TOURISM ISSUES

Tourism Issues



Tourism Issues

Introduction

As the Government realizes that tourism (1995) is a vehicle for economic and social development, some proactive policies and contingency planes had been adopted to further strengthen and enhance Australia's capacity to be a key tourist destination. However, even if Australia has been able to manage the tourism issues and problems well, there are still issues that they should consider so as to sustain the development of their tourism industry. Primarily, the main goal of this paper is to identify the contemporary tourism issues and determine how these issues affect both the community and the industry.

Five to ten years from now, tourism will be envisioned as an aspect in which progress is utmost. Many alternative tourism activities and programs are implied to drive this development. It includes movements of persons for essentially cultural motivations such as study tours, performing arts and cultural tours, travel to festivals, visits to sites and monuments in which all movements of persons satisfy the human need for diversity, tending to raise the cultural level of the individual giving rise to new knowledge, experience and encounters ( 2002).

In contemporary tourism, we have seen a development from mass tourism to alternative tourism, and this trend marks the changes from modern to postmodern age. The issue of mass tourism was criticized for its pessimistic impacts on environment destruction as was evident in the slow but sure change in the late 1970's to the 1980's, which saw the manifestation of alternative tourism (1998). However, it also recognized that such economic gains from the commercialization of tourism can directly or indirectly help in supporting the conservation missions of these tourist attractions.  (1993) as well as  (1995) raised a question which inquires into “ascertaining to whom the past belongs” associating it to the influence the conservation processes of tourist attractions.

 

Analysis of the Issue

As mentioned above, the contemporary tourism issue that should be given attention is the commoditization aspect and the destruction of environment. Commoditization refers to the social heritages that become or treated as a sanitized package offering and glorified version of cultural artifacts and experiences for public consumption just like a commodity. Tourism has been criticized for presenting the concept of heritage in exploitative manner in which commercial considerations outweigh the historical accuracy and value. In this sense, communization is argued to result to the static portrayal as well as “production of staged authenticity” which is popular in village folk museums, pseudo-festivals, trivialization, and mass-produced handicrafts therefore, highlighting the substitution, reconstruction, replication, reproduction, simulation, invention, and permutation of otherwise authentic artifacts ( 1993;  2000).       

According to  (1994) and (1983) a culture is said to be commoditized for tourism when the customs, rituals and arts are performed or produced for tourist consumption changing not only the meaning of cultural products but also the human relations between the producer and the purchaser, the history of these relations, and their ethnic identities (, 2000). Moreover, the commoditization of tradition as a tourist product can likewise create and perpetuate misinformation in the form of ...