Overbooked : The exploding business of travel and tourism
Elizabeth Becker
Simon & Schuster
(Bibliothèque de Ville Mont-Royal)
Entrevue avec l’auteure ancienne correspondante du New York Times (7.27)
Longue critique du New York Times sous le titre: 100 endroits à visiter avant leur disparition.
As Elizabeth Becker observes in “Overbooked: The Exploding Business of Travel and Tourism,” her meticulously reported and often disturbing exposé of the travel industry, the world has gotten smaller — but not often for the better. (,,,) Becker crisscrossed the globe, from the beaches of Sri Lanka to the game reserves of sub-Saharan Africa, from the vineyards of France to America’s national parks, measuring the impact of the tourist trade. And while she finds plenty of inspiring examples of wise governance and corporate responsibility, in many other cases greed and shortsightedness have ruined once-pristine environments, exacerbated human misery and destroyed the spontaneity that once made travel an adventure.
As Becker tells it, entrepreneurism, technology and political transformation all brought about the tourism boom. In the late 1950s, Arthur Frommer, a former G.I., turned a guidebook he wrote for soldiers on R.&R. into the best-selling “Europe on 5 Dollars a Day.” It made overseas travel inviting for millions. The decreasing cost of long-distance flights placed exotic destinations within the reach of people who once would have indulged their wanderlust by reading National Geographic.
And the fall of the Berlin Wall and collapse of the Soviet Union opened regions that had previously been off limits. Before 1990, Becker reports, 60 percent of the world’s international tourists visited Western European countries. “Afterward the tourist map was redrawn” to include the former Eastern bloc and “vast swaths of Africa and Asia.” The result, she says, was a remarkable surge in the overall number of foreign trips, from 25 million in 1960 to one billion in 2012. Today, “in gross economic power,” tourism “is in the same company as oil, energy, finance and agriculture.”
In the face of the tourist onslaught, some governments have acted with foresight and sensitivity. Becker lavishes praise on France, which has protected its coasts and its cottage industries, including winemaking and cheese production, through a mix of subsidies and tough environmental laws. Costa Rica has become the world’s pioneer of “ecotourism,” turning cloud forests into nature reserves and inspiring hotels to go green.
(…) Looking for a safari, Becker avoids Kenya and South Africa, which have increasingly become “Out of Africa” theme parks. Instead she heads to Zambia, where the safari industry is just beginning to be built up. Here she finds conservationists, government officials and tour operators seeking a balance between encouraging tourism and safeguarding the country’s wildlife. “Zambia is still wide open,” she observes, “with more than a hint of the Africa that the Europeans fell in love with a century ago.”
At the opposite end of the spectrum is Cambodia, which has pursued tourist dollars with little concern for the environmental or human consequences. The temples of Angkor Wat are being degraded, and the mystical ambience, Becker writes, has been lost “in a scrum of foreigners with guides shouting in competing languages.” Fueled by government corruption, sex tourism has flourished in Phnom Penh and other Asian cities. Dubai, transformed by oil wealth into an oasis of conspicuous consumerism, condemns its laborers to the equivalent of indentured servitude and expends enormous amounts of energy air-conditioning its skyscrapers, hotels and shopping malls. Dubai and Abu Dhabi, in Becker’s view, “are now global cities with little left of their desert heritage, their environment or their hold on the future should all those foreigners leave.”
She devotes two chapters to China, the new colossus in the tourism industry, where Becker and her husband stay in ersatz-traditional hotels, endure shakedowns in a panda park and are led around by a robotic guide who insists that the smog stinging their eyes and making them choke is merely a “yellow mist.” (…)
Becker aims her sharpest barbs at the cruise ship industry, which claims to add some $40 billion a year to the United States economy. Giants like Royal Caribbean and Carnival Cruise Lines avoid paying minimum wage and exempt themselves from environmental scrutiny by registering their vessels under the flags of countries with lax or nonexistent regulations. They lure cruise passengers into making expensive purchases of diamonds and art from companies that offer dubious money-back guarantees. And they have turned certain ports of call into crowded bazaars filled with tacky merchandise and tourist hordes. “They’re like portable low-rent Hiltons,” one walking-tour executive tells Becker, “that go everywhere with little concern for the garbage they leave behind or the havoc they make in the short time they invade a place.”
(…)