mass tourism and ethical etiquette
One of my first tasks at the university was to accompany
sixty students to the Mediterranean island of Malta on fieldwork. A colleague,
taking the role of tour guide on the bus, microphone in hand, proclaimed to the
students as we passed the crowded resort of Bugibba that ’this is a rather ugly
example of unsustainable tourism’ . On a grey February afternoon, even in
Malta, it is hard to make a tourism resort look pretty. Certainly Bugibba has
had its problems, stalled hotel projects being the most visible.
But Bugibba also accounted for twenty to thirty per cent of
Malta’s bed spaces in the 1970s and 1980s. It brought people, who brought
money, and that money fuelled the mini economic miracle that Malta has
undergone in the age of international tourism. Tourist revenue has helped pay
for better facilities and opportunities for tourists and locals alike. Bugibba
and the whole Qawra peninsula now has a lovely paved promenade, better sanitation
and fewer unfinished hotels than sixteen years ago.
For those in the know, what is good in Bugibba is not to be
found in architecture, museums or galleries (although you can hop on a bus and
be standing in front of Caravaggio’s Beheading of St. John the Baptist at St.John’s Co Cathedral[i], gazing
into the sublime Blue Grotto[ii]
or perusing one of the most important archaeological sites in the world at
Hagar Qim[iii],
all within forty minutes). It is to be found in the people, lots of them, tourists
and locals, drinking, relaxing, swimming and enjoying each other’s company.
That is its purpose, one it serves pretty well and, if you like, pretty
‘sustainably’ over the years.
Bugibba is cheap, but not ‘cheap’. People who go there in
the main work hard, save up and enjoy the conviviality and light hearted atmosphere
of the resort. Likewise Benidorm, Magaluf and Torremolinos, part of the role call of unsustainable tourism
in the eyes of the ethical lobby. Without the Bugibbas, Benidorms
and Torremolinos of the world, many would find a foreign holiday beyond their
means. Cheap is good, unless of course you believe, as some do, that staycationing
is the best way to preserve the planet. In my experience many who argue that
rack up the air miles to get to international conferences to do so.
Mass tourism, especially of the package variety, has few
fans in the broadsheets and the academy. In the universities there is a deference
to the etiquette of ‘ethical tourism’. This dictates that a place’s ethical
credentials are in inverse proportion to the net amount of fun being had. Also,
in the main, it involves little benefit to the communities involved.
There have been a couple of notable exceptions in the UK
press recently, both with reference to Benidorm. The Telegraph’s Anthony
Peregrine describes his experience: ‘I swam and sunbathed on the two vast,
magnificent beaches. I hired a car to go up the mountains directly behind. And,
by night, I oscillated between tapas and meat pies, wine and beer, Flamenco and
the birdie dance’. He is right to add that ‘[w]hen cultured people sneer at
Benidorm, they are not sneering so much at the resort as their fellow
Britains’. [iv]
Julie Burchill provides a great account of what is worthy
about Benidorm. Her family graduated
from Butlins to Benidorm in the 1980s, as did many others. Her article is about
her aspirant family, friendships and alcohol induced conviviality, and is free
of the irony and condescension that often accompanies reference to iconic
holiday resorts built for the mass market (in academic commentaries as well as in the media).
Aspiration for better things was also what prompted the
local council of the then small fishing village of Benidorm to petition General
Franco in the 1960s to allow them to build along the lengthy sandy beach in the first place.
Franco’s relationship to tourism was pragmatic. Foreign currency was needed to
develop, buy compliance with and time for his regime. Yet conservative regime
allies frowned on the liberal culture associated with tourism. The demand for
sun, sea and sand – not just from foreign tourists but from the Spanish too –
led to concentrated pleasure zones for the masses. Benidorm’s high rises
facilitated the mass package tourism that brought a little bit of Spain within
the reach of many. Space and light survive – buildings can only take up thirty
per cent of any given plot. Conviviality and fun thrive.
Benidorm is Europe’s biggest resort, with over four million
arrivals per year, but has retained its clientele. The adage that tourism kills
the goose that lays the golden egg – that resorts become crowded, unfashionable
and then decline – is largely a myth here, as it is on the Costa del Sol,
Bugibba and many other apparently ‘unsustainable’ crowded resorts.
As if to put one over on travel snobs, city officials for
Benidorm have recently applied for UNESCO World Heritage Status for their town.
If it achieves that it will be up there with the pyramids and the Great Wall of
China, and my local Canterbury Cathedral.
The statement from the Visit Benidorm tourist board claims
that the resort fulfils six of the ten conditions necessary for UNESCO
eligibility (only one is required). Benidorm, they claim, represents a
‘masterpiece of creative genius’, ‘provides a unique or exceptional testimony to a cultural tradition or to a
civilisation alive or missing’ and ‘represents natural phenomena or areas of
exceptional natural beauty and scenic importance’. The application has the
support of Mario Gaviria, sociologist at
the Universidad Publica de Navarra: ‘It is a symbol of harmonious
coexistence that happily brings together people of all nationalities and
languages. It’s a materialisation of the welfare state in action’ [v].
I can’t see any reason to give Benidorm World Heritage
Status. It is sought in part as a badge to help sell heritage to tourists, not
something Benidorm needs. However, the expansion of what constitutes world
heritage over the years suggests the application should be taken seriously. World heritage designation has been around
since 1972. For twenty years predominantly European castles and Roman remains dominated.
From 1994 new rules meant sites associated with human co-existence with the
land and those associated with particular traditions were brought in. The
broadening out of the designation coincides with a relativisation and greening
of what is taken as important world heritage in wider society. It is all a bit
hit and miss, as Peregrine points out. Why Durham cathedral and not York? Why
the West Devon mining landscape but not the Rhondda valley? Why not Benidorm?
in defence of the masses (on holiday)
As anthropologist Hazel Andrews recently noted, academic
analysts of tourism often ignore mass tourism, preferring to focus on the
merits of niches such as ecotourism and volunteer tourism[vi]. When they do address it, package tourism comes out
badly.
Andrews herself described her time immersed in the culture
of young Brits abroad in Magaluf as ‘one of the most troubling episodes of my
life’[vii].One undergraduate text books asserts that the building of high rise hotels on
beach frontages (characteristic of sun seas and sand tourism) constitutes
‘obvious environmental rape’.[viii]
Another asserts that there is a ‘crisis of mass tourism that has brought
social, cultural economic and environmental havoc in its wake, and it is mass
tourism practices that must be radically changed to bring in the new’.[ix]
The same author sees mass tourism as being ‘consumed en masse in a similar, robot like and routine manner, with a lack
of consideration for the norms, culture and environment of the host country
visited’[x]. Contemporary cultural analyses echo this, viewing the holiday habits of
tourists as determined by neoliberal culture rather than their own desires.
Of course there are exceptions. The excellent Europe at the
Seaside,[xi]
reviewed on this blog, looks like a dry economic history of mass tourism, but
proves to be (for an academic book) a rip roaring read about places, people,
social trends and the cultural benefits of affluence and mobility. It is a far
cry from the fetishisation of Culture with a capital ‘C’ in some academic and
popular commentaries – the notion of people inhabiting cultures that define
them now and for the future, cultures deemed to be at grave risk from the march
of modernity.
Another exception is Flight to the Sun, the Story of the
Package Holiday Revolution[xii],
by Roger Bray and founder of post-war
holiday pioneers Horizon Holidays, Vladimir Raitz. They tell the story of the
package holiday entrepreneurs, with the insiders eye of Raitz: hiring ex World
War Two aircraft, pushing for government licences to fly them, negotiating with
Spanish hoteliers for whom back to back charters (the staple of the industry)
was originally alien and confusing.
For other books unashamedly upbeat about mass travel you
have to look back at accounts of the growth of holidays in Victorian England.
Thomas Cook faced down Victorian moralists in arguing the merits of holidays
for ‘the million’ who could ‘o’erleap the bounds of their down narrow circle,
rub off rust and prejudice by contact with others, and expand their sails and
invigorate their bodies by an exploration of some of nature’s finest scenes’.[xiii]
Piers Brendon’s Thomas Cook: 150 Years of Popular Tourism[xiv]
and Lynn Withey’s Grand Tours and Cooks Tours: a History of Leisure Travel[xv]
are excellent books that capture the optimism of the time.
The Victorian critics of tourists back then were unguarded
in their condemnation of the masses on holiday. For eminent Victorian
gentleman Sir Lesley Stephen Londoners
on holiday meant ‘Cockney ridden’ resorts
that at least had the merit of confining the ‘swarm of intrusive
insects’ to one place.[xvi]
Today criticism is mediated through a discussion of the need to conserve
environments and cultural diversity in the face of a deleterious modernity in the form of mass tourism. Whilst Cook had optimistic and progressive
sentiment on his side, today those who see themselves as radical are often the most
circumspect about mass tourism and the
tourists who partake.
bad behaviour abroad
Bucking the trend, two sociologists have turned their
attentions from the eco resort to the bad behaviour of young hedonistic holiday
makers. Hazel Andrews sees the excesses
of lads abroad holidays as part of the construction of an exclusive and
aggressive British identity[xvii]. Daniel Briggs in his study of hedonistic
ravers on Ibiza sees neoliberalism and economic insecurity as to blame for a
culture of excessive drink, drugs and criminality amongst some [xviii].
Closest to the mark on this, however, is Spiked commentator
Neil Davenport who argues that the excesses of British youth (exaggerated in my
view, although personal experience is now very dated) are more to do with the demise of strong social and political
identities rather than the strength of aggressive British or neoliberal ones [xix].
Davenport agrees with Briggs that some have become
‘decoupled’ from established and traditional social values grounded in work,
family and community. But whilst Briggs blames neoliberalism and economic uncertainty for eroding such
strong pillars of society, Davenport sees a subtle and pernicious erosion of
the traditional script of adulthood that once helped socialise young people. A
disoriented society unable to champion transcendental values of any kind, without
future oriented ideologies, means that ‘young people are not furnished with an
historical imagination that can conceptualise change and transformation’.
Without this they ‘only see themselves ‘in the present’ and therefore have no
understanding of themselves and the society they are meant to be part of.’ This
is compounded by the tyranny of relevance in schools (Davenport is a school
teacher in a sixth form college). If education and society generally does not
champion knowledge beyond what is relevant to ‘me’ and to ‘now’, why should
young people aspire to more than this? For Davenport, the ‘lack of a sense of historical change excludes
the possibility of personal transformation’
encouraging the examples of
‘negative fatalism’ well described in Briggs’s book [xx].
Responsibletourism.com
Responsible tourism.com have just announced their ‘long
list’ for their annual responsible tourism awards. This long list is never long
enough to accommodate the package tourism destinations that so many enjoy. It
is generally a combination of small scale, green niches, often in developing
destinations, along with larger operators looking for an ethical kitemark to
place alongside their mission statements. Ryanair have never made the long
list.
South East Archive of
Seaside Photography (SEAS)
For a visual feast of times when tourism was leisure,
leisure was not politics, and it was OK to ‘leave your cares behind’, have a
look at my colleague Karen Shepherdson’s SEAS repository of old holiday photographs from the East Kent
coastal resorts [xxi].
These days Margate in particular appears to be on the up. The revival of its Dreamland theme park is a very welcome, if inevitably a little nostalgic, addition to Margate’s charms. I can personally recommend cycling the coastal path from Whitstable, through Herne Bay, round Margate and Broadstairs, and then down to Ramsgate – truly stunning views, happy crowded beaches, secluded bays, ice cream and history.
These days Margate in particular appears to be on the up. The revival of its Dreamland theme park is a very welcome, if inevitably a little nostalgic, addition to Margate’s charms. I can personally recommend cycling the coastal path from Whitstable, through Herne Bay, round Margate and Broadstairs, and then down to Ramsgate – truly stunning views, happy crowded beaches, secluded bays, ice cream and history.
[i] http://www.stjohnscocathedral.com/caravaggio/the-beheading-of-saint-john-the-baptist.html
[ii] http://www.bluegrottomalta.com.mt/
[iii] http://heritagemalta.org/museums-sites/hagar-qim-temples/
[iv] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/destinations/europe/spain/11576042/Benidorm-to-apply-for-World-Heritage-status.html
[v] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/destinations/europe/spain/11576042/Benidorm-to-apply-for-World-Heritage-status.html
[vi] https://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/features/fear-and-loathing-in-shagaluf-the-brit-scholar-abroad/2020106.article
[vii] https://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/features/fear-and-loathing-in-shagaluf-the-brit-scholar-abroad/2020106.article
[viii]
C. Cooper. et al, 1993. Tourism: Principles and Practice. 1st edition. London,
Pitman. p.103
[ix] A.
Poon. 1993. Tourism, Technology and Competitive Strategy. Wallingford, CABI. p.3
[x] A.
Poon. 1993. Tourism, Technology and Competitive Strategy. Wallingford, CABI.
p.4
[xi] L.
Segreto, C. Manera, and M. Pohl (eds) Europe at the Seaside. The Economic
History of Mass Tourism in the Mediterranean. Oxford, Berghahn.
[xii]
Bray, R and Raitz, V. 2002. Flight to the Sun: The Story of the Holiday Revolution.
Continuum, London
[xiii]
L. Withey. 1997. Grand Tours and Cook's Tours: A History of Leisure Travel,
1750 to 1915. Michigan, Morrow. p.145
[xiv] P.
Brendon. 1991.Thomas Cook: 150 Years of Popular Tourism . London, Secker and
Warburg.
[xv]
L. Withey. 1997. Grand Tours and Cook's Tours: A History of Leisure Travel,
1750 to 1915. Michigan, Morrow.
[xvi] Cited
in M.Fieffer. 1985. Going Places: the ways of the Tourist from Imperial Rome to
the Present Day. London, McMillan, p. 179
[xvii]
https://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/features/fear-and-loathing-in-shagaluf-the-brit-scholar-abroad/2020106.article
[xviii]
D. Briggs. 2013. Deviance and Risk on Holiday: An Ethnography of British
Tourists in Ibiza. London, Palgrave McMillan.
[xix] http://www.spiked-online.com/newsite/article/sun_sea_and_working_class_hedonism/14162#.VXDOBXl0x-s
[xx] http://www.spiked-online.com/newsite/article/sun_sea_and_working_class_hedonism/14162#.VXDOBXl0x-s
[xxi] http://www.seasphotography.org.uk/
