For a long time, capitalism was based on property rights over physical assets. However, tourism was never too affected by this matter. The sale of “packages”, transportation and hotel acommodations implied that a company possesed physical assets that would not sell but “lend” for a limited period of time. They charged for the “right to access” to temporary possession of a bus seat, a hotel room, the entrance to a determined place.

But tourism is not alone in this. As Jerome Rifkin in La era del acceso says, the whole economy has begun to transform into a huge field ruled by the charge of “access right”. Things that used to be sold permanently, today are being reached by the concept of leasing. In America, for example, a good percentage of the population rents a car from a certain company, pay per month, and after a determined period of time, get a new model. Instead of the definitive transfer of property, we find here a service based on periodic payments.

Something similar is trying to be replicated by companies that sell music through the internet. Before, buying an album meant its content was our property. Now, online stores lend songs: we can pay monthly to download a certain amount of songs, but if we stop paying, all the material becomes useless. Then, what’s relevant is that we can afford our monthly payments. Companies assure themselves fixed incomes and, of course, a lot more money to distribute.

In tourism, as we said before, none of this is new; access rights have always been charged for. But lately, we’ve seen how more and more things are touristified, turned attractive within a segmented market, thus being seen as part of the market supply. Museums of all kinds, tourist-oriented offers diversified to the maximum: it’s almost impossible to think what kind of human experience can not be seen or treated as merchandise.

Experience, at least in the touristic field, has long been commercialized as merchandise. The great news of this last decade is the vast extension of practices that could be merchandised by the industry, converted into packages, centered in a stage that treats the relation between the industry, natives and tourists only in function to its commercial profit.