KEEP IT SIMPLE WHEN TALKING ABOUT TOURIST OVERCROWDING
Plain and simple talk is what is required, because this social sustainability affects everyone - tourists themselves, residents, businesses, governments and even academics.
TURESPAÑA was founded in 1985. Otherwise known as Spain’s Tourism Institute, the fundamental reason for the establishment of this body under one of the great figures of the country’s tourism, Ignacio Vasallo, was the promotion of tourism overseas. Its functions have expanded over the nearly forty years, and ironic it may now seem, given the original purpose, that Turespaña is to conduct a survey into tourist overcrowding. A purpose of this survey will be the “directing” of tourism promotion going forward. Whereas Turespaña was once concerned with accumulating greater mass, it is now seeking to control the mass.
Since those days, Ignacio Vasallo has become a highly respected writer about tourism. He has spoken plainly on a variety of tourism-related matters. But unfortunately, one matter that can tend to be obscured by less than plain (clear) speaking is the social sustainability of tourism and especially tourist overcrowding. Even the use of ‘social sustainability’ can shroud the debate in jargon. Plain and simple talk is what is required, because this social sustainability affects everyone - tourists themselves, residents, businesses, governments and even academics.
For Turespaña to conduct a survey of members of the public, who will be the ones surveyed, the questions have to be simple and straightforward. It is illuminating that the agency’s deputy director of tourism studies, Julio López Astor, should refer to a “silent majority” whose opinions don’t often come to light. This can be taken in one of two ways. The silent majority either perceives there is tourist overcrowding or it doesn’t. Whichever way the perceptions go, it is important to counsel these opinions. Without a scientific validation, which López Astor says there will be, the discussion about the coexistence between resident and tourist (at the heart of social sustainability) is conducted in something of a vacuum of knowledge.
The history, if you want to call it that, of this discussion goes back fifty or so years to the seminal works of George Doxey and his tourism irritation index and Richard Butler with the tourism area life cycle model. Academics thus provided a framework, but it remains the case that the discussion is all too frequently carried out in an academic fashion. The announcement of the Turespaña initiative therefore offered a relevant and timely contrast to what had taken place a few days before in Palma.
There was a presentation for a book, the title of which is ‘Unrest in Touristification: Critical Thinking for a Transformation of Tourism’. The three people who presented this book were Ernest Canada and Ivan Murray, both of the University of the Balearic Islands geography faculty, and Margalida Ramis, who is coordinator of the environmentalists GOB. All three make and have made valuable contributions, but here’s the problem, two in fact - how understandable and meaningful are these for everyday discussion and how truly objective are they? Academics will always plead objectivity, but this may not be how it is perceived. And perceptions are everything, as Turespaña recognises; the perceptions of a silent majority.
To give a flavour of this presentation, Dr. Murray drew on the work of Jason W. Moore (no relation), author of, among other things, an article entitled ‘Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital’. He explained that we are at the gates of an epochal crisis, like that which occurred between feudalism and capitalism. Which was fine, but how can residents, tourists and others relate to this? However, he also said: “We could be at the gates of the end of cheap tourism.” Now that is all the more relevant.
Whether we wish to believe it or not, there is a societal issue with tourism and hence big issues in terms of economic models, employment, energy, the environment and a seemingly elusive coexistence, for which overcrowding is a central factor. There again, we have to know for sure, which is where Turespaña comes into the equation. Academic thinking is very useful, but it is not how most people think. Keep it plain, keep it simple. And that’s not simple as in stupid, that’s simple for everyone to understand.