ABSTRACT
It is often said that it is better to be a traveller than a tourist. This statement has much to do with the evolution of mass tourism and the notion of ‘authentic’ versus ‘inauthentic’ tourism experiences. Travellers presumably engage with the ‘reality’ of places, while the tourist consumes a sanitised, and no doubt crass, version of where they happen to be. Crick1 notes the difference between ‘tourism’ and ‘travelling’ as expressed by Boorstin and Fussell:
Boorstin… stresses the difference between ‘travelling’ [with its etymological connection to the notion of work (travail)] and ‘tourism’ (the apotheosis of the pseudo, where passivity rather than activity reigns). Tourism is a form of experience packaged to prevent real contact with others, a manufactured, trivial, unauthentic way of being, a form of travel emasculated, made safe by commercialism. … For Fussell, to write about tourism is necessarily to write satire, for the ‘travel industry’ is a
contradiction in terms: Exploration is discovering the undiscovered; travel is at least intended to reveal what history has discovered; tourism, on the other hand, is merely about a world discovered (or even created) by entrepreneurs, packaged and then marketed.2
