zondag 13 september 2015

Addicted to Tourism

The past view blog entries gave a largely positive view of tourism, in this entry I’d like to take a more critical approach to tourism.

Let’s start of with the more obvious problem that arises when a large part of your economy is based on tourism: Dependency. After the tourism industry received initial entrepreneurial success, many people started to orient their business to the tourists. A quick glance at the enormous amounts of tour guides, hotel owners and street vendors reveals the presumably attractive nature of the sector.

This dependency on visitors makes the system vulnerable. And that is exactly what is happening in Jordan today. The Middle East has always been a portrayed as an unstable and conflict-ridden region, but recent problems with IS have made most muslim nations a no-go area for Western tourists. This, coupled with the financial crisis in the West which severely decreased travel to foreign countries, has led the Jordan tourism sector (and thereby its economy) to severely decrease.

The results are large-scale unemployment, peskier street merchants and in some cases even outright hostility. When we were in Petra, one of the street merchants became outwardly hostile after we denied his advances to buy something. Another time in Jerash, we were followed by a peddler of chewing gum for at least 20 minutes, after which he had to be removed by our tour guide.

Even through all the hardships, the Jordanians seem intent on maintaining the tourism industry. Their main weapon in this battle is their supposed safety: ‘The Switzerland of the Middle East’ as they like to portray themselves in order to attract more tourists. But will this approach succeed in alluring a Western audience? We’ll just have to wait and see.

This has been a short note on tourism dependency. In my next blog I will pay attention to a less well-known negative side effect of tourism: The devaluation of culture.

Reference: Ancient Petra Sees Few Visitors as Jordan Tourism Declines. (2015, March 30). Retrieved from http://nyti.ms/1Nr3NNH

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