It’s quite common to consider the Internet a threat in the editorial world. It’s almost as if the perception were “we had a great business model, but now there’s the Internet to disturb and ruin it all”. But to consider the Web as an enemy is a mistake. Rather, we have to turn the Internet into an ally when obtaining better information. For instance, by allowing us to have a simpler contact with our readers, in case of travel guides. What for? To update info, prices, locations, for example. Nowadays, to think about a model of contents creation completely made by paid specialists just doesn’t make sense anymore, since most of these functions can be carried out better if we are able to create a community around our product. The idea is not simply “to lower costs”, but to help the always meager budgets destined to create a travels product find better ways to present information. That is: not just dedicate to collect information. That doesn’t have any aggregate value. We cannot compete with the Internet there.

As I’ve said before, I believe travel guides still have great opportunities in this market, even when the presence of the Internet is, for some, a threat. Part of these opportunities are so thanks to a central point: guides are capable to formalize information and present it neatly; to do the same with the Internet, we’d have to spent a lot of time searching, and finally we’d end up with a bunch of printed sheets, not too confortable to carry around.

This trend to formalize more adequately information is something that distiguishes guides such as Lonely Planet, for example. Recent editions are placing emphasis on the subject of tours. For instance, they make sections where they recommend what places to visit in a determined city, depending on how many days do we have available. This way, they help the tourist organise better his time, a scarce resource when we travel.

The other interesting thing is that guides should emphasize the trend the Internet is finishing to establish: it’s not only about having a didactic speech, from “specialist to student”; rather, there should be a relation among equals. That is, from traveller to traveller. The important thing is not to teach the other what he should see, but to provide him the tools he needs to live his own travel experience. Because that’s travel: an experience.

During the last weeks, I’ve received many chain-style emails, unsigned, which stated that several evictions had been taking place in Tilcara in the last weeks. The email said that people who had been living for a long time in Tilcara and who were part of the original communities of the area, were being displaced from their land, for the purpose of building touristic enterprises in the site. The topic grabbed my attention, of course, and the first thing I did was write to some media of the argentinean province of Jujuy to verify the information. The answer I got was that they knew about the email, but there was no source that certified the truthfulness of the version, so there was no news.

But since the subject seemed interesting for this blog -you know, here we’re quite far from spreading out the vision of “everything in tourism is positive”- I kept sending some emails around, to find out more about this. The issue gained even more potential when I came across an article in the Salta Libre site (spanish). There, some of the eviction situations were told citing names and last names. And it states the following:

“Men and women, who have taken care of the land and its animals for centuries, have been dispossesed of everything they own by unsensitive death merchants. They are being kicked out without compassion for lacking the papers that today the law remembers to demand from them; of course it’s late now, their land, the one they’ve cultivated sowing corn, watching for their goats, their lambs, their chicken, already have new owners in papers, land owners avid of increasing their fortune, occasion pirates that glanced at the business oportunity, corrupt officers that sign buy and sale papers within a week; the land is being literally “cleaned” to build new houses, hotels, and everything that helps to the modernization of the worldly patrimony of humanity in tilcaran land, its legitimate owners are abandoned to their fate in disgraceful huts, and soon will become slaves of their own land.”

These days, I’ve sent several consults to diverse sources to check the veracity of the information, and to see what’s the relation between this situation and the important growth tourism is having in this area. If anyone has more information, leave your contribution in the comments area. If you prefer to contact me, privately, to hand me more information, you can do so at jorgegobbi@gmail.com. As long as I recollect new information, I will publish it here.

One of the things I always found interesting about Bourdieu’s theories has to do with the ways in which fields, as social action spheres, tend to establish the limits of what’s thinkable. That is, to define what things is it reasonable to think about at determined moments and spaces.

In the case of the tourism field, these restrictions operate in a very particular way: they tend to sanction as useless any thougth about travel and tourism that doesn’t have as its objective any kind of sustainable commercial enterprise. Since I rather come from journalism and an academic context, fields where the analysis of any other kind of portion of reality shouldn’t necesarily be based on its commercial use, I always found quite problematic the reduction of “everything important should give money”.

In a way, this scheme establishes a clear limit of what’s thinkable: no critic reflection about the field itself is stimulated, since such reflections are understood as completely useless. According to this point of view, we should generate myths of place as business opportunities; but the evaluation of such imaginaries -that is, to take account of its production conditions from politics and economics- are not important.

This blog is part of a different bet: to analyze the different representations associated to the touristic field not as business opportunities but as social and political constructions. It’s a bet with no place in the touristic field, and for this reason its anchored in the academic, journalistic and literature side. In the same way the best travel stories are not written by travel journalists but those who come from sections more linked to politics -that’s the case of Ryszard Kapuscinski or Robert Kaplan- the best analysis of the tourism market will not come from the field itself, because this one refuses, systematically, to analyze any idea that is not comercially profitable.

One of the biggest problems of supporting tourism -that is, developing specific national policies to stimulate the growth of the sector- is the political context. For example, in 2001 the New York attacks brought down all of the year’s perspectives, and caused such an impact that the world tourism market -not only the american, although the numbers there were even worse- lost thousands of millions of dollars in revenues. Now, the recent attacks in London is going to cost this city the loss of more than 500 millions of dollars.

Tourism is a part of the economy that has to be promoted. But to excessively encourage the idea that it’s a sure development tool is highly questionable. It only takes a few modifications to the exchange rates or relevant political facts to seriously affect the efforts done. And all of this without taking into consideration those facts where tourists are the object of terrorist attacks, as it happened many times in Egypt -last time, few days ago.

Bonus: interesting info about the volume of the tourism business in Egypt. Anual revenues of 6600 millions of dollars, mainly concentrated in the pyramids area nd the resorts in the Red Sea; 8.6 millions of tourists per year and plans to double this number by year 2010; one thousand dollars a year of investment to build the necessary hotels to hold the growth in the number of visitors; the tourism sector is the biggest private employer in Egypt. More at Reuters.

For all those who are interested in doing the Inca Trail in the following months, Cuzco’s regional Instituto Nacional de Cultura has a website where you can check the availability of vacancies for tourists who wish to do the trail. Since there are only 500 positions available per day, these run out quickly on high season. You can check the list in this link. In fact, if you check the list for july and august, you’ll see there are no positions left, the same goes for this month. A certain number of vacancies are still open starting from september. No wonder they don’t stop raising the entry price to the trail; which such demand, there’s not much to worry about. Remember that to do the trail you must go in a guided tour, with carriers and tour guide. And the price has gone up a lot in the latest years; in low season it costs around US$ 290 and it can go up to US$ 600 during high season. You can see more about Cuzco at this and this entry. The information about the vacancies availability was originally seen at El Sur.

The growth of the number of low cost airlines and the growing pressure to lower airfare costs is provoking a quite annoying effect on many passengers: the companies are seeking profits from almost any service. Some airlines have begun to charge for services as food. And weight limits are increasingly becoming more and more strict. That is: if we surpass the maximum allowed of luggage weight or the established number of bags, we have to pay pretty high fines. This is a whole change in airline’s behavior, which used to charge higher fares but used to be way less strict when considering the weight limits per passenger. About this, there’s an interesting note in The New York Times (requires free registration). The topic is reaching to a point that one of the enterviewed persons jokingly says that soon we’ll have to wear one of those 20 pockets fishing jackets, so that we can carry a certain number of things. The note is worth reading since it shows how business models are changing in the tourism market.

Death is also part of processes of esthetization. If the Pope’s death has provoked a sensible raise in the price of hotels and restaurants in Rome, now Cambodia’s authorities have privatized one of the main “killing fields”, one of the places where Khmer Rouge murdered almost two millions people through a sistematic use of torture.

The note can be found at this page. But, in the end, this news is not as surprising. Even in a very respectful frame, Auschwitz has long ago become a part of Polland’s tours. The debate, of course, is under what conditions can certain locations historically related to exermination processes be incorporated to the tourism field.

By the way, we already had talked about a very similar topic at the entry dedicated to the commercialization of the Ground Zero area, the place where terrorist attacks took place in New York in 2001.

The sofisticated travel magazine Condé Nast Traveler dedicates an interesting note to the topic of Low-Fare Revolution. That is, the merging of a growing number of cheap travel deals, in transportation and lodging as well. Unfortunately, for those of us who live in the third world, for now, the consequences of the phenomenom are limited to the north american, asian and european market, although I know of a few low-fare airlines operating in Brasil, Uruguay and Argentina -something we already talked about in a previous post.

In the case of some routes between Asia and Europe, the fall of ticket fares has been really dramatic, going from an average of $300 down to $108, sometimes with incredible ’sales’ of something over $25. But not everything is nice: the note tell us how, as part of the plan to reduce costs, cheap airlines have eliminated almost completely food and accomodations during the flight. Besides, they are very strict in penalizing excess baggage. Everything they do just to save fuel.

The note can be found at this site.