Formación y empleo

The CBT visitor or tourist cannot be ignored as an important stakeholder of CBT. An understanding of who the CBT visitor is, their motivations to visit and their particular needs remains essential toward the planning and management of effective CBT. The purpose of this discussion is to provide a detailed analysis of the CBT tourist. As with destinations, tourists and subsequent tourism markets also change over time. Often these changes provoke those involved in developing and selling tourism experiences to adapt accordingly. A study of CBT not only involves a deep understanding of the community and associated internal and external forces, but also an understanding of who the CBT tourist is and what has motivated them to pursue CBT experiences. It also remains important to appreciate where CBT is positioned within the multitude of sustainable tourism experiences. To date, I have been unable to locate in the scholarly or industry literature a specific segment profile of a typical CBT tourist. For the development, marketing and management of CBT, I argue that identifying and understanding the CBT tourist is critical for the overall success of the venture. For scholars and practitioners of

CBT, it becomes of benefit to understand who CBT tourists are, how CBT is positioned within a tourism system, and also CBT’s relationships with other forms of tourism. As discussed in the proceeding narrative I will attempt to offer an analysis of these themes. I identify that the construction of a typical CBT tourist derives from important relationships with theories pertaining to tourist decision-making and the principles of sustainable tourism. I suggest that once we are able to construct the typical CBT tourist, it is then possible to differentiate or position CBT within the broader tourism system. It is normally assumed by tourists that CBT is simply another type of service or experience related to ecotourism. Given the advancement of CBT practitioners and related research agendas, CBT has become a recognized service or experience positioned within sustainable tourism. The same can also be said for the CBT tourist. I propose that appreciating the similarities yet differences between CBT, ecotourism, voluntourism, pro-poor tourism, small-scale tourism, ethnic/minority/indigenous tourism, rural tourism and other similar sustainable tourism experiences is essential for those involved in the management or inquiry of these products (services).

From the advent of contemporary tourism (circa CE 1950) more attention has been paid to the reasons that motivate people to travel, and in turn become tourists. Tourist needs and motivators have influenced the development and popularity of tourism products (services). I argue it is incorrect to refer to the actual tourism experience as a product (usually incorrectly identified as a product in tourism-related literature) as the word product can imply experiences are tangible. Tourism experiences are more correctly a service with associated activities that may have various tangible elements to them, specifically for the delivery of the service. Some examples of tourism services or activities include resort tourism, 3S tourism, adventure tourism, sports tourism, urban tourism, indigenous tourism, nature tourism, space tourism, culinary tourism, backpacker tourism, thanatourism, cultural tourism, education tourism, health/medical tourism, religious tourism, ecotourism etc. Identifying the motivations of a tourist who seeks these services can assist the development, marketing and management of the service, particularly CBT. It may also assist to understand the differentiation between the actual service and similar services that could be identified as competitor services.

To better appreciate tourism motivators and behaviors I argue the contributing factors need to be initially investigated. Applying a contextual understanding to the motivators and behaviors of the CBT tourist, a worthwhile commencement point is the work of Boorstin (1961) and Turner and Ash (1975). While Boorstin’s (1961) monograph addressing the unreality of the modern world is not specifically about tourism, his chapter entitled ‘From Traveler to Tourist: The Lost Art of Travel’ provides the reader with an appreciation that tourist attitudes towards travel have greatly changed. He examined attitudes and motivations toward travel in the 17th _and

unfamiliar experiences that would provide them with adventure, cultural enlightenment, refinement and improvement. Boorstin applies Descartes to explain this phenomenon:

There is no better illustration of our newly exaggerated expectations than our changed attitude toward travel. One of the most ancient motives for travel, when men had any choice about it, was to see the unfamiliar. Man’s incurable desire to go someplace else is a testimony of his incurable optimism and insatiable curiosity. We always expect things to be different over there. ‘Traveling’, Descartes wrote in the early seventeenth century, ‘is almost like conversing with men of other centuries’. Men who move because they are starved or frightened or oppressed expect to be safer, better fed, and more free in the new place. Men who live in a secure, rich, and decent society travel to escape boredom, to elude the familiar, and to discover the exotic (p. 78).

In the western world, travelling during the 17th _{and 18}th _{centuries became commonly}

known as ‘The Grand Tour’. As Boorstin accurately explains ‘to travel was to become a man of the world. Unless one was a man of the world, he might not seem cultivated in his own country’ (p. 82). A particular group of British Grand Tourists, later known as the ‘Levant Lunatics’ could be identified as the pioneers of modern-day adventure tourism. The Napoleonic wars of 1796 to 1815 disrupted the popularity of the Grand Tour. Travelers were forced to consider destinations beyond Italy and France. Writings from early travelers who visited Portugal, Corsica and Greece inspired potential young men from Britain to consider destinations in the Levant (the Eastern Mediterranean region between Greece and Cyrenaica) that was unexplored and generally difficult to visit. Tregaskis (1979) writes the Grand Tour had made classical archaeology a fashionable pursuit that resulted in expeditions by young rich aristocrats to the Levant for the purposes of recording and collecting examples of ancient Greek art. Of note are the destinations these young gentlemen traveled to, often challenging to get to, in some cases dangerous, and considered relatively remote and unvisited compared to towns and cities well known to previous Grand Tourists. The writings of these ‘Levant Lunatics’ provide a rich narrative of their exploits and interactions in the destinations they travelled to, and local hospitality. One of the most prolific Levant Lunatics, Lord Byron, provided an extensive account of his expeditions and adventures in the Levant, particularly Greece. Byron noted that youth, courage and a classic education were the specific chief ingredients that made him a Levant Lunatic (Tregaskis, 1979).

Boorstin (1961) suggests that in the middle of the 19th _{century the behavior of travelers}

and motivations to travel began to change. These changes are often attributed to Thomas Cook. Weaver and Lawton (2010) argue ‘more than any other individual, Thomas Cook is associated with the emergence of tourism as a modern, large-scale industry’ (p. 65). Cook’s idea of chartering trains and guest houses, then offering a planned tour with a reduced single fare for day and overnight excursions marked the beginning of commercialized mass tourism. Cook

initially established his excursions for spiritual purposes, but this purpose quickly changed to include sightseeing and leisure pursuits. Excursions expanded to Scotland, Ireland and Europe. Continuous advancements in rail and shipping offered Cook more destinations to visit, and by 1872, his company Thomas Cook and Son offered the first round-the-world excursion. As Boorstin (1961) explains, this new form of commercialized travel attracted critics from those who believed the Grand Tour should be about adventure and learning, not a mass sanitized pleasure activity:

Sophisticated Englishmen objected. They said that Cook was depriving travelers of the initiative and adventure and cluttering the continental landscape with the Philistine middle classes. ‘Going by railroad’, complained John Ruskin, ‘I do not consider as travelling at all; it is merely being sent to a place, and very little different from becoming a parcel’ (p. 87).

There is no argument that Thomas Cook and his travel company changed British society’s attitude toward travel. Before the Thomas Cook era, travel was seen as an adventure limited to the few. From the 1850s onwards, travel became an affordable pleasure pursuit for both the upper and middle classes. The period between the 1950s and 1970s heralded a chapter for the massification/commercialization of tourism. After the Second World War, economic, social, demographic, political and technological changes have all contributed toward stimulating demand for tourism activities (Leiper, 2003; Weaver & Lawton, 2010). During the 1960s and 1970s advancements in technology in the aviation sector contributed to more affordable air tickets, faster travel times and more routes. Better communication methods through print, radio and television exposed potential tourists to greater amounts of information concerning destinations. Thomas Cook had already firmly established the popularity of seaside resorts and associated pleasure activities such as sunbathing and swimming. The pursuit of ‘sun related’ activities continued throughout the 1950s, or as popularly identified in tourism literature as 3S tourism (sea, sand and sun), resulted in the rapid growth of tourism destinations in warmer regions, especially countries in equatorial areas. Turner and Ash’s (1975) monograph entitled

The Golden Hordes: International Tourism and the Pleasure Periphery provides a detailed examination of modern mass tourism’s impacts on the tourist and the destination. The overarching argument created throughout their chapters draws attention to tourism moving from an adventurous cultural pursuit with minimal harm to societies and environments visited, to tourism as a modern sanitized activity that has been rapidly commercialized and has resulted in severe negative outcomes for certain destinations. Turner and Ash conclude ‘we have already argued that alternative tourism will never be more than a fairly minor aspect of international tourism. The bulk of this industry will be made up of mass tourists who are not really interested in the countries in which they travel. For most people, a foreign holiday will be a socially acceptable device for filling some of the increasing amount of leisure time we will be faced

with’ (p. 282). Boorstin (1961) succinctly refers to this phenomenon as ‘the lost art of travel’, stating:

we go more and more where we expect to go. We get money-back guarantees that we will see what we expect to see. Anyway, we go more and more, not to see at all, but only to take pictures. Like the rest of our experience, travel becomes a tautology. The more strenuously and self-consciously we work at enlarging our experience, the more pervasive the tautology becomes. Whether we seek models of greatness, or experience elsewhere on earth, we look into a mirror instead of out a window, and we see only ourselves (p. 117).

The above and associated narratives clearly demonstrate tourism moving from the 18th_-

century adventure journey to a mass commercialized activity, and from a predominantly learning experience to the pursuit of safe, contrived leisure activities. The recent advent of the sustainable development movement and associated sustainable tourism initiatives has seen a shift in tourists’ motivations and what they seek from their tourism experiences. It is also relevant to consider the change in general consumer attitudes toward products and services, influenced by the growing environmental movement, climate change debates and environmental sustainability discourses. Combined, these forces have contributed toward the emergence of a new typology of traveler identified as a ‘green tourist’ (Bergin-Seers & Mair, 2009; Poon, 1993; Weaver & Lawton, 2010). In the early 1990s, Poon (1993) was one of the initial scholars to identify the emergence of this market segment. Applying Poon’s conceptual identification of this market, Weaver and Lawton (2010) provided specific characteristics of the ‘new traveler’;

• Green consumer

• Sensitive to local culture

• Conscious of social justice concerns

• More independent-minded and discerning

• Knowledgeable about environmental issues

• Prefers flexible and spontaneous itineraries

• Carefully assesses tourism products in advance

• Searches for authentic and meaningful experiences

• Wishes to have a positive impact on the destination

• Motivated by a desire for self-fulfilment and learning

• Searches for physically and mentally challenging experiences (p.347)

From this we can now commence to construct the green tourist and specifically the CBT tourist, and explore their decision-making processes and motivations. As potential tourists move through a decision-making process (see Hall, 2003, p. 18) concerning the consideration to travel, they are influenced by numerous factors generally identified as internalities and externalities. Scholars have provided several theoretical approaches to identifying and examining these factors. General marketing theory provides a useful starting point. Kotler, Brown, Adam, Burton and Armstrong (2007) argue there are two sets of influences that play an important role in consumer choices pertaining to products and services. Psychological and

personal factors are considered internal influences while cultural, social, environmental and marketing factors are considered external influences. Combined, these influences play an essential role in a tourist’s choice of tourism services and activities. These choices influence which services and products are developed by tourism providers.

Tourism theorists have utilized an interdisciplinary approach to further understand how internal and external consumer influences specifically relate to how potential tourists make decisions about travel and associated activities. Leiper (2003), applying sociological theories, examines how certain western socio-cultural trends have shaped and influenced tourism services and activities. Leiper relies upon the ideas of Jacques Barzun (2000), who identified nine cultural trends that have influenced aspects of western society between 1500 and the 21st

century. Leiper focused on emancipation, secularism, individualism, self-consciousness and primitivism and their relationship to tourism. To provide an example of Leiper’s theory, he identifies primitivism as ‘a desire for simplicity in life’ (p. 47). Leiper further states:

as a cultural trend in western civilization it has existed in various forms for centuries. The idea of the noble savage, usually associated with the 18th _century philosopher Rousseau but given that name earlier by the poet Dryden, is the idea that a high state of existence is possible in the natural world but impossible in civilized, luxurious, decadent societies (p. 47).

Considering modern society, the nature of employment and urbanization, the need to emancipate and to seek escapism through an alternative simplistic experience has influenced people to seek tourism services and activities offering an alternative experience. Examples of this include camping holidays, ecotourism experiences, trekking, visiting ethnic, minority and indigenous communities, CBT, adventure tourism, and bush walking.

Other scholars such as Cohen (1979) have argued that simply applying the term ‘tourist’ is problematic as it suggests tourists are all the same in terms of activities, behaviors, expectations, needs and wants, influences and motivators, and post-purchase behavior. Given this argument, theorists and those specifically involved with tourism marketing commenced to arrange and classify tourists into ‘types’ based on a variety of variables including demographics, psychographics and behaviors (Leiper, 2003). Demographics was one of the first variables to be applied in the early tourism studies of the 1970s. Examining specific demographics such as age, gender, education, employment/occupation, marital status, ethnic and cultural background, social class and life cycle revealed that the relationship between people and the variables resulted in a propensity for specific tourism services and products. Psychographic segmentation provided a way to identify certain tourist groups or segments based on their purpose for travel (trip). While this method identified the various types of trips tourists pursued, it failed to identify what influenced or motivated a tourist to undertake the trip; moreover, it also failed to address what influenced or motivated tourists to seek specific services and activities during their

visit. This shortcoming was eventually addressed by Gray in 1970. One of the earliest forms of terminology applied to identify different types of tourists based on the services and activities they pursued was termed ‘wanderlust’ and ‘sunlust’. Gray (1970) explained wanderlust as the ‘basic trait in human nature which causes some individuals to want to leave things with which they are familiar and to go and see at first hand different exciting cultures and places’ (p. 57). Sunlust does not necessarily imply seeking sun, as explained by Leipier (2003) it means ‘when tourists’ main needs are for recreation. They want rest, or entertainment, or relaxation, or a mix of these three forms of recreation’ (p. 55). These two theories have formed one of the most popular bases for tourist motivation since the 1970s and are widely quoted in tourism literature. Plog (1991), building upon Gray’s (1970) identification of wanderlust and sunlust, suggested two further psychographic typologies to describe certain groups of tourists based on their behaviors. Firstly, allocentric tourists are defined as ‘intellectually curious travelers who enjoy immersing themselves into other cultures and willingly accept a high level of risk’ (Weaver & Lawton, 2006, p. 186). Moreover, this group of travelers prefer to avoid fixed itineraries and may spontaneously change elements of their trip. They tend to avoid destinations where mass tourism development is prominent, preferring destinations offering an authentic ‘localized’ experience. The opposite group of travelers were identified as psychoentrics who are ‘self- absorbed individuals who seek to minimize risk by patronizing familiar, extensively developed destinations where a full array of familiar goods and services are available’ (Weaver & Lawton, 2006, p. 186). These types of travelers prefer destinations that are easily accessible, popular and have known brands available. They desire structure and organization in their experience and seek generic contrived or staged tourism experiences.

At this point of inquiry, the green tourist and specifically the CBT tourist could easily be constructed and defined as ‘wanderlust’ and ‘allocentric’; however, these two terms, while good broad descriptors, fail to provide an in-depth profile of the specific CBT tourist. Identifying psychographic variables (motivations, expectations and reasons for travel) and behavioral variables (activities and actions undertaken during the experience) of the CBT tourist provides an in-depth understanding for those involved in the research or management of CBT. Bergin-Seers and Mair (2009) provide an excellent typology of green tourists’ behaviors and attitudes. It is reasonable to suggest green tourists including CBT tourists share similar traits. The authors commence their investigation through examining literature pertaining to the green consumer, and then specifically the green tourist. The focus of their methodology was to utilize a green consumer scorecard for the purposes of measuring their respondents’ engagement with consumerism and environmental activism. The anticipated outcome was the development of a typical green tourist profile. Their findings toward developing a green tourist profile focused on three key identifiers, ‘sourcing of information’, ‘green views and intentions’ and ‘green purchasing’. Firstly, concerning sourcing of information, consumers who were considered more