The Exploding Business of Travel and Tourism - Book Report/Review Example

The Exploding Business of Travel and Tourism Internet technology has played the most positive role of bringing the world together, as internet users refer the word “netizen” to mark the membership of citizen of any country who regularly uses internet. With this in the background and the increase in population, the desire to travel to unknown destinations is emerging as a significant human instinct. Naturally, many organizations would like to explore this opportunity commercially. While around 25 million people traveled from one location to another during the mid-twentieth century, this figure has drastically risen to about a billion people traveling every year to different destinations, currently. Elizabeth Becker has highlighted an important issue as main thesis of her book, “Overbooked: The Exploding Business of Travel and Tourism”. The issue is the link as well as mutual interest of media and travel industry in promoting tourism. This often involves campaigns of misinformation. Internet has become the forefront runner of media currently and all kind of information is available concerning tourism on internet, which serves the purpose of travel industry in an effective manner. The author has rightly explored the idea of tourism to involve many things that go beyond travel, as it educates and entertains the traveler about culture, way of life and environment of the proposed destination. Exploring the evolution of tourism as a profitable industry, the author navigates through different important themes. These include exploration of cultures of places like Venice, France and Cambodia and consumer tourism involving Dubai shopping festivals as well as ship cruises. New tourism slogan of travel to China, the giant, as well as USA is efficiently emphasized in the book. This is particularly true because of current liberal visa regimes followed by many governments across the globe. Ms. Becker has rightly investigated the travel value proposition, in her recording that every point mentioned in the travel guideline or brochure has the main motive of exploiting the traveler for extracting more value. A simple example illustrating this fact can be the travel guide of a company taking travelers only to designated shops that share profit with the company and the guide. This happens everywhere like whether going for a cruise trip or buying a fancy item. Ms. Becker has justified this fact in her words as below: “At every point of every trip, the industry is figuring out how to make a profit on every experience…” Author further highlights the demystification of travel and tourism, due to such profit-oriented planning, which leaves nothing to surprise. Travel in real sense means discovering the unknown with an element of surprise and astonishment. However, the current travel planners have everything planned for utilizing every minute of the travelers. Current guided tours are horrified examples in this direction. As media drives travel industry, there is a genuine reason for it to promote tourism. The travel industry happily shares the revenue with media, in the guise of freebees and advertisements, which remain the greatest source of revenue generation for any media publication, including internet. Although Ms. Becker has been a journalist herself, she highlights this fact in a precise and efficient manner. The travel information and written guidance has changed its characteristics with the passage of time. In earlier times, the travel guides provided excellent information about the history and culture of the place. These illuminating documents pertaining to the Marco Polo travels of 13th century and Baedeker guides of 19th century are glorifying examples of such information. However, in the current times writers are paid by travel and tourism companies to write the content, which can generate revenue and profit for them. The author of this book has accordingly blamed the travel writers for getting bribes from industry captains for preparing the content suiting the whims of the relevant travel companies.(Roulac, nd) Going by the experience of travel media and internet, any prospective tourist can understand this bias of travel industry to report only about the best things while bypassing the worst things that a traveler can face during the tour. Critical reviews of any kind are blocked in a systematic manner, while positive reviews are always generously encouraged. Examples of such encouragement include provision of around 300 free offers, every year, by the Miami Tourism Board to travel writers. The offer includes free hotel stay and free meals at many Miami restaurants. Usually journalists do not interact directly with the advertisers, in order to avoid any corrupt reporting. However, travel industry has successfully found a way to influence the travel writers through reputed public relation agencies who work closely with travel writers. The job of such agencies is largely limited to providing freebees to travel journalists, in expectation of getting positive reviews from them. Media managements often look the other way instead of investigating into such corrupt practices, as travel advertisements remain their constant source of revenue generation since last almost five decades. While tourism can be responsible for providing much needed financial support to the economy of poor nations, the hazards connected with such travel do not find mention anywhere. These include damage caused to environment, promotion of sex tourism involving exploitation of children and destruction of native habitats in the name of tourism development. The book has given many examples of such negative impacts, while highlighting that profits usually go to the local elites and international tourism developers. While adding to the justification of these facts, the author mentions bout the inability of local residents to purchase property in their own place as it is cornered by wealthy international tourists. Ms. Becker has provided the reader with interesting information on the tourism industry, through this book, giving her personal experience details concerning many facets of this industry. Although the book is a critique on travel and tourism industry, the reader finds it absorbing and engaging all through. Writing about the future of this industry, Ms. Becker informs that tourism industry tries to incite the prospective travelers to avail their basic right of traveling without educating them about the corresponding responsibilities. In addition, author opines that the tourism industry may ultimately take the sheen of curiosity and surprise out of such organized trips. .(Roulac, nd) Work-Cited Roulac. S (nd). Overbooked: The Exploding Business of Travel and Tourism--Review. New York Journal of Books Retrieved from: http://www.nyjournalofbooks.com/book-review/overbooked-exploding-business-travel-and-tourism Read More