Preface

This book has been forming in my mind for over two decades. It began not as a theory but as a discomfort, the nagging sense that something fundamental was wrong with the way we talked about tourism, taught it, measured it, and celebrated it. I spent years in tourism education, and I watched as we prepared students for an industry that seemed increasingly at odds with the world it inhabited.

We taught them to maximize arrivals and optimize experiences. We trained them in destination branding and competitive positioning. We introduced them to sustainability, but always as a modifier rather than a foundation. And all the while, I noticed what we did not teach: how to listen to communities that did not want to be destinations; how to recognize when growth had become pathological; how to sit with the moral weight of an industry built on inequality.

This book is my attempt to say what I could not say in the conventional frameworks of tourism studies. It is not an improvement upon existing theory. It is a departure from it.

The central argument is simple but radical: tourism, as currently conceived and practiced, cannot be reformed. It must be fundamentally reimagined. The growth paradigm that has guided tourism development for half a century has produced not prosperity but dependency, not connection but consumption, not sustainability but greenwashing. The language we use to describe tourism (industry, product, market, competitive advantage) has colonized our thinking so thoroughly that we can no longer see the human beings and living systems obscured by these abstractions.

I write this book for graduate students, because you will inherit the consequences of our intellectual failures. You will work in a field that must reckon with climate constraints, community resistance, and a younger generation increasingly skeptical of consumption as self-realization. The frameworks you were taught will not serve you. This book offers different ones.

I also write for practitioners who have felt the gap between their work and their values, for policymakers tired of promoting what they know to be harmful, and for anyone who has wondered whether there might be another way to think about travel, place, and encounter.

What I propose is not the abolition of travel but its transformation. Not fewer journeys but more meaningful ones. Not the end of hospitality but the restoration of its dignity. The tourism we need is slower, rarer, deeper, and governed by mutual obligation rather than market transaction.

This will require courage. It will require us to question metrics that have defined our field, to challenge stakeholders who profit from the current system, and to admit that much of what we have built serves neither hosts nor guests but only capital. It will require what I call responsible inhospitality: the principled refusal to host under conditions that violate dignity.

I do not offer a blueprint. The post-growth future of tourism will be invented by communities, not prescribed by scholars. What I offer instead is a clearing, a space where different questions become possible because the old assumptions have been set aside.

The book proceeds in six parts. The first dismantles the consensus that has governed tourism thought. The second reframes tourism as a behavioral and ethical system. The third examines the political economy of places. The fourth sketches what post-growth tourism might look like in practice. The fifth develops a new theory of travel. The sixth imagines what comes after tourism as we have known it.

Some readers will find this book uncomfortable. Good. Comfort has been our problem. We have been too comfortable with growth, too comfortable with sustainability rhetoric, too comfortable with the fiction that everyone benefits. This book asks you to be uncomfortable, because transformation begins in discomfort.

I am grateful to colleagues who read drafts and pushed back, to students who asked questions I could not answer, and to the communities around the world who showed me what tourism looks like from the receiving end. Their experiences are the moral foundation of everything I argue here.

Finally, a word about tone. Academic writing often hedges, qualifies, and equivocates. I have tried not to do that here. The crisis is too urgent and the stakes too high for intellectual timidity. Where I am uncertain, I will say so. But where I am convinced, I will speak plainly. We have had enough careful studies that changed nothing. This book aims to provoke.