Tourist Gaze and the Commodification of Experience

Tourism is the world's largest industry (Picard & Wood 1997). The travel and tourism industry is the largest employer in the world and is expected to account for more export earnings than any other industry by the turn of the century. It is also one of the most competitive industries that are prevalent in the international marketplace as it quietly emerged to become an important force in many societies and economies in various parts of the world. Though not usually thought of as a single cohesive industry, the growth of tourism since the conclusion of World War II and the integration of technological development and various internationalization phenomena has nonetheless been dramatic. Today, the presence of higher discretionary incomes, smaller family size, changing demographics, lower transportation costs, improved public health standards, infrastructure development, and hospitable environments for tourists in many destinations have made tourism, especially long-distance tourism, an activity within the reach and desires of many members of many nations (Urry 1990; Eadington & Smith 1992; Ap & Crompton 1998).

The role of the sense of sight is considered to be the mightiest feature of every tourist in relation to how they see a tourist destination or any place dubbed as tourist spot. But then, the argument of diversity among tourists and tourism-related features in terms of its qualification on what should be a tourist destination or how could a place be considered a tourist spot is continuously attract public or private, scholarly or policy-making attention on debate. John Urry’s remarkable and possibly considered as the framework of the increased tourism-related studies upon the publication of The Tourist Gaze: Leisure and Travel in Contemporary Societies (1990), the ‘tourist gaze’, paves way to the categorization on what is a tourist destination and how does tourists’ perception contributes to the consideration and naming of tourist destinations and its eventual effects on the commodification of tourist experience. This paper discusses the various definition of the philosophy of the ‘tourist gaze’ presented in various literatures mainly coming from tourism, leisure, and hospitality industry as product of empirical as well as descriptive research studies of tourism experts and scholars. Further, it reflects on how tourist gaze affects the commodification – or the process of transformation from a non-commodity to a commodity – in terms of tourist experience. By providing examples on the subsequent discussion, the tourist gaze served as an important feature of tourism and tourism-related activities.

What is the ‘tourist gaze’ and its effect on commodification of experience?

Several tourism studies have given much importance on knowing why people travel, which destinations they prefer to choose, and the factors that play important role in the selection of vacation destination (Orth 2002). Most of the earliest studies in the tourism industry focused on the push – motivational factors enable potential tourist to develop attitudes toward travelling – and the pull – the attractions in destinations – as key factors (Orth 2002). According to most studies (including Aaker 1989; Porter 1990; Crouch & Ritchie 1999; Dwyer & Kim 2006), the budding success in tourism marketplace lies on the overall attractiveness and the experiences a destination delivers to its visitors. The strength and weaknesses of a tourism destination can be recognized through determining the factors underlying destination competitiveness. Destination competitiveness determines the ability of a destination to attract markets and is linked to the ability of a destination to deliver goods and services that perform better than other destinations. With the previously published literatures and research studies, none of them did mention anything on the concept of tourist gaze. Defining the term requires individual clarification on the two words that appear and work in a single meaning or function, that is, tourist and gaze. The lexical definition of these two terms is very much simple and could be deciphered without looking to any reference. In the context of tourism and its related applications, tourist gaze similarly encompasses the lexical definitions of such terms.

It is fundamental to the modern notions of what it means to be a tourist is the concept of the sightseer, or someone who engages himself/herself in a socially and culturally constructed way of viewing. This is what sociologist John Urry has famously and specifically defined as the “tourist gaze”. For Urry, this has supposed to be looking at “a set of different scenes, of landscapes or townscapes which are out of the ordinary” or at least what is out of the ordinary from the tourist's perspective. To quote Urry (1990, pp. 1, 3),

the tourist gaze is directed to features of landscape and townscape which separate them off from everyday experience. Such aspects are views because they are taken to be in some sense out of the ordinary. The viewing of such tourist sights often involves different forms of social patterning, with a much greater sensitivity to visual elements of landscape or townscape than is normally found in [the tourist's] everyday life. People linger over such a gaze.

In the late periods of the twentieth century, the search of leisure has become an indispensable component of contemporary consumer culture (Featherstone 1991) and society. At the present time, particularly in the case of western societies, people consider leisure and recreation as their right and an outstanding opportunity for diversion from the tedious as well as boring practices present in their everyday life (e.g. on the job, business, school, etc). Travel and tourism are key representations of the growing separation between work and leisure (Ioannides & Debbage 1998). People constantly and practically interprets that becoming a tourist allows any of them to move temporarily away from the usual place of residence and visit destinations offering views and experiences which do not feature within their ordinary day by day lives. These views and experiences, which Urry has dubbed 'the tourist gaze' as early as 1988 before the release of the book in 1990, are sought predominantly for the purpose of deriving pleasure. Even business travelers, who in certain destinations may represent a significant proportion of all tourists, commonly participate in various leisure and recreation-oriented activities during their trips (Shaw & Williams 1994).

The tourist gaze is merely a cultural variation of such a technical reduction of visual consumption (Holmes 2001, p. 24). Tourism relied on a ‘more physically mobile subject, whose experiences were preplanned' (Friedberg 1993, p. 61). This means that what is perceived or seen physically by the person are deliberately constructed according to their own ways and means while using the tourist spot in which they decide to look or gaze upon. No matter how does it looks like, it does not matter most as the individual possess an intrinsic qualification to view it as something beautiful or not, tourist attraction or just a so-so destination. Culture plays a significant role in the determination of a tourist gaze. Culture by definition is similar to culture itself. It does not have established definition; however, there are common denominators or concepts that connect various definitions from each other. The basic definition of culture in the dictionary is anything that pertains to human knowledge, belief, and behavior including shared attitudes, values, goals, and practices shared by people in particular place and time that transcend beyond generations. According to Handwerker (2002, p. 107), culture mainly consists of the knowledge on what or how people use to live their lives and the way in which they do so. Culture consists of both explicit and implicit rules through which experience is interpreted. Shields (1991) has argued that tourism practices fluctuate between representational, interpretive, and experiential spaces located somewhere between the tourist gaze, material landscapes of tourism, and sites and symbols of tourism. For scholars, this means that tourism cannot be simply understood through a “reading” of symbols, such as maps, because these symbols cannot be separated out from the material spaces of tourism (Del Casino & Hanna 2000). Both represent and constitute place as tourist site where culture defines the tourist gaze.

In reference to the tourist gaze, cultural capital broadly involves the consumption and collection of tourist experiences to demonstrate social tastes, lifestyle choices, and socio-economic status. Under the logic of this post-modern culture of consumption, the constant search for novelty and alternative experiences is emphasized, as the consumer becomes more discerning and sophisticated. Culture in relation to the tourist gaze is evidently pervasive in control. Most anthropological studies involving demographic criteria like age, race, ethnicity, social class, language, etc. do not undermine the important role of culture. For example, the traditional romantic European 'tourist gaze' - clear water, mountainous or at least undulating islands, coral reefs, sandy beaches and sunny weather defines a tourist destination for any European tourists. According to Holmes (2001, p. 42), the changing nature of the gaze, of travel and of different kinds of world-space suggest an unconventional option to 'economic' and political developmental perspectives on global culture. To understand the scope of forms of representation in information and tourist culture is to understand the systemic ways in which different telecommunicative and transportational forms surround modern existence, modify earthly experience and suggest changing bases for social integration. Another example includes the view of person in line to culture, as it is deemed to be an essential feature in the definition of the tourist gaze. The cultural attributes of western societies, for instance, are commonly similar and associated with each other, thus looking on any travel destination located on its covered areas is not really new. They may consider it as ordinary feature of their society and experience as well. What is more likely to be an extraordinary feature that any travel destination presented to them must be new on their gaze. This is considered to be one of the reasons why there is cultural tourism industry where there is looking on other cultures. Last example is seen on the commodification of tourism as it serve the most compelling example that needs no further explanation but the tourist experience itself.

Fainstein and Gladstone (1999, p. 28) maintain that the tourist's gaze certainly transforms the people viewed by the tourist into 'cast members'. Crang (1997) describes this transformation as a type of mutual performance, in which the tourists, already assuming false identities, automatically create a range of superficial or stereotypical narratives to interpret the people they are viewing. In relation to commodification, the tourist gaze served as the most primary criteria that are more likely to predict the travel experience. The outcome of the travel experience is related to how tourists see or gaze on the specific tourist offering or spot. The authentic purchase and consumption/production of tourist services such as the airline seat, the meal, and the admission ticket may actually be incidental to Urry's well-worn concept of the 'tourist gaze'. It is defined here as the time spent gazing upon such objects as a work of art, a historic attraction, or a scenic vista. Furthermore, although the actual time spent participating in a 'tourist gaze' may be extremely brief, it can be central to the overall quality of the tourist experience and, of course, is inherently spatial since it implies a movement of people to some distant destination.

As many writers have suggested, tourism involves both commoditization and consumption, an equation that gives souvenirs a vital role: all tourist sights are sites for consumption, first in visual terms, as tourists gaze on the sight itself, but then also in commercial terms, as tourists purchase products that will recreate the sight in memory (Greenwood 1989). For Vogler (2007, p. 104), commodification has, for better or worse become more or less 'integral with culture', condemning it outright accomplishes nothing in terms of cultural analysis. Indeed, critics has suggested that refusing to acknowledge the extent to which culture has become inseparable from commodification is as illusory as the efforts of Victorian intellectuals to identify themselves as "travellers" rather than ”tourists”. On the case of cultural tourism, it is much more sporadic to examine eases in which heritage has been commodified in order to attempt to determine, among other issues, the extent to which the expectations of the tourist gaze has come to influence local cultural production (Vogler 2007, p. 104).

As one researcher wrote, “almost every place in the world could well [be] an object of the tourist gaze” (Urry 1990, p. 40). Further, Urry's and similar analyses suggest that the tourist gaze has been incorporated into an ever wider range of social life. The tourist gaze, as argued by Vogler 2007, certainly contributes to the consumption of destinations in that the narratives of peoples and places are characterised as relevant to more eyes than those of local people. Yet locals also participate in the continuous process of producing places and histories through contemporary representations. Urry famously asserts that 'because of the universalising of the tourist gaze, all sorts of places (indeed almost everywhere) have come to construct themselves as objects of the tourist gaze'. According to Rojek and Urry (1997), it is to propose that post-tourist awareness is developing in a context in which the commodification of tourist experience remains the most obvious fact about the experience of travel for pleasure. Indeed, it is so obvious that it leads many commentators to believe that commodification is the only important thing about tourism. The consequence of this is that the effect of universal electronic forms of visual culture upon our perceptions is too readily dismissed as a secondary phenomenon. Therefore, all tourist sights rely on distinctions which differentiate them as extraordinary places. The differentiation process is reinforced by representational codes and routines of sight-seeing or gaze between the extraordinary and the ordinary as it is a cultural process. Now, a most important question for postcolonial societies in relation to tourism and its related features is how to decide on what to exhibit to the concept of the tourist gaze.

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