Exploring the Use and Impact of Travel Guidebooks
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Exploring the Use and Impact of Travel Guidebooks
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Overview
This volume provides the first comprehensive examination of travel guidebooks and their conceptualisation, use and impact. Guidebooks have been key tourism paraphernalia for almost two centuries and although researched in some areas, academic knowledge on guidebooks in tourism has not been expansively communicated. The uncritical, unreflective and largely pejorative approach to guidebooks in the public sphere, and to some degree also present in academia, is reassessed in this book. This challenges the current limited tourism research approaches to the topic, including the routinely held assumption that the internet has all but destroyed the printed guidebook. This book will be a useful resource for postgraduate students and researchers in tourism and tourism communications and consumption.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781845415655 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Channel View Publications |
| Publication date: | 02/04/2016 |
| Series: | Tourism and Cultural Change , #48 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 256 |
| File size: | 442 KB |
About the Author
Victoria Peel is a senior lecturer in cultural tourism management in the Graduate Tourism program hosted by the National Centre for Australian Studies, Monash University, Australia. Her research focuses on cultural tourism and the backpacker and student tourism markets.
Anders Sørensen is owner and manager of Tourismlab.dk, which provides tourism and hospitality research and consultancy and produces knowledge of tourism and tourists. His research interests include backpacker tourism, travel guidebooks and tourism in peripheral areas.
Read an Excerpt
Exploring the Use and Impact of Travel Guidebooks
By Victoria Peel, Anders Sørensen
Multilingual Matters
Copyright © 2016 Victoria Peel and Anders SørensenAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-84541-565-5
CHAPTER 1
Introduction: Travel Guidebooks and Tourism Discourse
In Berlin, in the days before the First World War, legend tells us that precisely at the stroke of noon (...), Kaiser Wilhelm used to interrupt whatever he was doing inside the Palace. (...) He would say: "With your kind forbearance, gentlemen, I must excuse myself now, to appear in the window. You see, it says in the Baedeker that at this hour I always do."
Boorstin, 1964: 111
It was probably just a matter of time – as the world metamorphoses into a pre-digested Let's Go/Lonely Planet theme park, the travel guidebook has attained a level of ubiquity crying out to have the piss taken.
Jeffrey, 2003: 29
Introduction
In this book, we explore the use and significance of the travel guidebook in tourism. Tourists with their travel guidebooks are a routine sight at locations of interest around the world. Examples include city visitors debating their next picking from a list of not-to-be-missed sights, sightseers consulting maps and descriptions in a guidebook, foreign package tourists checking the local tour guide's advice against their native-language guidebook, backpackers probing a much-thumbed Lonely Planet or Rough Guide for information on the cheapest and cleanest bed in town. And so on and so on. For at least a century and a half, travel guidebooks have routinely been ascribed a significant impact on the performance of tourism, and the congruent growth of international individual mass tourism and guidebook publication since the 1960s has only strengthened that impression. Yet, while popular representations of guidebook impacts regularly describe a massive and regrettable influence on tourists and destinations, neither the guidebook nor its critique has been subjected to significant academic interrogation. Indeed, scholarly understanding of guidebooks seems often to obliquely buttress a condescending view of guidebooks rather than examining the critique.
The overarching aim of this book is therefore to problematise thinking surrounding the guidebook and, by extending knowledge of this ubiquitous element of travel, to further understanding of the tourism system. We ask how guidebooks have been represented as influencing tourists and their tourism, both historically and in the contemporary scene, and their effect on the creation of tourism places in different contexts. Through critically deconstructing the framing of guidebooks in both popular and scientific writings, we expose and question a number of built-in assumptions about guidebooks and guidebook use. A pervasive component of travel paraphernalia, guidebooks are often mentioned but less scrutinised in the research literature. Yet, despite the lack of research – or perhaps precisely because of it – guidebooks and guidebook use are surrounded by a number of somewhat conflicting understandings.
Chief among these are assumptions at the heart of the customary denouncing of the guidebook and their users as representative of all that is superficial in modern tourism. The fleeting, routine encounters with tourists' guidebook usage described in the opening paragraph temptingly elicit in the mind cultural theorist Roland Barthes' (1972: 76) notorious criticism of the Guide Bleu to Spain as 'an agent of blindness'. Certainly, disdain, even mockery, of guidebooks, and those who carry them, has a long history (see Buzard in Gilbert, 1999: 282). In 1876, readers of the English satirical magazine, Punch (cited in Berghoff et al., 2002: 172), understood well the comedic derision of a rhyme describing a participant on one of Thomas Cook's package tours as bereft of ideas other than those imparted by 'the red book', his Murray's guide or handbook:
Learns to like and to look
By his Guide or his Book
Now he likes his routes Cooked
His opinion red-booked.
Contesting this, however, guidebooks can also be seen as signposting the increasing individualisation of the tourist experience in recent time. From the mid-1950s until the mid-2000s, growth in the guidebook publishing industry suggests a developing influence of guidebooks on tourist decision-making and thus on tourism more broadly. The increasing diversity of guidebooks signifies growing demand differentiation and tourists can now acquire a variety of titles on a destination, including the most remote regions. In this way, the rapid growth of the guidebook industry in the last half century enabled what Koshar (2000: x) describes as the 'individuating functions of tourism'. According to Koshar (2000: 2), the travel guidebook, 'in spite (or perhaps because) of its tightly woven itineraries, creates a space for significant individual practice', a perspective shared by guidebook publishers who represent their series as a liberating rather than a regulating device in the pursuit of travel.
A second common and largely unsupported assumption is that of the power of the guidebook as an arbiter of a destructive mass tourism. In mainstream English-speaking media, growth of the guidebook market over the last four decades is often illustrated by the success of publishers such as Lonely Planet and Rough Guide. As these publishers have a reputation as suppliers of guidebooks to less 'touristed' locations, it is frequently presumed that such guidebooks pave the way for destination development, tourism growth, and cultural change at the tourism periphery. However, there is little evidence to support this. Indeed, it might equally be argued that the causality is in fact the other way around and that the growth of guidebook publications is the result of increasing affluence which has in turn fuelled the expansion of international tourism. Following that train of argument, tourism growth in most locations would have happened with or without the guidebook, which cannot be entirely represented as spearheading such expansion.
This, in turn, offers another angle to the understanding of those guidebooks most commonly associated with destination growth. A simple analysis of publishers' websites indicates that the majority of publications from guidebook publishers, including those once routinely termed 'alternative', cover well-established tourist destinations. Here, guidebooks are but one source of information among a plethora of brochures, leaflets and booklets, oral information provided in tourist bureaux, internet promotion, travelogues, glossy picture books and various forms of social media presence. Thus, it can be argued that in many locations, the popularity of guidebooks is not derived from a need for place-specific information that cannot be found elsewhere. In such cases, guidebooks may be seen as fulfilling a need for guidance through the wealth of information about established tourist destinations.
In flipping the coin once more, it may equally be argued that precisely the destinations that are inundated with information are also those where, in recent years, information search and dissemination have gone online. Indeed, change seems to be blowing through the guidebook industry as companies jostle to find purchasers in a crowded and diversifying marketplace. Guidebook publisher Frommer's US sales declined from $34 million to $18 million between 2006 and 2012 with Lonely Planet sales likewise declining from $25 million to $18 million concurrently (G.M., 2013). The travel guidebook as conventionally conceived is being transformed by the intersection of rapid technological development and trends in consumer demand. The effect of such changes on the place and practice of the guidebook in contemporary and future tourism is unknown, but commentators are variously divided on whether the guidebook is continuing or coming to a halt, is transforming into an e-platform entity with much of its original character intact, or is evolving into something as yet unknown.
The very coexistence of such contradictory understandings surrounding the guidebook suggests to us a domain of culturally embedded knowledge where not only the use and influence of the guidebook in tourism but also the various meanings ascribed and attitudes towards it warrant a wide-ranging critical enquiry. Ours is not a defence of the guidebook, but a requalification of guidebook critique through peeling back the layers of truisms and discourse that have framed understandings of guidebooks and their influence on tourism.
We contend that guidebooks are more than functional tools subject to elitist ridicule. They are cultural items, routinely present in tourism for two centuries, dynamic and interactive with tourism, moving, changing and reflecting cultural change in tourism itself. Our interest in the guidebook is therefore as an historical and contemporary artefact of tourism which is significantly more complex than is often identified, and whose meaning in a larger setting of tourism and cultural change deserves a multifaceted exploration.
Guidebook Research
Despite criticism by Fussell (1980) and others who regard guidebooks as little more than the ephemeral and superficial 'debasement of an earlier and more sophisticated travel literature from the Enlightenment' (Koshar, 1998: 324), the guidebook has begun to receive more attention as an artefact of tourism. Yet, while tourism researchers have made extensive passing reference to travel guidebooks, focused analysis of guidebook agency and theory is limited and guidebook conceptualisation remains weak (Peel et al., 2012). We have identified four clusters of research activity referencing guidebooks. Together with seven areas of research lacunae which are described below, they frame the content of this book.
Cluster 1: Guidebooks and tourism history. Guidebooks have received varied attention in accounts of the familiar narrative history of Western tourism focused on the European Grand Tour tradition and the evolution of 19th-century mass tourism. Historians' interest in the guidebook as a resource for deciphering Western consumer interests and the imperial project is particularly extensive (e.g. Buzard, 1993; Koshar, 2000; Michalski, 2004; Palmowski, 2002; Parsons, 2007; Scott, 1998; Vaughan, 1974; Withey, 1998).
Yet, historians' use and interpretation of the guidebook, in both the writing of tourism history and as a subject of historical inquiry in its own right, have advanced slowly. Broad assumptions regarding guidebook use, which Therkelsen and Sørensen (2005) observed in the literature on contemporary tourism, appear equally evident among those who would seek to understand tourism histories and who have based their analysis on the guidebook for this purpose. In addition, while referenced in much historical narrative, the guidebook frequently receives atheoretical treatment, diminishing insight into the guidebook in the conduct of tourism and its performative features. The content, character and omissions of research into guidebooks and tourism history are the subject of Chapter 3 in this book.
Cluster 2: Guidebook texts and images. Scholars' analyses of guidebook texts and images to elucidate how guidebooks represent place, culture and history have resulted in a reasonable body of research (e.g. Bhattacharyya, 1997; Gritti, 1967; Jacobsen & Dann, 2003; Jacobsen et al., 1998; Kelly, 1998; Lew, 1991; Lisle, 2008; Siegenthaler, 2002). Much of the research within this cluster is situated within sociological and cultural theory perspectives which perceive the textual and/or visual content of guidebooks as an encoded source of mediated messages directing the 'tourist gaze' (Urry, 1990). Research approaches range from empirically descriptive elucidation of content and appraisal of textual representation and its accuracy and truthfulness, to various forms of content or discourse analysis.
However, there is a latent shortcoming in this approach which assumes that users of guidebooks necessarily perform according to script. We are also reminded of Franklin's (2003: 97) caution about the limitations of the kind of textual approach influenced by the recent cultural turn in the social sciences in which 'tourist things' are rendered significant 'only in what they represent; as a meaningful set of signs and metaphors'. In Chapter 4, we question how far findings based on textual/image analysis can take us in understanding the corporeal functioning of the guidebook in the tourism system.
Cluster 3: Guidebooks as mediators of tourism practice. The research in this cluster refocuses on material culture and 'the object' in human action and is akin to other interrogation of tourism praxis involving materialities such as the camera (Robinson & Picard, 2009), photographs (Crang, 2006), souvenirs (Morgan & Pritchard, 2005) and walking boots (Edensor, 2000). This agenda has provided a welcome addition to the focus on signs and metaphors in tourism by advocating for a 'social life of things' (Appadurai, 1986) perspective offering an understanding of guidebooks as mediators in touristic 'world-making' (Hollinshead, 2007, 2009). Such work has raised guidebooks to the status of 'dynamic objects' (McGregor, 2000) which offer a unique means through which to interpret the practical engagement of tourists within different cultural milieu. These approaches usefully signify the guidebook as an active agent in tourism experience facilitating the way 'meanings are constructed, contested and circulated through discourse as tourism knowledge' (Caruana & Crane, 2011: 1501). Generally, however, analysis of the guidebook as an object through which tourism is performed and which exerts a material influence in their use by tourists remains, like much guidebook research, sporadic (Beck, 2006; Caruana & Crane, 2011; Lisle, 2008; McGregor, 2000; Wilson et al., 2009; Young, 2009).
Overall, the research within this cluster both benefits from, and contributes to, understanding how tourism texts influence tourist behaviour and experiences more broadly. Tourism texts in general, and travel guidebooks in particular, are not necessarily passively accepted by the user, but are met with varying levels of resistance and diverse interpretations. In particular, they are contested by the (anti-)tourism discourse that scaffolds the enduring traveller–tourist dichotomy. There is a need to investigate this mesh of anti-tourism one-upmanship further and guidebooks, which are a palpable symbol of this dichotomy in diverse ways, offer a prism for such research. Much textual analysis frames the reader – the tourist user – as predisposed towards unconditional acceptance of the messages conveyed in words or photographs unmediated by any personal understanding. This, however, is not supported by much empirical evidence on actual guidebook use, and such an approach harbours a latent risk that Barthes' (1972) condescending view of the tourist is unquestioningly accepted rather than critically interrogated by the researcher. More simply, we can't claim to understand the impact of the guidebook on the tourist without understanding the touristic usage of the guidebook and the tourist user, themes which recur throughout this book.
We examine this further in Chapter 7. Descriptions of use are compiled from consumers' online discussions about guidebooks and evidence of use is drawn from observation of and interviews with tourists. These data support an examination of fundamental issues of when and how tourists use their guidebooks before, during and after travel, and even when travel is only vaguely anticipated. The intent of this discussion is to compare how published accounts of use accords with what is understood theoretically of guidebook usage as a means of problematising the way guidebooks are incorporated into the doing of tourism.
Cluster 4: Tourists' use of travel guidebooks. Much of the guidebook-based analysis in this cluster is firmly anchored in the tourist behaviour research domain with some theoretical and empirical groundwork undertaken in that context (Brown, 2007; Jack & Phipps, 2003; McGregor, 2000; Nishimura et al., 2006a, 2007; Osti et al., 2009; Therkelsen & Sørensen, 2005; Wearing & Whenman, 2009; Wong & Liu, 2011). Deeper understanding of tourists use of guidebooks has in particular occurred through Jack and Phipps' (2003) interpretation of the didactic nature of guidebooks as apodemic literature in that they are both written and consumed with the full intention of affecting behaviour, and Seaton's (2002) notion of the dual function of travel texts as stage directions (where to go, what to search out, what to see) and instructions on how to play the part of responding as a bone fide traveller/tourist. Brown's (2007) exploration of how tourists 'work' their guidebooks in unfamiliar environments to problem-solve also focuses on the way guidebook prose is converted to activity in the field.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Exploring the Use and Impact of Travel Guidebooks by Victoria Peel, Anders Sørensen. Copyright © 2016 Victoria Peel and Anders Sørensen. Excerpted by permission of Multilingual Matters.
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Table of Contents
Chapter 1. Introduction: Travel Guidebooks and Tourism Discourse
Chapter 2. Conceptualising Travel Guidebooks
Chapter 3. Guidebook Histories
Chapter 4. Travel Guidebooks as Text
Chapter 5. According to the Guidebook: Exploring Lonely Planet’s Australia
Chapter 6. ‘Why I Love/Hate My Guidebook’: Perspectives from the Blogosphere
Chapter 7. Slaves to the Guidebook? Exploring Guidebook Usage
Chapter 8. Towards a Typology of Guidebook Users
Chapter 9. Permission to Coast? Travel Guidebooks and Tourism Businesses
Chapter 10. ‘Countdown to Doomsday’? Guidebook Agency in Destination Development
Chapter 11. Transformations in the Age of E-tourism: The End of the Guidebook as We Know It?
Chapter 12. The Stigma of Guidebooks: Causes and Questions
References