Tourism is not an industry

This paper is a response to an invitation from the Euro-Asia Tourism Studies Association to “Picture Europe”. It is a thinking through of what the ideas of Europe and tourism mean and is situated in the study of British tourists holidaying in the Mediterranean island of Mallorca. The discussion acknowledges the complexity of trying to disentangle what Europe is understood to be in relation to understandings of the non-European. This rumination of the idea of Europe in this paper is intended to stimulate further exploration about how understandings of self and identity are formed and how, in turn, these might be used in the socio-cultural constructions of places for tourism purposes. The second aim of the paper is to get a better understanding of what tourism actually is. It is framed by two provocations: 1) “tourism is not an industry” and 2) “there’s no such thing as tourism”. The arguments posed seek to move tourism away from essentialised and instrumental understandings that frame tourism within the language of industry towards acknowledging that tourism is a constellation of different socio-cultural practices that manifest in the doing. This phenomenological approach to conceptualising tourism means tourism is not something external to which we respond. Rather, tourism is us as we make and bring it into being.