Pamela Nowicka, The No-Nonsense Guide to Tourism.

Tufts, Steven

Pamela Nowicka, The No-Nonsense Guide to Tourism (Toronto: Between the Lines/New Internationalist Publications 2007)

WRITING CRITICAL material which is accessible to the public is no easy task. Readable prose, brevity, and a willingness to abandon stifling scholarly conventions (e.g., endless, not always relevant citations) escape many academic writers. There is also the challenge of dissemination, making the material readily available to a broad readership whose critical thinking is largely shaped by the whims of an uncritical mainstream media. The No-Nonsense Guides published by the New Internationalist continue the long-established practice of producing radical educational

material. These alternative texts provide much greater depth than a * pamphlet but do not require the reader to commit to a 600-page treatise on a contemporary political-economic issue.

A recent addition to the series is Pamela Nowicka's The No-Nonsense Guide to Tourism. Nowicka, an activist and journalist, has written a concise, readable overview of contemporary tourism from a critical perspective. Despite the book's brevity, the author manages to cover significant aspects of one of the fastest growing global industries. The work is largely focussed on the post-war development of global tourism, but the introductory chapter does provide a historical background linking travel and tourism to European colonization and the growth of holidays in the West (acquired through the struggle of industrial workers). Nowicka discusses the major themes in the historical evolution of tourism such as the Grand Tour, and Cook's mass packaged holidays. The only omission is the role religious pilgrimages played in historical tourism.

It is in the substantive chapters of the book where Nowicka's primary theme of "tourism as exploitation" is detailed. Tourism has been an important economic development strategy foisted on poor countries by a range of institutional actors including the International Monetary Fund, World Bank, and the United Nation's World Tourism Organization (UNWTO), boosted by the World Travel and Tourism Council (WTTC), an increasingly powerful global industry association. In chapter two Nowicka begins to take a sledgehammer to the powerful discourse of tourism as a warm and fuzzy, eco-friendly form of "bottom-up" economic development. Of particular emphasis is the problem of "leakage." In many countries in the Global South, over half of the tourist dollar leaves the region as airline companies and global hotel chains based in the North retain significant revenues. The author puts a human face on the problem with a number of inserts giving voice to workers in the margins of the tourism economy who explain the struggle they have to make a living in the industry.

Chapters three and four honestly confront perhaps the primary contradiction complicating a radical perspective. Specifically, there is no escaping the fact that global tourism is driven by large numbers of workers in advanced capitalist countries "consuming" places, experiences, and bodies in the Global South through a number of unequal and precarious exchange relationships. As Nowicka notes, "to have traveled confers cachet." (53) The cultural capital accumulated through travel experiences does differentiate classes, but also positions all tourists above the 'Other' who is dependent on the visitor for his/her material well-being. This dependency is translated into exploitation as tourism workers surrender physical, emotional and, in growing numbers, sexual labour to tourists for less money as they compete in a global tourism market. The exploitation is further described in Chapter five as a form of "new colonialism," which is reproducing the periphery while doing significant damage to the environment each time a full passenger jet leaves the runway.

Chapter six explores how global tourism and its oppressive power relations remain a preferred and much touted form of economic development. The myths of environmental friendly development, local control, and "peace through tourism" are debunked. Despite the political efforts of NGOS fighting against mega-resort tourism lead by transnational corporations, such forms of (re)development are dominating recently traumatized areas from New Orleans to Sri Lanka.

In the final chapter, Nowicka outlines an agenda for a "new tourism" which reaches beyond voluntary codes of conduct and "ecotourism" rhetoric. Some of the suggestions such as a fair-trade regime which removes tourism from trade agreements and campaigns to educate tourists on why it is necessary to perhaps "pay more" for informal activities in the destinations are warranted. Instead of dismissing every souvenir seller as a charlatan or guide as a hustler, tourists should pay a fair wage. Actions such as an anti-sweatshop campaign for tourists are commendable. Nowicka fails, however, to address seriously the most difficult question concerning her subject: should we continue tourism as a mass consumer activity at all? As an academic who has travelled from Toronto to Boston, Oslo, Quebec City, and Vancouver over a seven-week period, I must come clean with my own hypocrisy in this regard. To quote Augustine, "the world is a book and those who do not travel read only a page." But as Nowicka has succinctly argued throughout the text, "reading" the world in this manner comes with a very high price. A truly radical text must consider the possibility of a world with limited or no tourism as we presently know it.

Nowicka's No-Nonsense Guide is a useful work with a few conceptual limitations, some of which have already been noted. The most significant failing is the treatment of the "tourist" as a generic, undifferentiated category. There are varieties of tourists with significantly different travel motivations and resources. Business travellers (who often combine pleasure travel with their trips) behave differently than people visiting friends and relatives (VFRs, a fast growing segment of the tourist market given global migration). Similarly, mass resort tourism is different from the "working holiday" taken by many student travellers. In part, this generic treatment stems from the book's conflation of global tourism with North-South leisure travel. In fact, global tourism remains a highly regionalized phenomenon. For example, France is consistently one of the world's most visited countries, with most tourists coming from Europe and North America. The author does not address tourism relations among rich countries, but I would suggest that similar exploitation exists, and this is especially evident in the number of immigrant workers toiling in the hotels of New York and London.

Another weakness of the text stems from its greatest strength. The author integrates few academic sources into the book, referring a great deal to a single edited collection. Instead, resources are drawn from respected international agencies and a number of NGOS working to alleviate poor working conditions in tourist destinations in the South. The author presents a wealth of statistical material clearly. Facts and figures are supplemented with a number of anecdotes, cases, and vignettes offset from the main text in boxes. The original voices of Raj, Shankar, and others highlighted in such boxes illuminate the real inequality experienced by tourism workers.

Overall, Nowicka has produced a powerful little book which meets the aspirations of the No-Nonsense Guide series. It is written for a popular audience, but as someone who has taught tourism development at the post-secondary level, I feel the work will serve as an excellent complementary text for any course which examines tourism critically. I fear, however, that it will be largely overlooked by many instructors who uncritically view tourism development as the best alternative for poor people in the South.

STEVEN TUFTS

York University