ABSTRACT
Tourist Discourse and Tourist Space The travel industry profits best by surrounding travellers with its goods and services. The tourist space is formed by standardising facilities, creating attractions and transforming them. The standardisation sometimes diminishes the qualities of the attraction that originally turned it into an attraction. Foreign food eaten on travel is one of the best examples of standardisation. Staging, probably more than transforming, expresses the process that intentionally transforms a feature into an attraction, into the object of gaze. Compared to the conventional tourists, the backpackers apparently leave the tourist space behind, or at least intend to do so. However, the apparent rejection of the touristic infrastructure does not have to mean the rejection of the conceptualisations that draw from the tourist discourse. This discourse is still mediated to the backpackers by the other travellers and by guidebooks.
