Chapter 18 Teaching Tourism Without Lying

Tourism education has a problem: it requires lying. The lies are not intentional. Educators believe what they teach. But the content of tourism curricula is systematically disconnected from the realities of tourism impacts. Students are prepared to promote growth, optimize experiences, and compete for visitors without understanding what these activities actually do. This chapter proposes a radical rethinking of tourism education: what professors owe students in a collapsing paradigm.

The lies begin with the nature of tourism itself. Students are taught that tourism is an industry that produces economic development. They are not taught that tourism is a behavioral system that extracts value from places and communities. The industrial framing is a lie by omission, excluding the extractive dimensions that would complicate the narrative.

Students learn destination marketing: how to construct appealing images, develop compelling brands, and attract visitors. They do not learn how destination marketing commodifies places, or how it creates expectations that communities must then perform, or how it contributes to over-tourism by stimulating demand that destinations cannot sustainably absorb.

Students learn revenue management: how to maximize occupancy and yield, optimize pricing, and increase receipts. They do not learn how revenue management can price out locals, or how it concentrates benefits while dispersing costs, or how maximizing receipts for industry is different from maximizing welfare for communities.

Students learn sustainability, but as add-on rather than foundation. They learn that tourism has environmental impacts and that these can be mitigated through efficiency improvements and offsets. They do not learn that the sustainability framework has failed, that efficiency gains are overwhelmed by volume growth, that offsets are largely ineffective. Sustainability as taught is sustainability as alibi.

These lies are institutionally produced. Curricula are shaped by industry advisory boards that want graduates who will serve industry interests. Funding flows from tourism ministries and corporations with stakes in the status quo. Faculty build careers within a paradigm that rewards growth-oriented research. The lies are not conspiracy but structure.

What would honest tourism education look like? It would begin with the history of tourism as an imperial and commercial project. Students would learn how tourism developed in relation to colonialism, how it served particular interests, how alternatives were foreclosed. This history would provide context for current practice.

Honest education would include the political economy of tourism. Students would learn who benefits and who pays, how value flows from periphery to center, how labor is exploited and communities are commodified. They would study specific cases of tourism harm, not just tourism success stories. The curriculum would include failures, not just best practices.

Honest education would engage ethics seriously. Not as a single course on ethics tagged onto a business curriculum, but as a dimension of every topic. What are the ethical implications of marketing places? What does sustainable mean when growth is the goal? What obligations do tourism professionals have to communities, environments, and future generations? Ethics would pervade rather than append.

Honest education would cultivate critical thinking. Students would learn to question industry claims, to interrogate metrics, to identify whose interests are served by particular framings. They would read critics of tourism, not just proponents. They would engage with communities resisting tourism, not just those welcoming it.

Honest education would prepare students for post-growth futures. The tourism industry as currently constituted may not exist in the forms students expect. Climate constraints, community resistance, and resource limits may transform what tourism professionals do. Students need skills for transition, not just skills for perpetuating the current system.

These changes would disrupt tourism education profoundly. Many faculty would need retraining. Many curricula would need reconstruction. Many industry relationships would become uncomfortable. But the alternative is continuing to prepare students for a world that is disappearing.

Consider what we owe students. They pay tuition expecting preparation for careers. If we prepare them only for the current system, we fail them when the system changes. Honest education prepares students for multiple futures, including futures where tourism contracts rather than expands.

We also owe students truth. Education is supposed to develop understanding, not just skills. Teaching lies, even institutionally convenient lies, betrays education's purpose. Students deserve to know what tourism actually does, even if that knowledge complicates their career planning.

Some will argue that critical education will produce graduates who cannot function in industry. This assumes that industry will remain unchanged. But industries transform. The students who understand why transformation is necessary will be better positioned to lead it. Critique is not impractical. It is preparation for a changing world.

Others will argue that critical education drives students away. Who will enroll in a program that questions its own field? Perhaps fewer students initially. But the students who enroll will be more committed, more thoughtful, more likely to become agents of change. Quality might substitute for quantity, as it should in tourism itself.

The practical implications are substantial. Course by course, program by program, institution by institution, curriculum would need revision. Industry advisory boards would need challenge or replacement. Research priorities would need redirection. None of this is easy, but all of it is possible.

Some programs have already begun. Critical tourism studies has emerged as a subfield that questions mainstream assumptions. Some faculty teach against the dominant paradigm despite institutional pressure. Some students demand more critical content. These developments remain marginal, but they show that change is possible.

The title of this chapter is teaching tourism without lying. It might also be framed as teaching tourism honestly, or teaching tourism critically, or teaching tourism for transformation. The point is the same: current tourism education fails its educational purpose by misrepresenting its subject. Fixing this failure requires not just curriculum change but institutional transformation.

This book has argued that tourism as currently constituted must end. What replaces it depends partly on what students learn. If they learn only to perpetuate the current system, they will struggle to imagine or create alternatives. If they learn to critique, question, and envision, they might build something better. Education shapes the future. What we teach now matters for what tourism becomes.