I’ve said this many times in this blog: what’s important about travel is the experience. It’s the people, what they think, feel, believe. Many of my persistent complaints about “travel journalism” practiced in my country respond to that absence in many notes. There are no relevant experiences, no people, just actors of the tourism market interested in making the agenda reflect points of view that benefits them.

But the experience can be commercialized by the industry. It’s what the tourism industry has always done: sell sensations, images, transitory situations. But even in the “experience market” there’s a lot to innovate, as you can see in the note published in the english newspaper The Times. And there are interesting examples in the article. For instance, Isango and Black Tomato, specialized in selling travel packages, emphasize on unconventional travel experiences, many times characterized with the ambiguous and unprecise term of “extreme”. Other more traditional sites, such as Lastminute.com, also have joined the trend of adding more experiences to the supply. It’s not just about selling trips, tickets and packages; it also adds to commercialize theater tickets, restaurant reservations and more.

The truth is, in the same way limits between ordinary life and travel become more diffuse, experiences associated to tourism also have more contact points with our “home” lifestyle. Surely, as time goes by, travel and tourism sites will expand its supply to newer areas, not associated to travel before. The process will not be so fast or in short terms, but it surely be happening in the next few years. Or months, if you realize how fast things happen in the Net.

The original The Times article can be found in this link, the reference was originally seen at Hotel Marketing.

Costa Rica is one of the most important touristic destinations in Latin America. The country is the most stable in its region and has always shown an important economic development. The section dedicated to this country by the Indigo Guide online guide tries to summarize the most important issues when visiting this nation: history, basic information about the population and its quality of life, weather conditions, air flights, plus sections about specific topics. There are special sections for the gay scene, the possibility to learn spanish, and plastic surgery -this last item being on high demand among US tourists, since medical costs in Costa Rica are much lower.

Destinations are divided in Central Pacific, North Pacific, South Pacific and the Caribbean. The information on every destination is quite basic and is limited mostly to specific info on geography, history and landscapes. Unfortunately, there are no pictures for us to appreciate the beauty of each location. It would also be important to get more useful information for the traveler, such as the availability of hotels in every place, including its prices; tours that can be done around the area; and places to eat and go out to. While the section dedicated to Costa Rica includes a section dedicated to tours and adventure tourism, these references are too general, so we have to do a further research in other sites. If traveling is basically an experience, a travel site should help us build and plan this experience. And in this sense, Costa Rica Indigo Guide falls a little short.

This entry is sponsored by Review Me.

To travel is not just to move around spaces; it’s also to bring home elements from that trip. Many times, those elements take form of souvenirs. Why do we buy that sort of stuff? This entry has a clearly hypothetic character, to point out some explanations on why do travelers and tourists own these objects. Just in case, I’ll set this straight: because of its hypothetic character, its intention is to be debated and not to be take as taxative affirmations.

The experience hypothesis: we buy souvenirs not for what they mean, but for the degree of connection it has with our travel experiences. That is, the souvenir is worthy as long as it allows us to recapture certain fragments of our travel, in the same way certain songs are important not only for its composition value but because of the things they evoke in us. This way, we could hypothesize that the souvenir only makes sense when we move.

The subordination hypothesis: if we acquire souvenirs, these standarized objects sold massively to hundreds or thousands of visitors, it’s because the tourism industry has managed to colonize our imagination and has imposed on us that our memories should make sense only in relation to those merchantilized objects. In the same way the industry manages to make us consume certain products not in function of its usefulness but in relation to what they mean, the souvenir is a form to “signify the travel” in benefit of the tourism industry needs.

The ironic hypothesis: even when we know these objects are ridiculous, massified and, in itself, lacking of value -and questionably associated to our travel experience-, the buying of souvenirs is an exercise of irony and distance from the meanings associated to the destination and the movement. It’s a little what has been discussed in many texts about posmodernism and quotidian life, where objects acquire value not for its intrinsic meaning or for its use value, but because of the way we can aestheticize them in relation to what we do everyday.

As I said in the first paragraph, this entry starts from a series of hypothesis about why do we buy souvenirs, even when I don’t side with any of the three. Any other hypothesis to add to the list? The picture is from a typical souvenir from Mar del Plata, one of the most touristic areas of Argentina. It’s a sea wolves figurine, which changes color according to the humidity in the environment. It’s a souvenir with a long history, one that has been sold for decades in that city.