2 The Explore team: tour leader profiles Susannah Moss

Box 5.2 The Explore team: tour leader profiles Susannah Moss

joined us after her studies of Social Anthropology in Ghana, and has since continued her love affair with Africa, leading many of our trips. A great adventurer, you may meet Susannah in Mongolia or Mali! Interests include drama and Tai Chi.

Lucian De Silva is our local leader in Sri Lanka. A registered guide since 1983, his welcoming nature, and

knowledge of almost every aspect of Sri Lanka, make him one of our most valued leaders. Suzi Poole

led tours for us all over the world and is now our Publications Manager. She is also responsible for environmental issues. Fluent in French and Spanish, Suzi enjoys painting and diving.

Bill McIlwraith is our Commercial Director. Bill held a senior travel post in San Francisco for a number

of years after he retired from leading overland expeditions through Africa, Asia and South America. Bill also crossed the Pacific as a crew member of a square rigger.

Source: Explore brochure (2001/2)

right’ (Hann Overland). At Journey Latin America (Small Group Escorted Trips) even the reservation staff are ‘South American experts’ and have ‘travelled extensively in Latin America’; the tour leaders are all graduates (some in Latin American Studies), a portfolio similar to Trailfinders. Tour leaders in these companies also embody, and are ambassadors of, new middle-class lifestyles, as the tour leader profiles in Box 5.2 testify.

this part of the tourism industry is more akin to a vocation. Encounter Overland refer

In addition, the spirit of professional dedication is also widely cited, where work in

to their trips as ‘projects’ and talk of their leaders in glowing terms: ‘ordinary men and women – often previous trip members – who have elected to put promising careers on hold and devote half a dozen years or more to what they like doing best’. And, of course, with greater flexibility in the service sector a higher proportion of new middle-class employees are able to take longer periods off between jobs or contracts, or are able to negotiate relatively long periods of absence. All in all a more dedicated, professional, and avaricious tourist class has emerged.

The point we anticipated earlier is that ‘travelling’ has emerged as an important informal qualification, with the number and range of stamps in a passport acting, so to speak, as a professional certificate; a record of achievement and experience. Not only is travel a professional pre-requisite for employment in parts of the tourism industry, but it is an important attribute in many new professions, such as overseas development work; it has become a rite of passage into certain occupations.

There are also indications that professionals working in other disciplines have begun to diversify into travel. Many of the occasional tour leaders, for instance, are profes- sionals in other fields. For example, the two directors of Papyrus Tours, a company

A new class of tourist • 127

established in 1984 with an aim to provide tours to East Africa, who were supportive of conservation efforts are also a senior officer in a large local authority and a self- employed professional landscape architect, respectively. Of course, we should also note that Third World tourism has created a huge range of job opportunities for the new middle classes in the First World. It is not just operators in the industry but consultants, journalists, tourism commentators, academics and charities focusing on tourism issues; take The International Ecotourism Society (TIES), for example, whose founder and pres- ident, Megan Epler Wood, explains that: ‘It was decided that The Ecotourism Society should be an organisation for professionals. It was clear in 1991 that a broad array of professionals from a variety of disciplines was needed to make ecotourism a genuine tool for conservation and sustainable development’ (Epler Wood, 1994). And more recently, TIES website describes the organisation as ‘Representing a worldwide network

13111 of 1,700 members from 55 professions and 65 countries . . . We’d like to invite you to the growing ranks of ecotourism professionals who are working with TIES’ (TIES website, 2002).

It is these professionals who are the opinion formers, the teachers, the advisers, even the ones who take decisions, and a number of publications have sought to prescribe ‘technical information on how to do ecotourism “right”’ (Whelan, 1991: 4). But the degree to which these ‘benevolent’ organisations are somehow value free is question- able. It is clear who these professionals are: in the TIES’s case, middle-class Americans, many of whom represent other powerful NGO interests (WWF, Conservation International, IUCN and so on – see listing of board of directors and advisers). We must ask what vision of the world they are pursuing and the degree to which such visions are imposed from the First World on the Third World, a question considered in the context of the activities of these organisations in Chapter 6.

The commencement of professionalisation processes in consumption are also detectable. As noted earlier, consumption has become more skilled. First, there are clear signals that the distinctions between occupational professionalism, and consumption and leisure, are beginning to blur. Illustrative of this is the growth of outdoor management and ‘team’ building exercises, especially popular among the new middle classes. High Places, for example, which offer mountain holidays in a number of Third World coun- tries, also offer ‘another type of HOLIDAY! . . . training programmes for people at work in industry, commerce and the public sector’. This is an operation appropriately called ‘HIGH PROFILE’, an experience for people like ‘YOU, the sort of people who come on our holidays’, described elsewhere as ‘intelligent and discerning people who wish to retain a taste of independent travel’.

Second, and more significant, tourists themselves are attempting to professionalise travel, a process encouraged, it would appear, by tour operators and environmental organisations. While the emergence of a formal travel qualification, such as the need to support an application for a Himalayan Kingdom expedition ‘with your climbing CV’, remains the exception rather than the rule for the time being, the number of tourist codes addressing the ethics and conduct of travel have exploded (see Chapter 7). A tourist ‘Code of Conduct’ established by the ECTWT, has been reproduced in many places, especially by the network of organisations concerned with the effects of tourism, but also, for example, among travel agency associations and tour operators who have formu- lated their own versions. Area-specific codes with emphasis on ecological and cultural issues such as the ‘Himalayan Tourist Code’ formulated by Tourism Concern (in the UK) have also appeared. Organisations such as these have attracted increasing support from members of the new middle classes and from new independent tour operators like High Places, which reproduces the Himalayan Code in full and which claims to strive

11111 to ‘adhere to the ethics’ of Tourism Concern. It is the emergence of an ethical, if not

128 • A new class of tourist

professional, approach to tourism reminiscent of Kutay’s observed ‘Peace Corps-type travellers looking for a more meaningful vacation’ (1989: 35).

These codes of ethics form the backbone of a hegemony of travel (or ecotravel as it is now known in North America), which is advanced by the new middle classes, the small independent tour operators and the vanguard of this hegemony, tourism organi- sations. Together they begin to represent a new tourism social movement with organi- sations such as Tourism Concern, the Campaign for Environmentally Responsible Tourism (CERT) and the US-based International Ecotourism Society, emerging as symbolic ‘institutes of travel’. These institutes now provide ethical yardsticks against which the activities of operators and tourists can be measured and classified. With an overwhelming concern for environmental ethics (such as the US National Audubon Society’s ‘Travel Ethic for Environmentally Responsible Travel’), it is in the ecolog- ical and indigenous heartlands of the Third World that these hegemonic struggles are most readily detected and played out.

The discourse of ‘new wave tourism’

‘Out goes the “’ere we go, ’ere we go” Spanish Costa-style, in comes a more thoughtful middle class approach’ (Barrett, 1990: 2). This was how Frank Barrett of the Independent newspaper, the UK’s champion of new middle-class values, describes the shift to ‘new

wave tourism’ (Wheeller, 1992). 4 There can be little disputing that the attributes and qualities of the supposedly more alternative, individualised and sensitive forms of travel are generally unspoken but appear to be deep within the new middle-class psyche. As The Travel Alternative, a specialist company offering craft and textile holidays, comments: ‘On a recent tour a passenger said “You can either be a tourist or a trav- eller.” We would like to think that our tours allow everyone the opportunity to be trav- ellers’ (Newsletter 7, 1994). 5

Of course, it is not only through the classificatory distinction between tourist and trav- eller that differentiation is pursued via discourse. But it is illustrative of the battle being waged to put into words exactly what kind of holidaymaker we are and what we stand for; and, conversely, state exactly what we are not for; as Barrett argues, ‘tourist’ is the ‘worst kind of insult’ (Barrett, 1990: 3).

Some observers have momentarily reflected on the highbrow nature of traveller and the intellectual snobbishness within which the whole debate is framed, and have attempted to rescue ‘tourist’ from middle-class derision. Tourist has become prefixed by benevolent adjectives such as the ‘The Good Tourist’ (Wood and House, 1991) or ‘The Reluctant Tourist’, title to a series run by the UK broadsheet Independent which culminated in The Reluctant Tourist’s Handbook. There are also references to ethical tourists, alternative tourists and so on. Arguably though, this is further confirmation that contemporary tourism is charged with the classificatory struggles in and between class fractions (Walter, 1982). As Culler observes: ‘Once one recognises that wanting to be less touristy than other tourists is part of being a tourist, one can recognise the superficiality of most discussions of tourism, especially those that stress the superficiality of tourists’ (1988: 158).

By contrast, the term ‘traveller’ assumes that it is no longer a process of tourism with which the individual is engaged, but a considerably more de-differentiated, esoteric and individualised form of activity; travel is to tourism, as individual is to class. It is a strategy for seeking differentiation or a ‘paper-chase aimed at ensuring constant distinc- tive gaps’ (Bourdieu, 1984: 481). Most importantly, the discourse adopted by these class fractions is a further reminder that consideration of the way in which power is expressed and imposed must lie at the heart of the analysis of tourism (Munt, 1994a; Urry, 1990a; Wheeller, 1993a).

A new class of tourist • 129

Many small tour companies and individual travellers have attempted to maximise the distinction. As already argued, the practices of travellers are perhaps best conceived as part of the ‘cult of individualism’ (Pels and Crebas, 1991), though it is deeply ironic that they are largely indistinguishable from each other by virtue of their discourse, dress codes and the informal ‘packages’ they follow through travel guides. Whole regions have become travel circuits (in popular travel discourse ‘doing’ South-East Asia, Central America and so on). Errington and Gewertz (1989) reproduce excerpts from a Papua New Guinea guest house visitor book to illustrate the fundamental traveller distinction, with two US travellers advising: ‘Explain difference between tourist and traveller . . . Be a traveller, not a tourist. It makes a big difference’ (1989: 40). Travellers, therefore, attempt to create their own aura, while attempting to prevent the encroachment of ‘tourists’ in their quest for authentication:

13111 Momentarily alone in one of the wildest places on earth, you feel exhilarated, exhausted and scared. Unfortunately the feeling is unlikely to last more than a few moments. If you are lucky, all that will happen is another traveller will appear on the ridge to exchange pleasantries and wonderment. If you are unlucky . . . your reverie will be interrupted by half a dozen Londoners swearing and shouting.

(Edwards, 1992: 19) As Box 5.3 suggests, mass tourism and tourists have also become the target of inde-

pendent tour operators. Intellectualism oozes through, with package tourists ‘invading’ backpackers’ discoveries and the celebration of areas where the invasion has been fore- stalled: at the height of aestheticisation, Cambodia is lucky for its ‘fascinating culture bruised by war’ and even luckier with a culture ‘unscathed by tourism’ (Calder, 1994b). Companies refer to the ‘anonymity and inflexibility’ (J. & C. Voyageurs), of ‘run of the mill’ (Abercrombie & Kent), ‘conventional’ (Explore) and ‘impersonalised’ (Africa Exclusive) mass packaged tours, and celebrate their demise (Magic of the Orient). Ultimately, it is an appeal to the idea that travel is ‘individual enough to be a sustain- able alternative to the juggernaut of mass tourism’ (Explore).