According to the english sociologists Scott Lash and John Urry, the main interest in the tourism industry, when constructing expert knowledge, is to guarantee tourists a higher security in their travel, thus minimizing risk.

It’s known that we can always travel on our own; this will surely be cheaper, but will leave us vulnerable to any problem we might have in our destination. That is, we’ll have to figure on our own a series of inconvenients in lodging, transportation or food, in an unfamiliar place.

Tours, packages and other organised trips solve this inconvenient; travel agency services allow us to minimize destination problems. And, if there’s any, the agency will fix it. Of course, there’s a central point here: many people are not in the economic conditions to afford this service. So security has a price tag that not everyone can afford.

I bring this topic in relation to the great motivation that’s being referred to when talking about the poor perfomance of world numbers in tourism in 2001-2003: the fear of tourists to move around after the lack of security shown behind the terrorist attack on september 11. While this point plays an important role, I tend to think that the main reason of tourism growth desacceleration is linked to the bad economic performance in Europe, Japan and the United States. In this last case, besides, there’s the growing restrictions to the enter of foreigners, which unencourages the arrival of new tourists.

Sometimes I feel that so much emphasis in the subject of “security” tends to hide the most general problem of the low growth of the world economy, the empoverishment of middle classes and the changes in the labor market, due to the growing flexibilization of laboral relations and regulations of leisure time.