an interview with Greg Richards

(the first in a series of reflections from key thinkers on tourism, as part of our Tourism Interviews Project)

Tourism seems to be at a significant juncture.

Covid-19 devastated the industry, and stymied sociability and discovery.

The discussion of post-pandemic tourism is far from optimistic. Natural and cultural limits to tourism seem to loom larger than ever.

Yet technological and demographic changes suggest new and radical challenges and possibilities for the industry, and for tourists. The numbers travelling continue to grow, a development in the past mostly associated with progress.

So here at Tourism’s Horizon: Travel for the Millions, in conjunction with The “Good Tourism” Blog and The Journal of Tourism Futures (who will publish the interviews as a set when completed),  we have sought the candid views of a number of well-known and respected experts. We asked each of them a mixture of questions designed to prompt reflection on how we look at tourism -  past, present and future.

We are delighted to feature Professor Greg Richards as our first interviewee.  In weeks to come this will be followed by Professor Michael Hall and a number of other long standing and eminent observers of the tourism industry from our universities. We also hope to feature similar reflections from other stakeholders. Do get in touch if you’d like to propose someone.

Greg Richards is one of the most well-known and respected analysts of contemporary tourism. His contribution to the field is estimable. He has pioneered research – both conceptual and applied – on a range of issues, with an emphasis on cultural tourism. He has a long association with ATLAS (the Association for Tourism and  Leisure Education and Research), an organisation he co-founded. Many scholars would agree that the now global ATLAS network has developed as the most important (and by reputation most friendly) grouping for those interested in all things tourism.

Here are Greg’s reflections, in response to our questions. Our aim is to prompt your own reflections, so we invite you to comment and discuss below the interview:

• Various authors have set out different ‘platforms’ and perspectives over the last 50 years.  Jafar Jafari set out advocacy, cautionary, adaptancy, knowledge-based, and public platforms (Jafari, 1990, 2001, 2007) . Do you think the perspectives and writing from the experts generally,  accurately reflected the ‘state of the debates’, and the reality, of tourism as it has developed? Or, with the benefit of hindsight, do you think ‘tourism studies’ got it right?

In his appreciation of Jafar Jafari, Honggen Xiao (2013) called him “the platform builder”. In this sense, Jafar was ahead of his time. He was building platforms to facilitate networking and knowledge exchange before most people in tourism knew what platforms were. Jafar was involved in the creation of a number of different platforms with varying roles in tourism academia, and these platforms, including Trinet, have been of considerably value to tourism scholars ever since.

Platforms are an important part of any network. Platforms provide the framing for important moments and draw attention to specific pieces of information or knowledge. Platforms often serve to highlight established wisdom, or the expected shape of knowledge. To do this effectively, however, they need to create debate and the real exchange of ideas, not just information. This needs not just the platform, but also events. As Sewell (1996) points out, a gap between expectation and reality is what creates an event – things that people are not expecting. To be really useful, therefore, platforms need to constantly challenge expectations and move debate forward into unexpected directions.

Over the years a more sociological or anthropological approach to the study of tourism has emerged, as scholars from wider backgrounds have discovered the tourism field. Their concern with tourism lies not in tourism business, but the effects that tourism has on society. This has opened up many new paths for research, but at the same time the business of tourism, or the tourism industry, has been less prominent in research agendas. This is a potential problem, because unless we understand more about the production of tourism experiences, we cannot understand how tourism affects and will affect society. There has been a lot of attention for the social impacts of Airbnb in cities, for example, but less attention has been paid to the platformisation of the economy that enabled Airbnb to grow, or the gentrification that made it trendy to stay in edgy areas of cities.

As well as his introduction of different platforms, Jafar Jafari (2012) also commented that “the present practice of the new generation of PhDs in tourism—who are busy conducting research on and teaching tourism as a freestanding subject—is most worrisome.” He went on to explain that “Connections to (or dependence on) established disciplines is being lost and importation of knowledge from them continuously shrinking” This highlights one of the apparent paradoxes of modern academia. We are more connected to others than ever before via new technologies, and yet we seem to spurn these opportunities in favour of narrowing our vision to small corners of our own field. The trend for PhDs to be completed via publication does not help in this respect. Rather than reading books and broadening their minds, students are busy slavishly following the publication trails of those in their own field, cajoled by journal editors to quote work from the journal they want to publish in. Literature reviews are completed by searching on SCOPUS, which returns journal articles from a narrow range of sources for a limited range of disciplines, and a narrow range of languages. Chance encounters with new knowledge on library shelves, such as Honggen Xiao describes in his discovery of Annals of Tourism Research, are these days very rare. This means that the gap between the material produced by tourism academics and the everyday practice of tourism is only getting bigger. We have created nice shiny silos for ourselves, and more of us seem happy to continue working within them.

• Is there a book – any book, fiction or non-fiction -  that profoundly shaped your thinking about tourism as a human activity? Tell us just a little about it, and why?

Backpacking research (Richards and Wilson, 2004) led us to a lot of literary sources related to travel: including Ernest Hemingway, Jack Kerouac, Hunter S. Thompson, Bruce Chatwin, Paul Theroux, Michael Palin and Freya Stark. Reading these books was not only informative, but a lot of fun. I later wove many of them into a course on authenticity, which my students enjoyed a lot. Of these writers Chatwin is probably the one I identify with most. I was particularly struck by the Songlines (1987), which is essentially an attempt to grasp the relationship between people and place, and to understand the primordial urge to travel. In The Songlines, Chatwin describes how the Aboriginal Ancestors sung the landscape into being on their nomadic travels. They used songs to paint a picture of the world, and the relationship between nature and people. The constant movement of Aboriginal tribes was seen by Chatwin as the natural state for human existence – the yearning to travel is therefore a primordial one. Chatwin muses: “Why do wandering people conceive the world as perfect whereas sedentary ones always try to change it?” The division between the sedentary and nomadic peoples is a recurring theme in Chatwin’s writing, and is reflected in the antagonism between nomadic backpackers and more sedentary tourists, who return quickly to their fixed home locations.

• In recent decades we have had various ‘turns’ and ‘platforms’ relating to localism, ethical behaviour, social justice, decolonisation and degrowth, amongst others. Do any of these strike you as either particularly insightful or particularly limited in their approach?

The ‘local turn’ has received increasing attention in tourism studies in recent years (Russo & Richards, 2016; Higgins-Desbiolles & Bigby, 2022). In the context of tourism, the turn towards the local goes beyond simple localism: it involves the use of the ‘local’ as a marker of distinction and authenticity. In the past, being local was a relatively simple matter – you came from and lived in a certain locality. But globalisation and increased mobility has problematised the simple link between the idea of the local and that of location. Not only are tourists by definition not permanently linked to the locations they visit, but the people that do live in the places they visit often have complicated links to the locality as well.

Ex-pats, migrants, digital nomads, exchange students and other mobile groups living permanently or temporarily in the destination also defy the traditional idea of ‘locals’.

As Albert Sans and Alan Quaglieri (2016) have shown in the case of Barcelona, ex-pats and lifestyle migrants are often disproportionately involved in the tourism industry, and they are responsible for interpreting their adopted local places to tourists, who also view them as ‘locals’. Arguably, ‘the local’ has become the new touchstone of authenticity. If something is ‘local’, then it must be authentic. This system is supported by Airbnb and many ‘live like a local’ tourism products across the globe (Koslowsky & Mody, 2019). The idea of many of these consumers is to discover non-touristed places, and to become a ‘para-local’. This kind of logic of escaping from other tourists by diving into the local has become a key part of alternative tourism and new urban tourism products.

Not only is the local turn complicated from the perspective of who or what is local, but the development of locally-orientated tourism has been argued to produce “an unhealthy level of separation between the seer (the tourist) and the seen (the destination and all it has to offer), resulting in a level of intrusiveness that the traditional barriers of mass tourism do well to moderate” (Koslowsky & Mody, 2019). In some ways, therefore, the local turn is potentially more damaging than traditional mass tourism because it offers tourists a route into the cracks and crevices of the local. This intrusion is exacerbated by platforms such as Airbnb offering access to the private, interstitial spaces of peoples’ homes, where tourists come into contact with many residents who did not sign up to become part of the tourism industry, but who find themselves nonetheless being sucked in to perform the emotional labour of their everyday lives for tourists.

In analysing the local turn we also need to be careful not to fall into the ‘local trap’ of assuming that everything local, including locally-based tourism, is inherently good. As Purcell (2006) points out, debates about the ‘right to the city’ are inherently susceptible to the local trap, and this is an issue that pervades discussions about the development of urban tourism.

• The term ‘overtourism’ became de rigueur during 2017. Google trends suggests that its rise to prominence followed much publicised, but small, protests in Barcelona, mirrored by other expressions of discontent in Venice, Amsterdam and elsewhere. It soon became a point of reference in the media, in academia and in global tourism organisations such as the WTTC. What do you make of this ? What does this newish term mean to you ?

I am not keen on the term ‘overtourism’. As in the debates about the nature of the local in tourism, a major problem is that overtourism inevitably places the emphasis on tourism in what is often a multi-dimensional problem. I prefer the original description in Dutch by Myriam Jansen-Verbeke (1990) of tourism pressure in Bruges as ‘overtoeristisering’ (in later English language publications she uses the term ‘overtourismification’), which also shows that the concept of overtourism is actually not that new. Her important point was that rather than tourism per se, or the number of tourists, the problem lies in the process of touristification of the local economy, culture and society. The re-orientation of systems towards visitors often comes at the expense of other groups, because tourism becomes a goal of local actors rather than a means to an end. This important work was missed by the bulk of tourism scholars because it was published in Dutch, which underlines the continuing silo approach to tourism knowledge that Jafar Jafari warned us about long ago.

Having a lot of tourists around can be a nuisance for other place users, but the real challenges emerge when local shops are replaced by tourist outlets selling waffles and Nutella, when the prices of accommodation drive local residents out of city centres and when local culture is replaced by a caricature of itself. This is not just the fault of the tourists, but also depends on the functioning of property markets, local businesses  and (the lack of) effective regulation. It is also important to realise that many of the processes  linked to tourist gentrification can also operate in the absence of tourism. In many areas increasing property prices and local displacement preceded the arrival of tourists. Tourism has simply enhanced and intensified the process by bringing in more external capital.

• In the nineteenth century Thomas Cook and others of his era championed the growth of leisure travel, and connected it to a sort of humanism – tourism’s growth represented the fruits of modernity that should be made more widely available to all. Today travel tends to be discussed more in the context of a culture of limits – as if we have reached the upper limit of what our planet and its inhabitants will take, environmentally and culturally. Where do you stand on the question of societal limits and future possibilities ?

We have lost faith in modernisation, owing to what Ritzer (1993) termed the irrationality of rationality. Modern (supposedly rational) development has brought many benefits, but has also generated unwelcome side effects, including pollution, climate change and social alienation. We may well yearn for a time when communities were still small and environments were relatively pristine,  but modernisation is difficult to turn back. So we seem to be stuck with large scale production and the inbuilt mobility of people and goods. The idea of putting limits on development sounds sensible given the negative consequences that people are increasingly aware of, but is this feasible in a capitalist system driven by growth?

The idea of limits to development goes back a long way – most notably to the Club of Rome report Limits to Growth in 1972. But we are now seeing some of the consequences of ignoring the warning signs that have been around for a long time. With the summer of 2023 already the hottest on record, tourism will also come up against physical as well as social limits. It will be interesting to see if tourists actually avoid the Mediterranean in the next few years, or if they will simply slap on more sun cream to protect them from global heating.

The debate on tourism limits is currently limited to a few places. Amsterdam recently adopted a policy that sets specific limits on the numbers of tourists visiting the city. Once the ‘critical limit’ of 18 million tourist overnights is reached, the Municipality has powers to take measures to reduce the number of tourists below the critical limit. The municipality has reacted to the growth of tourism by increasing the tourist tax to 3 euros per night per person, plus 7% of the hotel price. More structural measures taken to limit tourism included a ‘hotel stop’ in 2017 in an effort to limit supply. This did not act as much of a limiting factor, because approved hotel plans kept being built, continuing the expansion of hotel accommodation in and around the city to this day. In spite of the hotel stop and the policy to restrict the growth of tourism, 3000 hotel rooms were added during the Covid pandemic alone. There were also 20 hotels still in the pipeline in July 2023, suggesting this capacity-led growth will continue for some time.

The Amsterdam experience suggests that it is possible to set limits, but it is very difficult to stick to them. Even with very clear numerical limits on tourist numbers, public authorities simply lack the tools to physically limit tourism. Increasing tourist taxes, as Amsterdam and Barcelona have done, is seen by some commentators as a more effective measure. But again, experience suggests that many tourists will simply stay further away to reduce accommodation costs, and travel into the city centre. 

• Global international tourism has increased massively, from around 55 million in the mid 1950s, up to 1.5 billion today. One could see this as inspiring, or perhaps frightening and unsustainable. How do you see it?

This growth rate is clearly unsustainable, even if improvements in technology and increased social responsibility manage to minimise the environmental impacts. A major problem is the concentration of tourist flows in a few key areas, usually major cities. This is also logical given the distribution of major airports and therefore concentration of airline routes. Once in these areas, tourists begin to compete for resources with other city users, including residents, commuters and students. This competition has a negative effect on all groups, most notably through higher prices, but also physical overcrowding. At some point a physical limit to the carrying capacity of the city has to be reached – although Jan van der Borg and Paolo Costa’s research in Venice suggested that the city’s tourist carrying capacity was already being regularly exceeded in the 1980s – and yet tourism continued to grow unabated. This is certainly unsustainable, but tourism growth in Venice and other places has been maintained through a combination of tourism industry pressure, poor regulation and a lack of political will.

In order for things to change, more pressure has to be brought to bear on the politicians. This has started to happen in some places, particularly where there is effective grass-roots pressure for change, but the effects are still minimal. To some extent this also reflects the existing momentum of tourism growth stimulated by hotels and airlines.

• Covid-19 hit the two things tourism and hospitality rely upon hard: travel and conviviality. A variety of ‘lessons’ have been mooted, from the need to travel less and value the local, to a need to get back to growth.   What, if any, are the ‘tourism’ lessons that societies should learn from the experience of Covid-19  ?

In a recent blog post (Richards, 2023) I reflected on the expectations created by the pandemic versus the reality of tourism demand. Travel bans and lockdowns reduced the ability to travel, and people we forced to holiday closer to home, or not at all. There was a hope that after the pandemic this would lead to more sustainable forms of proximity tourism, but instead the reverse seems to have happened. We got a post-pandemic surge of ‘revenge tourism’. Initially this growth was seen in both domestic and international trips, but more recently a number of European countries have seen a decline in domestic tourism alongside a boom in international travel, as the cost of living crisis hits the ability of many poorer people to take holidays at all. The current patterns of tourism demand, at least in Europe, seem to reflect the widening inequality than many countries are suffering from. In terms of tourism this suggests that there are still important structural factors outside tourism itself that will drive demand, and that issues such as inequality are ultimately more important than crises such as the pandemic.

One of the important lessons of the pandemic was also the vital role of physical co-presence in tourism and leisure experiences. The response of many tourism and cultural organisations to the pandemic was to participate in a ‘virtual pivot’ to offering experiences online. The rapidity with which this happened was impressive, because organisations based on selling physical experiences had little other option. There was also  an impressive take-up rate of many of these virtual experiences. But the levels of demand soon sunk once lockdowns were eased. It seems virtual experiences are ok when there is no alternative, but the post-Covid physical travel surge also indicates that VR is no real substitute for the ‘real thing’. However, the virtual pivot during Covid has normalised the combination of virtual and physical experiences. It is likely that in future more tourists will make virtual visits to prepare for physical experiences, or to reflect on them afterwards.

• More than a couple of decades ago Jafari, and others, suggested that ‘tourism’ scholars should look to engage with and publish in the journals of other disciplines and fields. It is often commented upon that academic fields and disciplines can end up like silos, insulated from developments in related fields. How do you see the state of tourism related scholarship? Where should we look for inspiration?

Tourism academia suffers from a lot of the same problems that plague publishing across many fields. There is a lot of poor-quality research being published because of the pressure to publish and the proliferation of journals. This is about scoring points rather than generating knowledge. The pressure to publish also means that scholars concentrate on their own work rather than getting to know broader fields or the work of other scholars. Literature reviews are churned out using automated searches and fixed search terms, and ChatGPT is now appearing as a co-author. All of this means that we have less contact with the wider academic field rather than more. The search for inspiration seems to lie primarily in finding a ‘gap in the literature’ rather than generation of good ideas or addressing important problems.

Language is another important factor. Recently we reviewed the literature in the event management field, which also has a lot of tourism content (Richards et al., 2022). We found that English is rapidly becoming the dominant language in this and other fields, and that publications written in other languages are effectively invisible to scholars because they are not featured in indexing services such as SCOPUS. This creates a vicious circle, in which academics working in other languages are forced to publish in English in order to have their publications valued by international audiences and their national research systems and universities.

• Finally, from your own personal experiences, is there a memory or vignette you can share that might interest or inspire young people interested in the tourism and hospitality industries?

Tourism and hospitality are people industries. Keith Friend, who worked in tour operations, was the person who taught me that very important lesson at the start of my career. He introduced me to the social side of the travel industry, while everybody else was still focused on management. For Keith, doing business was essentially a social activity – meeting people, learning about their wants and needs, having fun together, and almost as an afterthought, doing deals. He was one of the first travel industry figures I knew who immersed himself in the local in the places he visited. It seemed that anywhere he went in the world, he would know a small friendly bar tucked away down a side street – the holy grail of the current ‘live like a local’ crowd. I spent many an evening wandering the back streets of tourist resorts while Keith followed his unerring bar detector: “I know it’s down here somewhere. I recognise that blue doorway. We’re getting close now, I’d recognise the sound of that jukebox anywhere. Oh no, maybe it was one street over after all. Never mind, this place looks like fun – let’s try here”. I don’t think Keith would have used Google Maps even if we had it in those days – he was too fond of generating chance encounters and serendipitous experiences to be guided by anything than his own gut feeling. And he was usually right.

References

Higgins-Desbiolles, F., & Bigby, B. C. (Eds.). (2022). The local turn in tourism: Empowering communities. Bristol: Channel View Publications.

Jansen-Verbeke, M.C. (1990). Toerisme in de binnenstad van Brugge: een planologis-

che visie. Nijmegen: Katholieke Universiteit Nijmegen.

Koslowsky, K & Mody, M. (2019) Panacea or peril? The implications of Neolocalism as a more intrusive form of tourism. Boston Hospitality Review. https://www.bu.edu/bhr/2019/03/20/panacea-or-peril-the-implications-of-neolocalism-as-a-more-intrusive-form-of-tourism/

Purcell, M. (2006). Urban democracy and the local trap. Urban studies, 43(11), 1921-1941.

Richards, G. (2023) Domestic tourism takes a post-covid hit: growing inequality to blame? https://www.richardstourism.com/post/domestic-tourism-takes-a-post-covid-hit-growing-inequality-to-blame

Richards, G., Censon, D., Gračan, D., Haressy, M. Kiráľová, A.,  Marulc, E., Rosetti, G.,  Sotošek, M.B. & Sterchele, D. (2022). Event management literature: Exploring the missing body of knowledge. Journal of Policy Research in Tourism, Leisure and Events. DOI: 10.1080/19407963.2022.2128810

Richards, G. and Wilson, J. (2004) Travel writers and writers who travel: Nomadic icons for the backpacker subculture? Journal of Tourism and Cultural Change 2(1), 46-68.

Ritzer, G., (1993). The McDonaldization of Society, London: Pine Forge Press. 

Russo, A.P. and Richards, G. (2016) Reinventing the Local in Tourism: Producing, Consuming and Negotiating Place. Bristol: Channel View Publications.

Sans, A. A., & Quaglieri, A. (2016). Unravelling airbnb: Urban perspectives from Barcelona. In Russo, A.P. and Richards, G. (2016) Reinventing the Local in Tourism: Producing, Consuming and Negotiating Place. Bristol: Channel View Publications.

Sewell, W. H. (1996). Historical events as transformations of structures: Inventing revolution at the Bastille. Theory and society, 25, 841-881.

Van der Borg, J., & Costa, P. (1993). The management of tourism in cities of art. The Tourist Review, 48(2), 2-10.

Xiao, H. (2013). Jafar Jafari: the platform builder. Anatolia, 24(2), 288-296.