Chapter 5 Tourism Is Behavior, Not an Industry

The language we use to describe tourism has shaped and limited what we can think about it. By calling tourism an "industry," we have imported a set of assumptions that obscure more than they reveal. Industries produce goods. Industries have inputs and outputs. Industries are measured by productivity and efficiency. Tourism does none of these things in any straightforward sense, and forcing it into industrial categories has distorted both research and policy.

This chapter proposes a different framing: tourism as behavior. Tourism is something humans do, a pattern of movement and meaning-making that has existed in various forms throughout history. Understanding tourism as behavior rather than industry opens new questions, new analytical tools, and new possibilities for ethical engagement.

The behavioral framing begins with observation. What do tourists actually do? They leave their ordinary environments. They travel to places that are not home. They encounter people, landscapes, cultures, and experiences different from their daily lives. They then return, bringing memories, photographs, souvenirs, and (sometimes) transformed perspectives. This behavioral sequence has occurred in countless variations across cultures and centuries.

The Grand Tour of European aristocrats, the pilgrimage to sacred sites, the walkabout of Aboriginal Australians, the gap year of contemporary youth: all are recognizable as tourism in this behavioral sense. They involve leaving home, encountering difference, and returning changed (or at least claiming to be changed). The variations are enormous, but the underlying pattern persists.

What the industrial framing obscures is that this behavioral pattern is subject to moral evaluation, like any other behavior. We evaluate consumption patterns for their environmental impact and their effects on workers. We evaluate reproductive behaviors for their implications for population and family. We evaluate military behaviors for their justness and proportionality. Why should tourism behaviors be exempt from similar evaluation?

The industrial framing exempts tourism by reifying it. When tourism becomes an industry, it becomes a thing in the world rather than something humans choose to do. Things are not subject to moral judgment in the way that actions are. You cannot hold an industry morally responsible. You can only hold humans responsible, and only for things they choose.

By calling tourism a behavior, we restore moral agency to the analysis. Tourists choose to travel. Hosts choose (or are compelled) to receive them. Governments choose to promote tourism. Corporations choose to facilitate it. Each of these choices can be evaluated ethically. Each actor can be held responsible for the consequences of their choices.

This does not mean that tourism behavior is simply individual choice. Behavior is shaped by social context, economic constraint, cultural expectation, and institutional structure. The person who chooses to fly to a beach resort did not create the marketing that made beach resorts desirable, the cheap fuel that made flight affordable, or the poverty that makes resort labor cheap. But acknowledging these structural factors does not eliminate agency. It locates agency within structure.

Behavioral analysis allows us to ask questions that industrial analysis precludes. What motivates tourism behavior? Answers range from status seeking to genuine curiosity, from escapism to education, from connection to acquisition. Different motivations lead to different tourism behaviors and different impacts. Understanding motivation opens possibilities for redirecting tourism toward better outcomes.

What social functions does tourism behavior serve? It marks transitions (honeymoons, retirements, graduations). It signals status (exotic destinations, luxury experiences). It creates shared memories (family vacations, group tours). It provides fodder for social media performance (the photograph as proof of experience). These functions help explain why tourism behavior persists even when its problems are widely recognized.

What constraints shape tourism behavior? Economic constraints are obvious: tourism requires disposable income and leisure time, which distribute unequally. Cultural constraints matter too: not all societies valorize travel, and different cultures produce different tourism behaviors. Institutional constraints (visa requirements, infrastructure availability, safety conditions) channel tourism flows. Understanding these constraints reveals leverage points for change.

The behavioral framing also clarifies tourism's relationship to other human behaviors. Tourism is closely related to consumption: it involves purchasing experiences, services, and sometimes objects. But tourism is not reducible to consumption because it also involves presence, encounter, and (potentially) relationship. Tourism shares features with mobility behaviors (migration, commuting, exploration) but differs in its temporariness and its orientation toward return.

Perhaps most importantly, tourism behavior is related to ethical behavior in general. How we act when we are away from home, among strangers, with no social monitoring, reveals something about character. Tourism provides opportunities for both ethical growth and ethical failure. A person may travel to learn, to contribute, to connect across difference. Or a person may travel to consume, to exploit, to indulge desires that would be constrained at home. The behavior is what matters.

Tourism studies has largely avoided behavioral ethics. It has treated tourism as value-neutral or value-positive by default. When ethical questions arise, they are typically channeled into corporate social responsibility frameworks that focus on business practices rather than tourist practices. The tourist as moral agent remains undertheorized.

What would behavioral ethics of tourism look like? It would begin with the recognition that travel is not a right. This is contrary to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which includes freedom of movement. But freedom of movement is not the same as entitlement to hospitality. I have the right to move freely. I do not have the right to demand that others welcome me, accommodate me, or perform for my enjoyment.

This distinction matters because the tourism industry has promoted tourist entitlement as a moral claim. Marketing encourages travelers to expect service, to treat destinations as products, to prioritize their own satisfaction over host wellbeing. This orientation produces tourists who complain when locals are not friendly enough, when experiences are not authentic enough, when value is not sufficient. It produces behavioral patterns antithetical to genuine encounter.

A behavioral ethics would cultivate different orientations: humility instead of entitlement, curiosity instead of expectation, gratitude instead of complaint. These orientations would produce different behaviors, and different behaviors would produce different impacts. The same person traveling to the same destination can leave very different traces depending on how they behave.

Of course, individual behavior change is insufficient without structural change. A humble tourist arriving at an overcrowded destination still contributes to overcrowding. A grateful guest in a resort still participates in a system of extraction. Behavioral ethics does not replace political economy. But it does restore a dimension of analysis that political economy alone cannot provide.

The behavioral framing also allows us to think comparatively across time and culture. How have different societies organized tourism behavior? The pilgrimage traditions of medieval Europe involved long journeys, significant sacrifice, and (supposedly) spiritual transformation. The modern vacation involves minimal sacrifice and rarely claims spiritual significance. What changed, and what might change again?

Indigenous tourism practices often operated within reciprocal frameworks that modern tourism has abandoned. Visitors brought gifts. Hosts received guests according to elaborate protocols. The encounter was ritualized in ways that protected both parties. These practices were not perfect, but they embedded tourism behavior within ethical frameworks that the market has dissolved.

Can we recover or reinvent such frameworks? This is one of the questions the behavioral framing makes possible. If tourism is behavior, it can be ritualized, constrained, guided, and transformed. It is not a force of nature or an economic inevitability. It is something we do, and we can choose to do it differently.

The chapters that follow develop the ethical implications of the behavioral framing. They examine the moral asymmetry between tourists and hosts. They propose dignity as the missing principle in tourism ethics. They argue that tourism behavior should be governed by moral considerations that the industrial framing has obscured. Tourism is behavior, and behavior is subject to judgment.