounted for 54.2% of online sales in 2006, followed by eLong.com with 17.8 percent of the market. Expedia.com owns 52 percent of eLong.com, but also has its own China website this year.
   

Although struggling now, many expect China's online travel market to explode in the coming years as more people enter the middle class and the use of plastic (credit cards) becomes more widespread. -- With trends like that, no wonder that the Shanghai stock market is booming these days!

(This blog entry was originally posted on my Web 2.0 Travel blog. - Alan)

What is Travel 3.0 ?

From the many podcasts that I listen to, I have basically heard of two definitions for Web 3.0:

1. Web-Everywhere Technology - Always connected portable technology
2. Total Immersion Web - Virtual worlds and MMOGs

Web 1.0 was the static, expert knowledge web. Web 2.0 is the interactive, user knowledge web. So these definitions of Web 3.0 as an always connected technology and total environment knowledge web make sense to me.

And either way, the significance for travel and tourism is enormous. An everywhere web is a traveling web. It means being connected when you travel locally to work, to the grocery store, to the gym, as well as on business trips and family holidays. The Web 2.0 tools that I review on my Web 2.0 Travel Tools blog are among the leaders into this everywhere web space, which I predict will move toward greater convergence in the coming decades.

I have personally not bought into the the Second Life virtual world phenomenon, which I think is far from ready for prime time. In the long run, however, I think that online virtual worlds will become an important way of communicating with other people, initially, and with distant environments, ultimately. The newly emerging Web 2.0 sites that have video tours of hotels and destination are important baby steps in this directions -- even more so than the experimental hotel building in Second Life because they are more accessible for the masses.

Travel 3.0 is clearly not here, yet. However, because we can conceptualize it -- imagine what it will be like -- it is an important force shaping the visions of todays Travel 2.0 engineers and entrepreneurs.

UPDATE: Check out the Sunverse.net blog, which is "All about Virtual Worlds and the Tourism Industry". The site mostly focuses on the development of real world tourism destinations in Second Life.

UPDATE: March 26, 2008: Bill Ryan, heard on Kenradio.com : "Web 2.0" was setting interoperability standards (including AJAX and web services, etc.) and creating communities and user-generated content. Web 2.0 was very exploitative of user generated content. "Web 3.0" is engaging more professionals to create user-generated data/content communities by compensating them. Also the semanitic web as the new tech-side supporting the new communities.

What would this mean for the travel and tourism industry? I am not sure. As an academic working on a couple of textbooks during my sabbatical, I think it is involving other academics who may adopt my books to create teaching and learning communities that provide value both for the teachers, students and the world at large. I had not thought about the potential role of compensation -- but am considering it now. I will be working on this over the summer.
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(Originally posted on my Web 2.0 Travel Tools Blog - Alan A. Lew)

The world is smaller than you think!

Social networking sites and the web 2.0 are growing massively. Several projects, from Facebook to MySpace are drawing more and more people in. I just recently signed up for facebook myself, to become a member of a network that was set up in there as an organzing tool for a real life network at Uni. But will we really use it, I am not sure. Despite their popularity no one really seem to be quite sure yet, whether facebook and myspace will transform social organization or honestly are just a huge waste of time.
This is totally different, from my perspective, in a specific set of servises, in which the rationale for networking is to allow the members to benefit from mutual hospitality across a web-based global community. It is highly intresting to assess Web 2.0 relevance to travel.
Signing up in Couch-Surfing or Hospitality Club, the two main providers in this field will avail you with 1000s of open invitations to stay as people’s guests, free of charge, on a couch or sofa, in a guest room or at least camp in the garden. I became acquainted with the systems last year and used it extensively recently on a trip through California. I have to say, I am a fan!
I met very friendly people in San Franzisko, Santa Barbara and in LA, they not only took me in but also showed me around, offering their insights into the local restaurant szene and bars as much as their lives.
Looking at it with a bit more perspective it quickly becomes obvious how intresting the issues is for travel and tourism studies. Hospitality Club (HC) is the older version, dating back to 2000 and has by now over 300.000 members in all continenets. Couch-Surfing (CS) started bit later, but quickly grew to over 250.000 today. These numbers don’t seem significant when compared to general tourism statistics. Yet there groth rates are amazing and there is not an end in sight. How does it function?
I entered HC first, last summer and then tried in on a short trip to Bratislava. I contacted a few people as offered in the list and got feedback from one member. She said her housemate wouldn't want to allow her to have people stay this time, but she was willing to show me around in Bratislava. Happily I accepted and we met and she showed me around, giving me insights into the town and her take on the cities situation that I would have missed without HC.

What makes the voluntary exchange intresting to tourism studies is the challenge is poses to the hospitality industry. As one user puts it: “"Who wants to sit in a lonely hotel?" Staying in annoynous and expensive housing is not necessarily convinient. Moreover it seems that despite calls for "post-tourism" and its claim that all tourists today relate with some ironic distance to the world of travel, HC and CS show that people still invest heavily into the idea of authentic travel experience and are actively looking for alternatives to commodified tourist scapes.
Moreover the extensive community and networking functions that the web provided are themselves restructuring the social realities of travel. Communities from in these sites are not remaining virutal, but realized themselves in festivals and camping events, organized in several places and of different geographical scope. A CS member from Leeds recently invited me to a Leeds members meeting in Hydepark in my neighborhood. And so through the help of a global networking page I might end up making friends just blocks away from my house.

Research should be undertaken into these sites and their communities as they are actively transforming the way travel works. I will keep my eyes open and hope that I see you soon on HC and CS.

Blogging About Tourism and Travel

Thanks to Fabian for adding me as a contributor to the N.E.T. I have several other tourism-related blogs and will post items related to the goals of N.E.T. here, as well. This first item is a bit peripheral to the new economics of tourism, but I think it would still be of interest to N.E.T. readers... Cheers, Alan
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I recently sent out a question to some 1000 or so tourism academics (professors, lecturers, graduate students, and other researchers) on email discussion lists, asking them "Do You Blog?" The purpose was to see how blogging is used by tourism academics. A summary of my findings can be found here:

http://tourismplace.blogspot.com/2007/05/why-dont-we-blog-university-faculty.html

The major categories or types of blogs that people told me about include:

• Blogging about Tourism
• Blogging for Classes and Students
• Research (and) Blogs
• Personal Travel Blogs
• Podcast Blogs
• Email Lists as Blogs

For a full summary and links to those who responded to my query, click on the link above. Here, I am going to cover the more general topic of blogging about travel and tourism.

In my informal survey, above, I found a handful of people who are doing things in each of the areas that I listed. However, even though blogging has been around for about a decade, the higher education arena seems to be taking it up only now. Travel blogs, on the other hand, have been popular with the general traveling public for several years now. That is actually how I got started blogging -- by being encouraged by my daughter to keep a travel blog of a particularly interesting trip that I took June 2005.

Travel blogs have become incredibly popular because people like to talk about their trips. In addition, because they are in the public arena (on the Internet), they also provides an ever growing opportunity for tourism researchers. In my summary above, there were more people using blogs for research purposes than anything else -- including five research papers that I know of that have been (or will soon be) submitted for publication in academic journals.

There are a lot of travel blogging websites available. I, personally, use Blogger.com (aka blogspot.com; owned by Google.com) for almost all my blogging, simply because they can all be accessed from one "dashboard." However, by doing so I am not getting the many other features that specialized trip diary blog sites provide -- such as easy photo and video uploads, trip mapping, and social networking. Some of these specialized travel blogs include:

1. VCarious.com
2. TripConnect.com (formerly TripMates.com)
3. WAYN.com
4. Travelpod.com
5. MyLifeOfTravel.com
6. 43Places.com
7. TripConnect.com

Click on each of these to read a mini review that I have written of them over the past year.

In addition to these "consumer" travel blogging sites, there are other blogs that are more professional, travel industry, and destination marketing oriented. A few examples of these are:

• PinoyTravelBlog.com – A Filipino Guide to the Philippines
• Gadling.com – Professional Travel Writers - collaborative blog
• Roads Less Traveled - by Scott Ahlsmith of The Travel Institute
• VagaBlond - Collaborative Travel Blog about “Fashionable Travel”
• Geeky Traveller – A Travel Blog for Nerds
  
• Written Road – Tips for Travel Writing
  
• Up In The Air - about Tourism and Climate Change by the Icarus Foundation
  
• Carbon Neutral Tourism
  

So there is a lot out there. Blogs are a one of the oldest and most fundamental parts of the long-tail economy, the attention economy, and the social/new media economy. To talk and teach about the new economics of tourism requires an understanding of the blogosphere. And I think that the best way to do that is to read blogs and to write blogs!

Note: You can subscribe to blogs and read them as you would an online newspaper by using an RSS agregators, such as Google Reader or Rojo.com (two that I have used), or Bloglines.com (very popular).

"'Voluntourism' becomes popular"

and more commerically exploited. Newpaper articles and online reports about voluntourism and voluntourists have surely increased in recent months.
A short query shows this. Publications like desertnews conclude in April this year conclude "that consumers are becoming more interested in vacations with a voluntarism aspect".
Also the LA Times observes that "Whatever the reason, more tourists — such as college students on spring break, jet-setting luxury travelers and retiring baby boomers — are using their vacations to volunteer". Whatever the reason....well, we want to know.
The recent surge in interest in voluntourism goes back to the Tsunami Catasrophy in Thailand in Winter 2004 that triggered the involvement of tourists into relief efforts. What initially was a spontaneaus reaction of travelers and tourists to help in a situation of need soon transformed into a new form of organized travel. The NGO Tsunami Volunteer Centre (TVC) in Thailand provides an example of this process.
Even before the hype that the theme of voluntourism experienced, academic research has approached voluntourism. After serveral empirical studies, Stephen Wearing wrote a book about the voluntourism in 2001 in which he assumed that voluntourists are developing their selves in their practise. A little later Sally Brown and Xinran Letho discussed that there we two different tendencies in the term Voluntourism, one sifginifing the fact that volunteer work often involved travel, the other that travel sometimes, and as they argued increasingly, involved a bit of volunteer work. (Brown and Letho 2005) This second tendency can also be described as a commericalization of the voluntourism. Brown and Letho are entirely optimistic about this new development. They imagine the implementation of elements of volunteering into mainstream tourism will "create authentic cultural experiences unlike any other in the industry" while "enabling every traveller to become an embassador of peace". But they open little room for the reflection of historical continuity of international charity practises in western culture. Methodologically their focus on the travellers involved in the practises ignores the reflection of the larger political economy in which tourism is taking and creating place. The commercialaztion of an individual desire to do good might provide a satisfying experience for both the traveller and the industry. Yet the local impact, the reaction of local participants in the exchange remains unreflected. Importantly than in the study of Voluntourism should focus on the bio-political production of subjectivities, the systems of assistance and dependence that evolve and how "meaningful" international travel exists in both a historical and contemporary international system of post- and neo-colonial powerstructures. A more critical approach to Voluntourism is indeed needed.

Informal Economies

We focus on aspects of the exchange taking place in tourism outside the frameworks of formalized regularization, for example public and private law.

Volun-tourism

Central to the concerncs of N.E.T is the current commerical hype of Volun-tourism.

Mission Statement

Issues of global distribution, social justice and environmental concern increasingly surround international tourism and travel. Not only are such issues defining new forms of tourism, they are also shaping far more fluid patterns of production and consumption. Processes of regulation, rationalisation and re-structuring are being re-cast in line with the highly complex and dynamic formation of informal structures, communicative practices, junctures and ruptures in a touristic world that escapes modernist notions of political economy. Destinations are being defined beyond the material notions of the nation-state, traditional mobilities are being challenged, motivations tested, and new forms of exchange are emerging in line with inter-and intra generational ethical thinking, and alternative political approaches to development.

A new weblog, based at the Centre for Tourism and Cultural Change (CTCC) at Leeds Metropolitan University, has been devised to interrogate the ‘new economics of tourism’ (N.E.T) – to transcend the narrow boundaries of contemporary tourism economics. N.E.T is a tool for networking and exchange between scholars and students reflecting on aspects of the new economics of tourism. From the operation of informal economies in tourism, to the alternative economics of exchange in ‘Volun-tourism’; from film and digital media’s post-geographical definition of destinations, to the individual bargaining of loss and gain in the expectation and practice of the journey, and the role of dreamscapes and virtual worlds in the tourist exchange, N.E.T seeks to provide a forum to explore original, alternative and challenging practices of, and approaches to, global tourism in the material, intangible and symbolic sense.

Contributions are invited from an international, multi-disciplinary range of scholars and institutions. N.E.T provides a convenient and illuminating proximity of breaking international news and lasting reflections on the issues addressed and serves as a global networking tool and as a resource for stakeholders in the expanding field of exchange and transformation that characterises global tourism. Proposals to contribute and participate are welcome.