Chapter 1 Tourism Was Never Neutral
Tourism did not emerge naturally from human curiosity about the world. It was engineered, a product of specific historical forces, economic interests, and ideological projects. Understanding this is essential because neutrality has been tourism's most effective disguise. When something appears natural, it becomes invisible to critique.
The modern tourism system took shape in the nineteenth century, not as democratic leisure but as an extension of imperial geography. Thomas Cook's first organized tours moved British subjects through landscapes already pacified by colonial administration. The infrastructure of tourism (railways, steamships, hotels, guidebooks) followed the infrastructure of empire. Tourists traveled where armies had preceded them.
This is not merely historical curiosity. The patterns established in that era persist. Tourism still flows predominantly from wealthy nations to poorer ones. It still relies on asymmetries of power that make some places visitable and others visiting. It still operates through institutions (airlines, hotel chains, tour operators, booking platforms) headquartered in the Global North while extracting value from the Global South.
The post-World War II period saw tourism reframed as development. International organizations, led by the World Bank and later the United Nations World Tourism Organization, promoted tourism as the engine of modernization for newly independent nations. This was not philanthropy. It was economic integration on terms favorable to capital. Former colonies were encouraged to convert their beaches, cultures, and historical sites into products for foreign consumption.
The language mattered enormously. Tourism became an "industry" in the 1960s, a rhetorical move that accomplished several things at once. It legitimized tourism as serious economic activity worthy of government support. It aligned tourism with manufacturing logics of input, output, and productivity. And it obscured what tourism actually is: a form of human behavior with profound social, cultural, and environmental consequences.
Industries make products. But tourism does not make anything. It reorganizes space and time to enable consumption of places, experiences, and (often) people. The "product" is an encounter whose value depends entirely on what happens to those being encountered. This asymmetry vanishes when we speak of tourism as industry. The language performs a kind of magic trick, making hosts disappear into the abstraction of "destination."
Consider the tourism "value chain," a concept borrowed directly from manufacturing. In a factory, raw materials move through processing stages until they emerge as finished goods. In tourism, what moves through the chain? Not materials but human beings. And what are the processing stages? Marketing, transportation, accommodation, attraction management. Humans are processed. The violence embedded in this framework goes unremarked because we have normalized industrial language.
The neutrality myth also operates through the concept of "demand." Tourism is framed as responding to what visitors want, as if demand existed prior to the system designed to create it. But tourism demand is manufactured. It is produced through advertising, through the construction of aspiration, through the social coding that marks certain experiences as necessary for a complete life. No one is born wanting to visit the Maldives. That desire is produced, and produced in service of interests that have nothing to do with the traveler's wellbeing or the destination's flourishing.
Marketing does not inform; it creates. The tourism industry spends billions annually not to describe places accurately but to construct them as objects of desire. Destination branding treats communities as raw material to be shaped into competitive products. The "brand essence" of a place is not discovered but invented, often by consultants who have never lived there and who answer to economic interests rather than community values.
When Iceland brands itself as a land of fire and ice, it is not describing itself; it is constructing an imaginary that serves tourism. When Thailand promotes "Amazing Thailand," it is not documenting culture but producing a consumable version of it. The places that emerge from these processes bear complex relationships to the actual communities that inhabit them. Often, the brand becomes more powerful than the reality, and communities find themselves performing their own commodified identities.
None of this happens neutrally. It happens through the exercise of power: economic power to fund marketing, political power to shape land use, cultural power to define what is authentic, and epistemic power to determine whose knowledge counts. Tourism studies has largely failed to examine these power relations because it emerged as a discipline aligned with industry interests, funded by tourism ministries and hospitality corporations, and staffed by scholars whose careers depend on accepting the field's foundational assumptions.
This is not a conspiracy. It is institutional logic. Universities establish tourism programs because governments fund them. Governments fund them because industry lobbies for workforce development. Industry wants workers trained to optimize the system, not question it. The result is a body of knowledge that takes growth as given, treats destinations as products, and measures success in arrivals and receipts.
Academic conferences on tourism feature sessions on maximizing visitation, enhancing guest satisfaction, and developing competitive advantages. Where are the sessions on when to refuse tourists? On how communities can resist development they do not want? On measuring the success of degrowth? These questions are structurally excluded because they threaten the consensus.
The COVID-19 pandemic briefly made the consensus visible. When international tourism collapsed by more than 70 percent in 2020, the industry's assumptions were suddenly open to examination. We saw how tourism-dependent economies crumbled. We saw how workers with no bargaining power were abandoned. We saw how quickly destinations could recover when freed from tourist pressure. Venice's canals ran clear. Air quality improved over entire regions. Communities reported a quality of life they had forgotten was possible.
But we also saw how quickly the old thinking reasserted itself. Recovery plans focused not on reimagining tourism but on restoring it. Growth targets returned. Marketing campaigns intensified. The opportunity for transformation was squandered because we lacked the intellectual tools to think differently.
This book provides those tools. It begins by recognizing that tourism's apparent neutrality is its most powerful ideology. Once we see tourism as designed, as the product of choices made by identifiable actors serving specific interests, we can begin to imagine and demand alternatives.
The engineering of tourism happened in three overlapping phases. First came the engineering of space: the construction of destinations through infrastructure, zoning, and land use that converted lived places into consumable ones. Second came the engineering of desire: the manufacturing of tourism demand through marketing, media, and the cultural valorization of travel. Third came the engineering of compliance: the creation of policy environments, trade agreements, and educational systems that made tourism development appear inevitable.
Each phase can be reversed. Spaces can be de-touristified through planning that prioritizes residents. Desire can be redirected through counter-marketing and the cultivation of other values. Compliance can be withdrawn through policy reform and the empowerment of communities to refuse development they do not want.
But reversal requires first understanding what was constructed. The neutrality myth makes this impossible because it renders construction invisible. A natural phenomenon cannot be deconstructed. Only when we recognize tourism as historical, contingent, and designed can we begin the work of designing something better.
The chapters that follow build the case for that redesign. They expose the growth delusion that has captured tourism policy. They dismantle the sustainability alibi that has provided ethical cover for business as usual. They reveal the hidden costs borne by communities manufactured into hospitality. And they begin to sketch alternatives grounded not in industry interests but in human dignity and ecological limits.
Tourism was never neutral. That is the foundation. Everything else follows from this recognition.