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Tourism: beyond the pleasure of practicing geography

The scholarly and instrumental contribution of Geography to Tourism Studies is well established and broadly indisputable, as is the contribution of Geography to the phenomenon of Tourism itself – its dimensions, it functions, its impacts, indeed all of its aspects (Hall & Page, 2009, 2014; Pearce, 1979; Squire, 1994). There are, however, instances and circumstances where the role and significance of Geography to Tourism become even more readily and urgently apparent. In fact, there can be no tourism or study of tourism without geography. Tourism capitalizes on geography – whether ‘real’, virtual/iconic or imaginary. Tourism intrinsically connotes change of one’s familiar environment, in pursuit of the unfamiliar. It derives its raison-d-être from this literary or metaphorical distance, this transportation to the different; this is the tourism lure, the thrill, the attraction (Adler, 1989; Urry, 1990). Geography provides not only the background and vessel for this experience, but also all the pleasures; it provides the ‘goods’ themselves: a mysterious expedition in wilderness, a relaxing lounge on the beach, an uplifting pilgrimage, a history ride, etc. Tourism is entwined with geography, for better or for worse: it feeds on the novelty or the value of nature and culture, devouring the world, but its returns are simultaneously in sync with the vicissitudes and tribulations of this world: tourism rushes to the fields of tragedy, it is breathlessly arrested by beauty, it profits from all sorts of entertainment, but it is also susceptible to crises, disasters, and strife. In all of these ways, the future of tourism is not only certain, it is also brilliant. Tourism invariably celebrates humanity, and, most of all, it is the most global and massive way of face-to-face interpersonal, intimate, ‘exotic’, mysterious, fun, exhilarating human contact on earth: an epiphany of contact. Thus, tourism becomes not only the pleasure of practicing geography, but also of meeting the world face-to-face, and, through this meeting, as Montaigne once declared (Jackson, 1980, p. 4), of meeting oneself.