Many times we’ve said here that travel is, above all, experience. That is, not just a physical movement from one place to the other, or staying outside the house more than one night. At least those things don’t define the importance of the travel. Such speech is not quite original, and has been stated by several authors from sociology or anthropology.

But now marketing has begun to exploit it. According to what Michael Peluso, from Travelocity - one of the most popular tickets selling sites in the Internet, they conceive travel as an experience. But, while analysts who work on the topic from the social sciences view do so to focus on the practices and representations built in the travel, Peluso does it with another end: if the key of the travel is experience, it’s because it’s more important than the price. That is, the bet is clear: to try to separate Travelocity from a “site for people who are looking for cheap things” to place it as: “a site where people look for fascinating experiences and are willing to pay their worth”.

To market the experience is the base of any touristic proposal. But to state it in such terms of differentiation is another thing. And surely it announces marketing moves in the field of online tickets selling sites, to position themselves to fight for the market of business or five stars travellers. The important thing is that the key element of all this is “experience”. That is, to transform into something more than a mere seller of packages or flight tickets, and jump to a higher category. Maybe, soon, we’ll have titles such as “travel experience organiser” or something.

Michael Peluso’s, from Travelocity, declarations can be found at Hotel Marketing Online.

What happens when a hotel or hostel is located outside the most traditional touristic area of a city? Manuel Frias, who is working on a paper for the Communication and Travel seminary I teach at the Communication Science field of the University of Buenos Aires, begins his work with this question. The idea is to analyze the speeches of hostel owners located at neighborhoods apart from the “touristified” downtown of Buenos Aires, Palermo or Recoleta. These hostels owners don’t say “it’s a shame we’re out the enclave”. Rather, they use this marginal position as a capital to be strategically displayed. That means saying: “we’re located in an authentic city neighborhood, not the touristic downtown, where everything is fake. If you want to see the real Buenos Aires, you should come here”.

This kind of speeches, which position capital in a strategic way, can be studied from theories such as Bourdieu’s. Authenticity speeches are not enough; it’s also important to remark the facilities of transportation, to draw attention to the “rich history” of the neighborhood, etc. But by showing as capital what in principle could be considered a disadvantage -to be located outside the enclave- can tell how well the agents in tourism field have learned to play the game. They can enunciate this kind of speeches because they have accepted the rules of the tourism field and want to play in their terms. That is, far from denying them, placing the value of the hostel in the marginal location of the touristic enclave in Buenos Aires shows how, in order to generate an “alternative proposal”, first one has to know how to place and differentiate them from the dominant strategies. Since we can’t play the game just like them, because we lack the economic or social capital they have, we reposition ourselvees and propose to see the field from another view. We do so because we’re interested in accomplishing a strategic position in the field that favors us. That is, for economic interest; nothing new about that.

Even when, from these perspectives, we’re aware of the “continuity” of alternatives proposals in the tourism field, one can’t help to be surprised on the variety of speeches when trying to position these capitals in an strategic way. And the ability of the different actors to “play the best game” is found in this variety. But we’ll talk about this later, when Manuel works more into his research and the analysis of the speeches of the owners of some Buenos Aires hostels.

A few days ago, Pablo Schweitzer published in the mail list about cultural tourism managed by the people of Naya (spanish only) an interesting message about the problems of tourism and social inequality. We’ve covered the topic several times in this blog, but I thought it was a good opportunity to return to this issue, mostly because Pablo’s text summarizes, in a short space, a series of important items. I will leave you know with Pablo’s text, and I want to thank him for his permission to publish it. By the way, Pablo is working on a website about these problems and, hopefully soon, I’ll be able to tell you more news about the topic in this blog.

Tourism, poverty and social justice?

Usually, receptive tourism is considered and export. But from the social point of view, I believe we’d have to see it as an import of consumers, with the social impacts it implies.

Pablo Schweitzer

In my routine of travel blogs and sites reading, I found out, at Tim Leffel’s site, that Budget Living magazine, targeted at backpackers and people who travel on low budgets, had closed. And its editor says this:

“The name ‘budget’ worked great with readers,” he said, “but it was a hurdle for advertisers. The name was a mixed blessing.”

That is: while the “budget” denomination is appealing to the public in general, in the same way the word “backpacker” is in our environment, advertisers finds it horrible. Thus, we have a product that may appeal to many people, but also attracts the “wrong” readers, from marketing’s point of view. Why wrong? because they’re not willing to spend a large sum of money in their travel.

Such assumption has caused that at many latin american countries, the travels section is written for five stars travellers. This happens even in newspapers, despite some of them are quite massive. The conflict is important to analyze because the issues between “the public’s interest” and the “advertisers uninterest” should be resolved. Otherwise, we’ll keep lacking good publications for the public that wants to travel without spending too much.

And there’s another issue: my perception -only, since I couldn’t prove it with numbers- i that at least here, in Argentina, the backpacker public is noticeably reluctant to support editorials initiatives regarding to cheaper ways to travel, even when these are good and not pricey. As I wrote in the entry dedicated to “extreme backpackers”, many times there’s some sort of common sense by which one “should not spend a dime at all”. So, in this extreme version of the story, the backpacker is not someone who spends little, but someone who wants to spend nothing. Of course, in the long run, such attitude holds potential dangers in relation to the local people who provide tourism services and who have to deal with people who want everything for free; and without any editorial proposals. The reason is simple: many readers don’t want to spend anything, even when the publication would help them organise the trip and save, and advertisers just don’t want to see their ads there. And that’s that. At least in this part of the world, the only travel magazines existing are aimed at middle-high class tourists. Luckily, we have the Internet, but a complement from the editorial world would be really good.