One feature that is not uncommon in many places of Latin America -and a few other countries outside the region- is that the beer consumption is not measured by the style of beer -ale, stout, pilsen- but by the brand. Most people don’t have a clue of what type of beer they’re drinking, particularly respecting blondes. While in the latest years the weight of smaller breweries has grown, its weight on the market is definitely still small.

Why the lack of higher specialization when drinking beer? why do we drink brands and not varieties? why is that a lot of people doesn’t even know there’s many varieties of beer, as with wine? It’s interesting to see how the weight of marketing, built on brands, hasn’t even helped to associate the name of a beer to a variety. In Argentina, for example, many people drink Quilmes, and period.

What’s this beer’s variety? While it’s true that in the latest years this company, now owned by Ambev, has tried to put on the market some new variety -for instance, Quilmes stout- the attempt is at least something isolated. It doesn’t seem to exist plans, in the next months, for new labels. Thus, the argentinean beer market has no red beer, for example. And dark beers usually have generic names, with few exceptions. To get to drink well identified varieties, one has to point at smaller brewery brands, such as Otro Mundo, Antares, Barbarroja, Blest, Otto Tipp, Patagonia, etc. The big problem is, of course, the price, that can be over five times more expensive than a massive brand’s.

Many anthropology of consumption works have proved how our appropiation of the products we buy has become more sophisticated. But this phenomenon, at least in the beer market, still seems irrelevant, specially when compared to the level of sophistication the wine segment has. And I’m talking about countries where a strong wine consumption exists, wines that were once barely labeled as “red” and “white”.

Who knows, maybe in a few years we’ll start to see a bigger variety in Latin American massive beers markets. But, I think that, for a while, I’ll have to settle for small breweries red or stout beers. Which, by the way, has nothing wrong as long as I can afford them And of course, good brewed beers suggestions are welcome.

Those who have read in this blog the entries about Ilha do Mel, and are planning to go there, better be aware that Parana state authorities are strictly applying the 5 thousand tourists per day limit. Therefore, a few issues are coming up, and in some cases you can’t get boat tickets to get to the island unless a certain number of spaces are available.

More in Mochileros, a brazilian traveler’s forum (in portuguese). The note was originally seen at De viaje a Brazil, Tony Galvez’ blog (in spanish).

30 years ago, Dean Maccannell wrote this:

The touristic critic of tourism is not an analysis of tourism: it’s part of the problem (…) The touristic critic of tourism is based on the desire to outpower other “simple” tourists and reach a deeper appreciation of society and culture (…) All tourists want, at some point, this deeper commitment with society and culture; it’s a basic component of the motivation to travel.

Maccannell summarizes in this paragraph the eternal critic of the “traveler” over “tourists”. That is, that the traveler knows how travel better since, apparently, he has a “better understanding of the world”. That they use the same means of transportation and that they use the same payment systems in hotels and hostels are things that are usually overlooked. Against certain common senses, the mobility of the “traveler” around the world does not deserve to be studied differently than the “tourist’s”. Because, for those of us who play analysts, there’s a basic point to be respected: not to assume as obvious the perspective of the interviewed, the one who is part of the object of study. Methodologically, the “traveler’s” justification of “why they are better than tourists” shouldn’t be looked as an analytical form to approach the tourism field. In fact, these descriptions are part of the travel and tourism field, and should be analyzed as any other kind of document or text.

Dean Maccannell’s cite was taken from his book The tourist, originally published in 1976 and translated to spanish by Editorial Melusina in 2003.

The best thing about mobile devices is we can use them as we travel. The worst thing is, when we move a little, it usually doesn’t have the infrastructure needed to function. For example, I can think of the Blackberry I’ve been testing for a few weeks. Receiving emails anywhere and being able to answer them is indeed an extraordinary working tool. Until we reach the GPRS (the standard GSM net, the most used in mobile phones) net covered area. That is, we can’t go too far away from urban areas, or our Blackberry will not have signal. Not to mention notebook computers and its WiFi needs, or even count on normal signal on mobile phones. There are many mobile devices, but at least in most of Latin America, the basic infrastructure is limited to more populated areas.

Now well, many people are surprised that the Net doesn’t have more travel related applications that can be executed from a mobile device. There are tools such as Splash Travel, available for Palm OS, but not much more. I believe such absence is absolutely logical. What’s the point in creating such a social network that work in a mobile device for travelers, when most of the planet lacks of ubicuous locations to Internet? Even if Wimax started to expand rapidly, the possibility of internet connection available in most of the country is a long, 10 years perspective, or longer. Will web applications for mobile devices take that long to arrive? In our region, in the south of the world, it’s most likely. In Europe, where distances are shorter, they will appear much sooner -and in fact, tests of social networking for mobile phones are already being done in this area of the world.

If you want to read more about the topic of Mobile 2.0 - that is, the arrival of collaborative and participative tools for mobile devices- you can read the excellent summary published by Read/Write Web (thanks to Juan Pablo Paradelo for the info). For a more comprehensive definition of Mobile 2.0, check out Dan’s Blog.

Hotel Reservations is a reservations site. But don’t let its name mislead you: you can also buy airflight tickets and vacation packages, even rent cars. The service is available in english and spanish. While the homepage indicates it operates in countries such as the US, Canada, France, Great Britain, Spain, Italy, and other european nations, you can actually search through a lot more cities. If you’re looking for hotels in Asia, Latin America or Africa, just do your search and you’ll get a good number of results.

The site has many parts. The main is the hotel, travel packages and car rent search engine. There you only have to give some information, such as the city, and other requirements according to the search, and you’ll get results along with the price. In the case of hotels, besides, you can also observe extra information on every one of them and its location on the map. You can refine the search, and indicate if the hotel we’re looking for must have a pool, or allow pets, among other requirements.

While the reservations can be made directly from the Web, you can also do the transaction through the phone. The site has also many useful sections for those who wan to travel, such as travel guides for a large number of countries, and a very interesting search engine of places to visit within the US. Just enter the zip code, the number of hours you want to drive, and in what direction you want to go. Possible destinations will appear marked in the map, next to the route to take.

This entry is sponsored by Review Me.

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.

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.

The “identity” of ethnic groups has been a topic of debate in the field of social studies on tourism, particularly since Dean Maccannell’s last decades contributions. We’ve already discussed this author in “Authenticity as an explanatory concept“. But there’s an interesting assumption behind: even when it’s quite possible that it prejudices them, groups that classify themselves or are classified as “ethnic” are interested in obtaining some kind of monetary income from tourism. That is, “selling” the difference.

But, what happens when a group has suffered real abuse from part of the tourism industry and the commercialization of its identity? This case is boarded by Jonathan Friedman at “Globalization and Localization”, included in his book Cultural Identity and Global process. The case chosen by Friedman is what’s known as “hawaian cultural movement”. Few cities have been so popular around the world through travel market’s proposals and the touristification of many of its dances and practices. Facing this, it’s understandable that this movement keeps an obstinated opposition to tourism.

After more than a century of american domination, hawaians have become a minority in a land they consider their own and only acquired certain visibility through touristic representations. That is, the problem is not the difussion of their “identity”, but rather how to present it to locals and foreigners ignoring the huge difussion power of the tourism media and industry. Such operation requires that what the media present as “hawaian identity” can be seen as something foreign and imposed, and possible to be reconstructed from outside the rules of the tourism field. That is, to conceive that the “authentic” quality is something that can not be “commercialized”. A task hard to carry out in a market society, where everything that may have some kind of attractive can always be reached by market insertion strategies.

Bibliography

Friedman, Jonathan (1994) “Globalización and localización” en Identidad Cultural y Proceso Global. Buenos Aires, Amorrortu, 2001.

Starting from common sense: isn’t there lots of people who would love to be a travel writer? To be able to go from one place to the other, and being paid for this, is something truly enviable. Unfortunately, things sometimes are not so simple or pretty. Every time I read the phorum or blogs that gather travel writers or journalists -particularly freelance in english language media- I find an aboundance of complaints. That the payment is low; that there’s more marketing and less journalism; that the good times are gone… Any journalist knows that his job is quite conditioned by advertising, the incomes of the media and the attractiveness of the section you work in. And apparently, the media’s travel sections are more read by advertisers and actors of the tourism sector than by ordinary readers. Which would explain, partially, why the “media readers” choose the Internet to inform themselves about destinations. The reason: they can talk directely to other travelers and tourists without necessarily having to undergo the media’s filters and the travel companies’ marketing areas.

Let’s return to travel writers. Some days ago, The New York Times published an interesting article about the problems of being a travel guides writer. The core issue: this is work, not a leisure travel. So, everything you do when you travel in such conditions is… move around the places that will be useful to develop a travel guide that’s helpful to other travelers. That’s not what we see as usual in a travel, where we rather assume we’re relaxed and move from on place to the other without hurry or problems.

Do we move without hurry and carelessly around the city? I’m afraid this form of tourism we have incorporated as “what we do when we travel”, is quite far from many real travel practices. More likely, when we arrive to a city, we usually have so little time, we move frenetically around in order to see everything our guide has marked down as “must sees”. And it’s not only during the day, at night we also have to go out, take pictures, walk around, check out the “local environment”. At the end, when we return from our vacations, we’re more exhausted than when we left. Although, of course, strangely happy.

Could it be that, in fact, practices generally associated to travel writers are increasingly becoming part of our routines as travelers? When we travel, we produce more things in order to publish them in the Internet: pictures, travel notes, videos, etc. I know many of these supports were already common to travelers, taking notes is a travel tradition of many centuries; and taking photos, of many decades. But there’s a more clear idea of producing “private” and “public” versions of our travels, something common for a tourism journalist, but not so much for the rest of us. Of course, these “public” versions of our trips are possible thanks to new forms of Internet publications, such as blogs, phorums, etc.

Will we end up as travel writers, but without working in a traditional media?

And what about the problems of travel writers, finally? Better read the New York Times note (you’ll need to register in the site, for free, first)

The New York Times article was originally seen at Travel Writers.

Travel allows us to live our dreams. To travel is to be a witness of our courage to make dreams come true, to do everything we want to do. Travel gives testimony of our willpower, of our determination of the limits of our spirit. Travel is the line of the life of our inner passion, of the life that exists within ourselves. Travel is the line of our energy’s life.

Steve Zikman en El encanto de viajar. Buenos Aires, Vergara, 1999.

Maybe you don’t know it, but there’s a line in the self help literature that appeals to the idea of travel as a form of overcoming everyday’s life limitations. Zikman’s book, cited above, belongs to this segment. The tactic: to describe the travel uniquely as a positive thing, and relating it to people’s desire to leave everyday’s life problems behind.

This blog has always been aware of not falling easily on purely positive representations of travel. To conceive it as something “intrinsically good” has many problems. First, it means assuming as true travelers’ stories, who as any other social agent, seek to present their own practices as something positive -something we all do everyday. Second, because it makes us lose sight of the domination relations that take place within the field and the negative consequences of travel and tourism -which exist, and are relevant and should be studied.

What doesn’t surprise us is that self help literature that appeals to the idea of travel resorts to and old common sense: one that opposes “everyday life” to travel -a recopilation about travel common senses can be found in a previous entry here. As I said before, there’s no such opposition. What does exists is a relation by which travel only acquires its sense because there’s something we call everyday life. If we were nomads, relations between everyday life and travel surely wouldn’t be the same.

Most likely, very little in self help literature is valuable or original. Most of these books try to give answers and start from an obvious assumption: that readers buy these books to find these answers. And if they’re unhappy with their everyday life, appealing to the travel as a “liberty space” is a good form to offer simple and plausible “answers”. We all know that when we travel we feel “more free”. Sure, because we’re not working

If you’re interested in digging deeper in the subject of the relations between travel and common sense, you can also check a previous entry called “Travel as space of freedom an other common senses” that I wrote a year ago in this same blog.