Smartketing Se 02 ep. 02 Making internet sense of tourism destinations

SmartketingMaking Internet sense of tourism destinations

Ramon [email protected]

Internet Interdisciplinary InstituteUniversitat Oberta de Catalunya

How do you plan your holidays?

How do you keep record of your holidays?

Fundamental changes done by the intensive use of internet, social media and in general ICT

A whole word to explore…… but we have only 3 hours…

We will focus on one relation between: Internet (virtuallity) and place (materiality)Mostly based on the experience of Barcelona

Internet (virtuallity) vs place (materiality)

When we focus on Internet and Social Media, we tend to forget about place:

1. Focus on what happens on the net2. Place becomes virtually mediated and many

times de-materialised

BUTTourism as a business is based on delivering

experiences anchored to a place. Place as the key competitive and differential

asset (even when is fake: i.e. Las Vegas)

And virtual technology have place impacts that can be transformative

Plan of the class

1. A little about: Barcelona, experience economy, tourist gaze, socio-technologies and place.

2. A little more about: Barcelona, experience economy, tourist gaze, socio-technologies and place. 3. Sharing Destinations: sharing economy, sharing tourism and its impacts

A little about: Barcelona

A little about: Barcelona

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XHG6e3P4eQ8

A little about: experience economy, tourist gaze, socio-technologies... And place


Experience economy


Tourist gaze


Socio-technologies


place


Remaking placeMaterially & virtually

A little more about: Place/Destination

Tourism is a place-based activity


From mass fordist to mass postmodern tourism


Changes of place/destination


Monopoly rents and symbolic capital

Destination is about uniqueness & authentity:

If claims to uniqueness, authenticity, particularity and speciality underlie the ability to capture monopoly rents, then on what better terrain is it possible to make such claims than in the field of historically constituted cultural artefacts and practices and special environmental characteristics (including, of course, the built, social and cultural environments)? (Harvey 2001: 1003)

A little about: Place/Destination


Destination is about uniqueness & authentity:

Many rest upon historical narratives, interpretations and meanings of collective memories, significations of cultural practices, and the like: there is always a strong social and discursive element at work in the construction of suchclaims. Once established, however, such claims can be pressed home hard in the cause of extracting monopoly rents since there will be, in many people’s minds at least, no other place than London, Cairo, Barcelona, Milan, Istanbul, San Francisco or wherever, in which to gain access to whatever it is that is supposedly unique to such places (Harvey, 2001: 103).



The rise of Barcelona … has in part been based on its steady amassing of symbolic capital and its accumulating marks of distinction. In this the excavation of a distinctively Catalan history and tradition, the marketing of its strong artistic accomplishments and architectural heritage (Gaudi, of course) and its distinctive marks of lifestyle and literary traditions… This has all been show-cased with new signature architectural embellishments … and a whole host of investments to open up the harbour and the beach… and turn what was once a rather murky and even dangerous nightlife into an open panorama of urban spectacle (Harvey, 2001: 104).



But … as opportunities to pocket monopoly rents galore present themselves on the basis of the collective symbolic capital of Barcelona as a city (property prices have skyrocketed …) so their irresistible lure draws more and more homogenizing multinational commodification in its wake. The later phases of waterfront development look exactly like every other in the western world… multinational stores replace local shops, gentrification removes long-term residential populations and destroys older urban fabric, and Barcelona loses some of its marks of distinction. There are even unsubtle signs of Disneyfication. This contradiction is marked by questions and resistance. Whose collective memory is to be celebrated here ...



(the anarchists like the Icarians who played such an important role in Barcelona’s history, the republicans who fought so fiercely against Franco, the Catalan nationalists, immigrants from Andalusia, or a long-time Franco ally like Samaranch)? Whose aesthetics really count (the famously powerful architects of Barcelona like Bohigas)? Why accept Disneyfication of any sort?(Harvey, 2001: 105).


City as spectacle

commodification: the city as a commodity, the development of a consumer society where market relations subsume and dominate social life (Gotham Fox,2002).

New users of the city ... Some with more power that it might look at first glance (Martinotti, 2011)


City as spectacle

society of spectacle (Debord 1973): the domination of media images and consumer society over the

individual while obscuring the nature and effects of capitalism

the spectacle ... [as] a tool [that ]... ‘distracts’ and ‘seduces’ people using the mechanisms of leisure, consumption and entertainment as ruled by the dictates of advertising and commodified media culture (Gotham Fox, 2002 1737).


City as spectacle

Contradictions emerge in the meaning of spectacle and the city, and the city and tourism itself.


But... Increasing inter-place competition and Increasing generation of attractions in place

A little more about: Experience economy

The distinctive feature of the experience economy is that services need to be more than just mere ‘services’, which can seem boring to the increasingly thrill-seeking consumer. Services need to be somehow pleasurable and memorable; they must be ‘experiences’, ‘revealed over a duration’ (Urry and Larsen, 2011: 53).


In a post-Fordist economy businesses need to think of themselves as ‘theatres’ with their staff as performing artistsin order to engage with consumers (Pine and Gilmore, 1999: 104). Places of service encounters need to be imagined and staged as affective venues of atmosphere and eventness where memorable experiences come to be ‘revealed over time’. Service producers must thus learn to perform, play, enact and stage – not unlike actors in a theatre. They are no longer providers of benefits but stagers of sensations (Urry and Larsen, 2011: 53)


Experience economy

Policy makers, urban planners and architects, who areseeking to revitalise decaying places and commercialise cultural institutions such as theatres and museums, increasingly turn into ‘experiencescapes’ (Hayes and MacLeod, 2007). Tourism and hospitality managersalso adopt [these] ideas so as to develop innovative approaches to service performance (Landry, 2006; Bell, 2007) (Urry and Larsen, 2011: 53).


Experience > function


Experience > place?

Territorialization of experience

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ShFkyIKhXD4

A little more about: socio-technologies

Technologies plays a fundamental role- Social Media/Web 2.0- Augmented reality- Sharing

A little about: socio-technologies

http://apps4bcn.cat/en/app/barcelona-travel-guide-minube/203


Tourist Gaze

The ‘tourist gaze’ is not a matter of individual psychology but of socially patterned and learnt ‘ways of seeing’ (Berger, 1972). It is a vision constructed through mobile images and representational technologies. Like the medical gaze, the power of the visual gaze within modern tourism is tied into, and enabled by, various technologies, including camcorders, film, TV, cameras and digital images.

There is no single tourist gaze as such. It varies by society, by social group and by historical period. Such gazes are constructed (Urry and Larsen 2011: 2)


The history of capitalism:

is a history of the role of signification and meaning systems in the economic life of society. This role is not confined merely to the marketing of commodities. Rather, the entire process of capital accumulation is shot through with mechanisms that depend on symbolic processes for their proper functioning (Gottdiener, 1997: 48).


Thus, “meanings systems” and other forms of signification are not merely products of technology, media and consumer culture or the selling of a destination

They are products produced into deeper cultural but as well material social relations.

We need the bigger picture where these processes interact

A little more about: Tourism impacts (Urry 2013),

In mobile societies, tourist destinations are fluid:

Tourists, business travelers, commuters, commodities, ideas, signs ….global connections through economic, social, cultural, technological networks

Place (tourist destination) isn’t only constructed thru local history and processes

Place is articulated in global relations constellations there (and everywhere)

This could lead to conflict

A little more about: Tourism impacts (Urry 2013),

These impacts can be:

social: economic, cultural, political…environmental: CO2, resources…

And these impacts depend on the intersection of various economic, social, cultural, environmental, and as well TECHNOLOGICAL!

Sharing Destinations: sharing economy

http://www.tnooz.com/article/sharing-economy-startup-pitch-video/


“I think it’s simple. If you care a bout your fellow human beings, you share what you know with them. You share what you see. You give them anything you can. If you care about their plight, their suffering, their curiosity, their right to learn and know anything the world contains, you share with them. You share what you have and what you see and what you know. To me, the logic there is undeniable.”

The audience cheered, and while they did so, three new words, SHARING IS CARING, appeared in the screen…

Mae Hollands, in Eggers (2013: 302)

https://www.airbnb.com/?locale=en


The sharing economy “is a socio-economic system built around the sharing of human and physical resources: shared creation, production, distribution and consumption.

A common premise is that when information about goods is shared, the value of those goods may increase, for the business, for individuals, and fo the community

Techology enables this system, it makes connections between people. Goods and services more efficient, resulting in new communities, organizations and biz models for the public and private sector

(wikipedia)


Guiding principles:

Unused value is a wasted value

Waste as food

Access not ownership

Transparent and open data

Trust

Urban density

(wikipedia)


Driving forces

ICT: open data, mobiles, apps, social media…

(Urbanised) population growth

Rising income inequality

Increasing global crises

Increasing volatility and natural resources

(wikipedia)


Sharing economy

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=32NlrmJs5kw

Sharing Destinations:

Once I took a taxi...


But is the clash between the old and the new economy about that?

Sharing Destinations:From @albertarsa

airbnb Hotel

Again: experience economy, tourist gaze, socio-technologies... And place

So then,

Sharing economy?

City as spectacle?

Social media role?

And your experience?

Smartketing Se 02 ep. 02 Making internet sense of tourism destinations

Education

Transcript of Smartketing Se 02 ep. 02 Making internet sense of tourism destinations