ABSTRACT
Tourist travel, an industry predicated on the buying and selling of experience, in many ways exemplifies the therapeutic tilt of modern consumer culture (Rothman 1998; Urry 1990). Yet, at the same time, travel’s immaterial nature places it at odds with the accumulation generally taken as part and parcel of consumerism. Unlike the market for cars, electronics, clothes, and other purchases, buyers are seemingly left with relatively little to show for the money spent on vacations, outside of photographs and souvenirs. In this chapter, I argue that tourism has in fact had a very material impact on consumer culture, acting as a powerful shaping agent on the broader aesthetics of mass marketing. Advertising, industrial design, fashion, retail outlets, and leisure environments all bear the mark of touristic ways of thinking about space and place. Indeed, tourist travel provides a whole body of narratives and symbols that pass through everyday life (Löfgren 1999), helping to constitute the basic lexicon of consumer enticement: travel landscapes double as advertising dreamscapes, leisure time nourishes fantasies of abundance, and ways of being mobile speak to desires for autonomy and self-actualization.
