(1) Tourism involves creating or re-creating places, managing them, luring visitors, and selling them services, products, and experiences:
- Creating, exploiting, or reshaping image (ex. Bierstadt painting of the Sierra Nevada; Santa Fe Railway ad; Faneuil Hall Marketplace)
- Constructing infrastructure (attraction or accommodations) (ex. Disneyland; lookout tower at Niagara; Old Faithful Inn)
- Providing access (and exclusivity) (ex. Atlantic City rollerchair pushers; seeing-the-city cars)
- Managing labor
- Promoting (advertising) (ex. See Rock City barn sign)
- Providing services and amenities (hospitality)
- Selling products (including souvenirs) (ex. Tombstone tourist shops)
Shaping visitor experience (guides, tours, maps) (ex. transit-line tourist guides)
(2) Tourism involves the expectations that tourists bring when they visit places:
Tourist expectations are shaped by . . .
- Promotion of Image (previously noted)
- Depiction in literature (ex. Midnight in the Garden of Good & Evil), art (ex. Bierstadt), photography (ex. Bruce Mozert underwater photography at Silver Springs), music, film, tv, web
- Consumer product branding (ex. Zatarain’s)
- Word of mouth (stories told, photos shared, postcards sent, souvenirs given)
- Past experience
(3) Tourism exerts economic, architectural, cultural, social, political, environmental impacts on places:
- Economic impact ex: Las Vegas gambling economy;
- Architectural impact ex: Royal Orleans Hotel mimicry of Fr. Qtr. style;
- Cultural impact ex: New Glarus, WI—more Swiss than the Swiss;
- Social impact ex: Aspen, CO’s push for affordable housing;
- Political impact ex: New Orleans’ 1960s freeway fight to protect the French Quarter;
- Environmental impact ex: Cherokee, NC, traffic jam
(4) Tourism has a history, and that history is interwoven with the history of both tourist places and the history of our nation:
Broader trends shape tourism; tourism shapes broader trends
Tourism Scholarship:
- Pioneered by cultural anthropologists and geographers in 1970s
- Historians took note by 1990s
- Heavy focus on West and Southwest, period 1870-1930, cultural impact of tourism
- Subfields treat most US regions and growing number of US cities
- Growing effort to see tourism as complex force that produces complicated outcomes
- Growing effort to understand tourism from the perspective of those other than promoters
- Growing effort to tie tourism back into larger American history
