Commodivacation

In my previous blog entry I talked about the so called ‘quest for authenticity’. There is one issue I didn’t really touch upon then: How does an experience come to be perceived as authentic?

What we perceive to be authentic, in my opinion, is largely based on our subjective knowledge of the place we visit. This knowledge may stem from a wide array of different sources (e.g. travel brochures, stories and even movies). For example, all of us have a certain view of how a real desert should look, and that view (if you’ve never visited a desert) is entirely based on second-hand information.

Tourist companies know how to use this information to their advantage, and they are more than willing to do so. They essentially try to sell you an image; an image of what a real visit should look like. Can you imagine visiting Jordan without seeing Petra? Few people can, for Petra has become the embodiment of what a Jordanian trip should look like. That makes it possible for them to charge a hefty entrance fee of 50 Jordanian Dinar (63 euro!).

In this way Petra,or better yet; the experience to go to Petra, has become a commodity. This process, whereby a place or an experience becomes an object for sale is called ‘commodification’. It is commodification, that makes a large part of the tourism industry a viable enterprise.

Ironically, it is often this focus on making money that can make an experience feel inauthentic again; it has become ‘touristic’. When people speak about the real Paris, they probably don’t mean the Eiffel Tower.

And so we have a full cycle of places being portrayed as authentic, being commodified and finally being perceived as inauthentic again. Authenticity then, is just a matter of time.

Reference: Meethan, K. (2001) Tourism in Global Society,Basingstoke: Palgrave.