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BOOKS A global tourist trap

An exploration of the downside to mass travel is engaging but not wholly satisfying, says MIK SABIERS

The World in a Selfie: An Inquiry into the Tourist Age
Marco D’Eramo
(Verso, £20)

PREDICATED on the premise that there is nothing more annoying than a tourist blocking that perfect shot of the tower of Pisa or even the Mona Lisa, Marco D’Eramo’s The World in a Selfie is readable, well-researched and well-written. It takes not just tourists but tourism as a whole to task.

Whether touching on Mark Twain’s travel exploits as one of the world’s first globetrotters, admonishing Adam Smith over the “grand tour” or even imaging what aliens from another planet would make of the annual pilgrimage to pastures new, tourism is tackled head on. And it’s found wanting.

D’Eramo proclaims that “tourism is the most important industry of the century” and rolls out facts and figures backing that claim.

Generating over 10 per cent of global GDP, supporting 319 million jobs directly and seeing 1.4 billion people take an international trip in 2018, D’Eramo argues that tourism has even driven revolution, highlighting the hankering of East Germans to travel and try out the West back in 1989, although he makes no mention of how that turned out.

The first few chapters dig deep into the origin of tourism, from the first travel agency set up by Thomas Cook in the mid-19th century to sightseeing trips in Parisian sewers and morgues right through to the selfies and TripAdvisor user reviews of modern times.

Tourism is visible, valuable and prevalent across the globe but that does not make it a good thing, according to D’Eramo and to prove his point he highlights how tourism is ossifying cities as the clamour to keep the tourist dollar overwrites their needs.

He shows that the result of a city being awarded world heritage status by Unesco embalms rather than preserves it, although some like East Germany’s Dresden rebel. It lost its heritage status but gained a much needed bridge.

While the book could benefit more from the experience of workers in hospitality and on the front line of the leisure industry, D’Eramo shows that they can fight back.

He documents the unionisation of migrant workers in the depths of the tourist mecca of Las Vegas and the success of the Frontier Hotel strikers but in the main the power to act is in the hands of people who are atomised and alienated.

Citing Marx and Hegel, D’Eramo eventually outlines where he is coming from, namely that “alienation is good,” a declaration leading to a downbeat ending that outlines the possible end of tourism, and in particular tourism as we currently know it, with the ongoing impact of the Covid-19 pandemic.

The World in a Selfie is a good read but not necessarily a good book for those hoping for an incisive analysis of the travails of tourism.

There’s no real answer as to why travellers despise tourists and for those simply wanting to know the future of mass travel, the book is a tad like the eponymous selfie — somewhat self-absorbed and focused on its own slightly arch premise rather than fully illuminating.  

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