Chapter 17 The Post-Tourism Society

This chapter speculates, rationally, on futures where tourism is no longer central to development strategies, identities, or economies. This is not prediction. The future remains unwritten. But exploring possibilities opens imagination and suggests directions for action. What might a post-tourism society look like?

Begin with what post-tourism does not mean. It does not mean no travel. People will continue to move for many reasons: to visit family, to pursue work, to satisfy curiosity, to make pilgrimage. Movement is human. What ends is not movement but the particular organization of movement that we call tourism: the commercial system, the growth imperative, the destination logic.

Post-tourism also does not mean isolation. Globalization has integrated the world in ways that cannot and should not be entirely reversed. Post-tourism societies would remain connected to the world, but through different modalities. Trade might continue; cultural exchange might continue; educational mobility might continue. What changes is the specific form that treats places as products and people as consumers.

What might post-tourism development look like? Many communities currently depend on tourism because alternatives have been foreclosed. Colonialism, structural adjustment, and corporate globalization have dismantled other economic bases. Post-tourism would require rebuilding those bases: reviving agriculture where appropriate, developing industries suited to local conditions, creating service economies that serve residents rather than visitors.

This rebuilding would take decades and would require international support. Wealthy nations that have benefited from tourism would owe assistance to communities transitioning away from it. This is not charity but justice, compensation for historical extraction. Transition funds, technology transfer, and preferential trade arrangements might be part of the package.

Economic measurement would change. Currently, tourism success is measured in arrivals and receipts. Post-tourism would measure community wellbeing: health, education, housing, environment, social cohesion, cultural vitality. These metrics exist but are not applied to tourism assessment. Post-tourism would integrate them.

Educational institutions would transform. The thousands of tourism programs worldwide would need different missions. Some might close. Others might become programs in hospitality studies focused on genuine hospitality rather than commercial service, or programs in place-based development focused on community flourishing rather than destination competitiveness. Faculty would need retraining. Curricula would need reconstruction.

The built environment would change. Hotels might become housing. Attractions might become community spaces. Airports might shrink or close. The physical infrastructure of tourism, built over decades, would be repurposed or demolished. This sounds drastic, but the built environment always changes. The question is whether change is planned or chaotic.

Identity would change. Many places have come to define themselves through tourism. They are destinations. Residents have internalized this identity, understanding their home through the tourist gaze. Post-tourism would require recovering other identities: as communities, as ecosystems, as places with meaning independent of visitor interest. This psychological decolonization might be the hardest part.

What would happen to places that have been thoroughly touristified? Venice, for example, has lost most of its resident population to tourism pressure. Can it recover? Perhaps, with sufficient investment and time. The buildings remain. Some former residents might return. New residents might be attracted by affordable housing and recovered quality of life. The city was a living community before it became a tourist destination. It could become one again.

Or consider beach resorts built specifically for tourism, with no prior community and no alternative function. These might not have post-tourism futures. They might be abandoned, like the ghost towns of earlier extractive booms. Or they might be converted to other uses: retirement communities, research stations, rewilding zones. Not every tourism development can be saved.

What would happen to travel itself? Travel would become rarer and more significant. Without the tourism industry promoting constant movement, without marketing creating artificial desire, without easy access manufactured by competition, travel would return to something closer to historical patterns: occasional, purposeful, substantial.

This sounds like loss, but it might not feel like loss. Current tourism produces much dissatisfaction. Tourists exhausted by acceleration, destinations overwhelmed by visitors, workers ground down by service demands. Reducing tourism volume might increase travel quality for everyone. The experience of the few who traveled in the past was often richer than the experience of the many who travel today.

The environmental implications are significant. Tourism contributes substantially to climate change, primarily through aviation. Post-tourism would dramatically reduce aviation, with corresponding climate benefits. Aviation might continue for purposes deemed essential (emergency response, some business travel, family reunification), but leisure flying would decline or end.

This raises equity questions. Those who have traveled extensively have enjoyed benefits that others would be denied in a post-tourism future. Is this fair? The question assumes that tourism benefits travelers, which is partly true but often overstated. Travel's benefits are real but can be achieved through other means. Reading, virtual exchange, engagement with diaspora communities, and attention to one's immediate surroundings can all cultivate the broadened perspective that travel is supposed to provide.

The post-tourism society is not utopia. It would have problems of its own. Some communities would struggle with transition. Some individuals would miss the travel they could no longer undertake. Some of the genuine goods that tourism provides (cultural exchange, economic opportunity, human connection) would need to be supplied through other means.

But the post-tourism society addresses problems that the current system cannot solve. It stops the environmental destruction that tourism growth inevitably produces. It ends the extraction that tourism development necessarily involves. It restores sovereignty to communities that tourism has subordinated. These are substantial goods that should be weighed against whatever is lost.

How do we get from here to there? Not through sudden transformation. The current system is too embedded, the interests too entrenched, the dependencies too deep. Change will be gradual, uneven, contested. Some places will transition faster than others. Some resistance will slow the process.

But change is already beginning. Communities are resisting over-tourism. Young people are questioning consumption. Climate constraints are tightening. The pandemic provided a glimpse of what reduced tourism might look like. These developments do not guarantee a post-tourism future, but they make it possible in ways that seemed inconceivable a decade ago.

The post-tourism society is not prediction. It is imagination. We imagine alternatives because imagining enables action. If we cannot imagine life beyond tourism, we cannot work toward it. This chapter has tried to make imagining possible by sketching what post-tourism might look like. The sketch is incomplete. Others will develop it. What matters is that we can now see, however dimly, a different future.