We were tired, miserable, hungry, and very cold—but mostly highly irritated. No Ethiopian Airways representatives had been seen for several hours. We had had enough. This massive troupe of Africans stormed the wrong way down the stairs, surrounded the Italian immigration officials, and demanded to be let out so we could give the airline a piece of our minds. The officials got very excited (again, they spoke very little English), and we were all nearly arrested. Eventually someone got word to Ethiopian Airways, and someone new arrived. He apologized and announced that we would receive breakfast, the other passengers would join us shortly from the hotel, and our flight would depart. We were skeptical but decided that a meal would certainly help ease our suffering. We were given a small sandwich and a warm beverage, then left to our own devices again!
An hour after breakfast, a passenger delegation was sent downstairs to wrangle with the immigration officials again. When the agent showed up, he apologized profusely for the delay and allowed us to wait in the Alitalia First Class lounge. Finally something was going right! There were comfortable leather couches to sleep on, free food and drinks, and even a hot shower. We spent the rest of the day waiting there. Still, I had not been able to speak to anyone at home, in the UK, or even my girlfriend in Rome.
Nearly twenty-four hours after touching down in Rome the day before, the next flight from Addis Ababa arrived, and we were put on it to England instead. The flight to London’s Heathrow airport was uneventful, but after we disembarked we learned that our luggage was still on the original plane. We waited two more hours for the bags, and then it took another two hours to get to the family’s home. Well over sixty hours after leaving Harare, we finally got to bed on Christmas morning. I have always been very proudly Zimbabwean and African by birth, but to be treated like an afterthought due to my passport was a very frustrating and distasteful experience.
—Gareth
Entry regulations and border controls can also effectively serve as a barrier to tourism. A country may discourage travel to their destinations by imposing strict regulations on travel, such as requiring all tourists to check in with the police upon entry or traveling with a guide at all times. The same is true if the country has difficult and confusing procedures, long wait times, and/or high fees for applying for entry visas. A country’s reputation for long lines at border checkpoints and rigorous customs and security inspections may also serve as a deterrent.
Conclusion
Just as the physical features and processes of place shape tourism, so will the varied human features and processes of that place. There are countless factors that will act as resources for or barriers to tourism; these chapters have barely skimmed the surface. Nonetheless, we can begin to see how we can use a geographic framework to help us identify and explore these issues. In part III, we will build on this foundation by examining the geographic effects of tourism. The nature of these effects for any destination will undoubtedly be influenced by the characteristics of both the physical geography and the human geography of that place. Thus, we will continue to draw upon these topical branches that we have already discussed, even as we turn our focus to a few new ones.
Key Terms
cultural geography
political geography
rural geography
urban geography
Notes
1. Kevin Meethan, Tourism in Global Society: Place, Culture, Consumption (Houndmills, UK: Palgrave, 2001), 128.
2. United States Census Bureau, “2010 Census Urban and Rural Classification and Urban Area Criteria,” accessed April 28, 2011, http://www.census.gov/geo/www/ua/2010urbanruralclass.html.
3. Amsterdam Tourist Board, “Amsterdam Metropolitan Area,” accessed February 1, 2012, http://www.iamsterdam.com/en/visiting/amsterdam-metropolitan-area.
4. New Mexico Tourism Department, “North-Central Region,” accessed February 1, 2012, http://newmexico.org/explore/regions/northcentral.php.
5. Tourism Toronto, “Places to Explore,” accessed February 1, 2012, http://www.seetorontonow.com/Visitor/Explore/City-Neighbourhoods.aspx.
6. See, for example, Duncan Light, “‘Facing the Future’: Tourism and Identity-Building in Post-Socialist Romania,” Political Geography 20 (2001).
7. Rebecca Maria Torres and Janet D. Momsen, “Gringolandia: The Construction of a New Tourist Space in Mexico,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 95, no. 2 (2005): 315.
8. Elaine Ganley and Bouazza Ben Bouazza, “Tunisia Riots: Tourists Evacuated As Protests Continue.” Huffington Post, January 14, 2011, accessed February 4, 2012, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/01/14/tunisia-riots-tourists-ev_n_809118.html.
Sources
Blacksell, Mark. Political Geography. London: Routledge, 2006.
Chang, T. C., and Shirlena Huang. “Urban Tourism: Between the Global and the Local.” In A Companion to Tourism, edited by Alan A. Lew, C. Michael Hall, and Allan M. Williams, 223–34. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2004.
Crang, Mike. Cultural Geography. London: Routledge, 1998.
Duncan, James, Nuala C. Jackson, and Richard H. Schein. “Introduction.” In A Companion to Cultural Geography, edited by James Duncan, Nuala C. Jackson, and Richard H. Schein, 1–9. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2004.
Kaplan, Dave, James Wheeler, and Steven Holloway. Urban Geography. 2nd ed. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2009.
McKercher, Bob, and Hilary du Cros. Cultural Tourism: The Partnership between Tourism and Cultural Heritage Management. New York: Haworth Hospitality Press, 2002.
Meethan, Kevin. Tourism in Global Society: Place, Culture, Consumption. Houndmills, UK: Palgrave, 2001.
Sharpley, Richard. “Tourism and the Countryside.” In A Companion to Tourism, edited by Alan A. Lew, C. Michael Hall, and Allan M. Williams, 374–81. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2004.
Shaw, Gareth, and Allan M. Williams. Critical Issues in Tourism: A Geographical Perspective. 2nd ed. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2002.
Sheller, Mimi. Consuming the Caribbean: From Arawaks to Zombies. London: Routledge, 2003.
Smith, Melanie K. Issues in Cultural Tourism Studies. 2nd ed. London: Routledge, 2009.
Taylor, Peter J. “New Political Geographies: ’Twixt Places and Flows.” In The Student’s Companion to Geography, 2nd ed., edited by Alisdair Rogers and Heather A. Viles, 113–17. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2003.
Williams, Stephen. Tourism Geography. London: Routledge, 1998.
Woods, Michael. Rural Geography. London: Sage, 2005.
Part III
The Geography of Tourism Effects
While tourism began as an activity, it quickly became an industry. Peoples and places all over the world—now more than ever—looked to tourism as a means of development. The promise of economic benefits from tourism, namely job creation and income generation, has been extremely alluring. Likewise, with the evolution of the environmental movement, the potential for environmental preservation has also been a strong motivator. Today, these arguments for tourism can be heard in places all over the world, whether on a small island with chronic high unemployment rates or in a remote wilderness area under pressure from the extractive industries. Tourism is held up as the panacea for all sorts of problems. Indeed, properly planned and developed, tourism can have a positive impact on both the peoples and the places involved. However, this is not always the case. The benefits of tourism are not always evenly distributed, and it can have unforeseen consequences. Both the potential costs and benefits for a particular place must be carefully considered and weighed to understand the net result of tourism. Ultimately, this knowledge should be used to determine the most appropriate strategies to maximize the benefits of tourism at the destination and to minimize the costs.
This section examines the geography of tourism effects. In particular, chapter 8 discusses the economic geography of tourism. Chapter 9 considers the social geography of tourism, and chapter 10 explores the environmental geography of tourism. Each of these chapters uses the tools and concepts of the respective topical branche
s to help us understand both the benefits and the costs of tourism on the human and physical resources of the destination. In addition, they will address some of the factors that play a role in determining what the outcome of tourism will be for a particular place.
Chapter 8
The Economic Geography of Tourism
Tourism is big business. The UNWTO estimates that the international tourism industry—without considering the value of domestic tourism in countries around the world—generated US$1,030 billion in 2011.1 With figures like this, it’s not surprising that the economic impact of tourism is considered so important. However, neither the economic benefits nor the economic costs of tourism are evenly distributed between countries, communities, or even segments of the population. Consequently, who benefits from tourism and who is hurt by it are issues that need to be carefully considered.
The economic geography of tourism gives us the means to examine the economic effects of tourism at the individual, local, and national scales. Economic geography is a topical branch in human geography that is related to the field of economics and intersects with other branches such as social, political, and urban geographies. Broadly, economic geography is the study of the spatial patterns, human-environment interactions, and place-based effects of economic activities. Economic geography has a long-standing focus on issues of production. Traditionally, production has been used to describe production in the primary (e.g., agriculture) or secondary (e.g., manufacturing) economic sectors. Yet, with the tremendous rise of the tertiary sector (i.e., services) in the modern world, the study of economic geography has adapted to reflect this change.
Given this emphasis on understanding the patterns that have developed with the service sector, it would stand to reason that there should be a close relationship between economic geography and the geography of tourism. In today’s world, tourism is undoubtedly one of the most significant economic activities and arguably the most significant service sector industry. As such, tourism geographers have naturally drawn from the theories and concepts of economic geography. Yet, the exchange has not always been mutual. Despite calls for greater connections between economic geography and the other topical branches of geography2 and specifically tourism geography,3 economic geographers have given little attention to either tourism geography research or tourism as a topic of inquiry.4 Tourism geographer Dimitri Ioannides suggests several potential barriers to greater interaction between the two branches, including the inability in many cases to distinguish between tourism and other related services, the conglomeration of industries and services that make up the production of the tourist experience, and the greater emphasis that has been placed on demand-side perspectives in tourism studies.5
Economic geography has a vital part to play in our understanding of the geography of tourism. The potential economic benefits of tourism are extraordinarily important in the development of tourism destinations around the world. Yet, the promise of such benefits should not be adhered to blindly; they must be weighed against the potential costs to determine if net benefits will, in fact, be received. This chapter utilizes the tools and concepts of economic geography to consider the potential for tourism to contribute to economic development at a destination, as well as the failure of tourism to live up to this potential or have other negative consequences for the destination. Additionally, it also discusses the factors that influence the outcome of these effects.
Economic Benefits of Tourism
Particularly since the post–World War II era, tourism has been seen as an attractive option for economic development. Economic development is typically described as a process. It encompasses the various changes that create conditions for improvements in productivity and income and therefore the well-being of the population. Essentially, economic development has the potential to bring many changes to the economic geography of a place. For many less developed countries based on predominantly low-income primary sector activities, tourism has provided new opportunities for economic diversification. For example, countries that weren’t considered to have a cost-effective location for industrial development might now be identified as having attractive locations and/or resources for tourism. This allows the development of tertiary activities, which may be accompanied by an increase in income. As such, the benefits of tourism have primarily focused on job creation and the interrelated factors of income, investment, and associated economic development.
Tourism Employment
One of the principal benefits of tourism is job creation. This is particularly emphasized by countries that have traditionally experienced problems with high unemployment rates, as well as rural and peripheral regions of countries where jobs are limited. For example, the Caribbean has a history of chronic unemployment and high rates of labor-based emigration. Thus, the creation of new jobs for tourism has been a distinct advantage for many islands.
There is considerable potential for direct employment in the tourism industry, which is considered to have a relatively high demand for labor. For example, the Venetian Resort Hotel Casino in Las Vegas, Nevada (figure 8.1), combined with the Palazzo Resort Hotel Casino, is the largest five-diamond hotel/resort complex in the world and employs a virtual army of nearly ten thousand people.6 This one complex alone maintains a larger workforce than many traditional manufacturing facilities, which have been experiencing declines in labor demand as a result of increased mechanization. By way of comparison, Hyundai Motor Manufacturing Alabama employs three thousand people.7
Figure 8.1. Massive resort complexes such as the Venetian Las Vegas maintain thousands of employees in a vast range of capacities, from hotel management to casino dealers, bartenders, maintenance crews, security forces, and even these gondoliers. (Source: Velvet Nelson)
Direct employment in the tourism industry varies widely. Some people may be employed, often in the private sector, to facilitate destination planning, development, or promotion. Others provide services to tourists by working at local information offices or serving as guides. As in the case of the Venetian, hotels and resorts employ countless people; depending on the scale of the hotel and the services provided, these employees may function as valet parking attendants, bellhops, check-in clerks, concierges, housekeepers, groundskeepers, maintenance crews, security forces, bartenders, servers, kitchen staff, salespeople in in-house retailers, spa therapists, casino dealers, or entertainers. Tourist attractions also employ a range of staff to maintain facilities and to facilitate the tourism experience.
In addition, there is considerable potential for indirect employment generated by the tourism industry. In some cases, these jobs support tourism development but are not directly involved in serving tourism. This includes jobs in the construction industry that are required to build both the general infrastructure that will allow tourism (e.g., airports or highways) and the specific tourism infrastructure (e.g., hotels). Likewise, this can include manufacturing jobs that produce the goods that are sold to tourists. In other cases, these jobs are created in related service industries that both support and benefit from tourism but do not solely cater to the tourist market. This includes jobs in transport services, general retail businesses, local restaurants, or others.
The tremendous diversity of services provided in the context of tourism constitutes an added benefit; it allows jobs to be created in a variety of capacities and at different skill or education levels. This opens up tourism employment to a wider range of people, rather than a subset of the population. For example, a higher proportion of tourism-related jobs go to women compared to jobs in other modern industries. Particularly in less developed countries, less skilled work is accessible to women, who may not have had the opportunity to obtain a formal education. In addition, the domestic nature of many of the services provided in tourism may be seen as an acceptable form of employment in parts of the world where women have not traditionally had a place outside of the home and in the formal economic sectors (figure 8.2).
Figure 8.2. Tourism is often promot
ed as creating new employment opportunities. This woman is working at a tourist restaurant and entertainment venue at Victoria Falls, Zimbabwe. (Source: Velvet Nelson)
Income, Investment, and Economic Development
For most places, the potential financial benefits of tourism are an important factor driving tourism development. However, these benefits come in different forms with different effects. Tourism has the potential to bring investment to a place or region. A place may possess the resources for tourism, but varying degrees of development will be required before tourism can take place. This is typically infrastructural development to allow people to reach the destination, to stay there (if appropriate), and to appreciate attractions. The public sector is likely to invest in the basic infrastructure, such as transport systems and utilities, and some attractions, such as local/national parks, monuments, or museums. The private sector is likely to invest in specific tourist infrastructure, such as accommodations, as well as attractions. For many destinations, particularly those in poorer regions seeking to use tourism as a strategy to improve the economy and income levels, the local private sector may not have the capital to invest in tourism development. As such, external—often foreign—investment may be a crucial catalyst for growth and starting the development process in that place, when it would not have been possible otherwise.
An Introduction to the Geography of Tourism Page 23
