The use of the term ‘hosts’ in this section of the chapter warrants a justi-fication. Aramberri (2001) has suggested that the term should be removed from the lexicon of tourism research. He notes that its derivation and use 114 Global Tourism
by anthropologists writing about tourism proceeds on the basis of three features—the term connotes an implicit contract by the host to extend pro-tection to the guest, it suggests a future reciprocity of such propro-tection, and it implies a set of rule-following behaviours so that hosts and guests can coexist as a virtual family. Aramberri (2000) elaborates as follows:
The host-guest paradigm cannot be used to account for most types of what is called tourist behavior. Excluded from the visual field are all of the inter-actions that do not take place between members of pre-industrial commu-nities and denizens of developed societies. These are nevertheless the overwhelming bulk of tourism both domestic and international.
Table 6.1, which depicts the relationships to be explored in this chapter, does use the generic expression ‘hosts,’ but subdivides the term into two categories with which Aramberri would presumably be more comfort-able—interaction with service providers and interaction with local com-munity members. The presentation of information in this section simply uses the term ‘host’ as a convenient integrating expression for the two groups with whom tourists have contact. There is an agreement here with the argument that it is not considered appropriate to embrace the more anthropological and noncommercial use of the term ‘hosts’ in its tradi-tional premodern format.
The dominant trends in the literature on tourist service personnel contact is written from the perspective of evaluating how well the service personnel perform. As Noe (1999) reports, service providers are typically evaluated on such dimensions as their reliability, the assurance they provide, the tangible aspects of their performance, and their empathy and responsiveness to client needs. These kinds of service provision evalua-tions have been developed by researchers such as Parasuraman, Zeithaml, and Berry (1994).
This line of inquiry is peripheral rather than central to the theme of tourists’ relationships as presented in this chapter. The question can also be asked in this context of what does it mean to have a relationship with a service provider or indeed is the very term ‘relationship’ appropriate?
The perspective adopted here is that a relationship involves multiple encounters with other people that one is able to recall and, further, the person encountered must be individually identified. The service encoun-ters typically reported in the service quality literature essentially offer brief points of contact and many travellers would undoubtedly struggle to remember and recognise individual taxi drivers, hotel personnel, restaurant waiters, booking clerks, customs personnel, and coach drivers.
For some service providers a relationship can be considered to be a more appropriate term. For example, a tour guide who spends a day with a traveller, an interpreter or booking clerk who guides a visitor through The role of relationships in the tourist experience 115
complex travel rescheduling, and a tourist information officer who influ-ences a day’s activities may provide memorable encounters and be seen as incipient relationships. It is noteworthy that with the exception of some efforts to develop cross-cultural awareness training there is little research or analysis of how well tourists behave in these relationships (see Pearce, Kim and Lussa, 1998; Ward, Bochner, and Furnham, 2001). It would seem to be another area of potential research investigation to explore the atti-tudes and behaviours of different tourist market segments toward the staff and assisting personnel they encounter. To date, the research has been very much focussed on the service providers’ behaviours rather than the tourists’ responses.
There is one marked exception to the lack of research on relationships in tourist–local encounters. The area in question involves sexual encoun-ters. There is widespread agreement that the relationships developed by tourists seeking sexual activities with local people is complex in terms of the motivation of the participants, the effect on the host society, and the range of relationships that develop in these situations. Herold, Garcia, and DeMoya (2001) suggest the use of the term ‘companionship tourism’ to help integrate the multiple relationship possibilities identified by other researchers. For example, Pruitt and Lafont (1995) noted the existence of romance tourism in Jamaica where female tourists developed rela-tionships with the local males that included emotional involve-ment, courtship, and sometimes sexual intimacy. In their study it was noteworthy that indirect rather than immediate financial payments were made. By way of contrast de Alburqueque (1999) suggested that romance tourism involving female tourists was a euphemism. In his view the rela-tionships were not romantic ones but a form of prostitution using the local beach boys. Herold, Garcia, and DeMoya (2001) reject de Alburqueque’s view. They suggest that for the North American and European women travelling to the Dominican Republic the term ‘consensual romantic rela-tionships’ best describes the tourist–local interaction. By interviewing both male and female tourists and male and female local participations with a female interviewer Herold, Garcia, and DeMoya (2001) reported that ‘more of the women (were) motivated toward the romance end of the (companionship) tourism continuum and more of the men motivated toward the sex part of it.’ More generally, McKercher and Bauer (2003) report that tourism and travel can be a unique facilitator of sexual rela-tionships. The themes of anonymity, sensory stimulation, reduced social control, and new potential partners all act to expand the range of same sex and opposite sex encounters (Selanniemi, 2003).
On many occasions the relationships are brief and financially well defined (Opperman, 1998; Truong, 1990). The question of who is exploit-ing whom is not easily assessed; there are radical tourist views that the sex workers are without power, whereas others see at least some of the 116 Global Tourism
tourists as cautious customers, powerless to complain about any problems and controlled by the situation and experienced partners (Truong, 1990;
McCormick, 1994; Ryan, 1999). The ways in which these tourist relation-ships are managed were portrayed in some detail by Herold, Garcia, and DeMoya (2001) in their study of the Dominican beach boys.
The beach boys reported that they never directly ask for a specific sum of money as do female prostitutes . . . Rather they use different strategies to indicate their lack of money to pay for drinks, admission to discos or taxi transportation . . .
Another strategy is to look sad and not to talk. This throws the woman off guard because until that point the beach boy has been very friendly, smiling all the time and very talkative . . .
The woman now quickly picks up the message that something is very wrong as he ‘reluctantly’ admits to having money problems.
These kinds of scams and exploitative tactics are not new or confined to the Caribbean. Cohen (1982) noted almost identical strategies in earlier studies of Thai women and Western men, Zinovieff (1991) identified similar exploitative manoeuvres in Greece (1991), du Cros and du Cros (2003) reported the use of ingratiation and flattery by young Cretan males, and Dahles and Bras (1999) identified sets of Indonesian males who
‘worked’ the tourists as resources to be exploited in Yogykarta.
It would be misleading, however, not to view some of these relation-ships as providing mutual, even if temporary, satisfaction and rewards to the participants. For Taiwanese men, Lee (2002) reports that the sexual lib-eration of other parts of Asia are synonymous with a better, freer lifestyle.
Further as Cohen (2003) has documented, the sexually oriented tourism relationships may not always be short-lived. Cohen considered the weak-nesses and strengths of marriages between Thai women and foreign men resulting from the chance tourism encounters. This relationship develop-ment represents the expressed goal of at least a subset of participants in the romance tourism category (du Cros and du Cros, 2003; Wong, 2003).
Cohen’s analysis noted the difficulties of such marital relationships, which included the persistent and expanding financial demands by the women on behalf of themselves and their family. The problems appeared to be the greatest when the foreigner stayed in Thailand. For some of these mar-riages, an initially difficult period was encountered, but a number of the relationships persisted, held together by children, common property, and growing mutual understanding.
If successful albeit infrequent marriages between tourists and local part-ners represent a positive pinnacle of tourist–local encounters, there are some contrasting troughs of exploitative and harmful encounters. Tourists can be targeted as victims in organised criminal attacks and assault (Chesney-Lind and Lind, 1986; Harper, 2000). The scale of this phenome-The role of relationships in the tourist experience 117
non can vary from small opportunistic attacks, such as stealing and snatching handbags and wallets, to organised terrorism against identifi-able national groups such as in Bali in October 2002. The attacks may also be targeted at the elderly or identifiable groups such as gay tourists (Want, 2002). Other forms of negativity can also be identified. Exploitation of vis-itors by overcharging, misdirecting, and exchanging the products pur-chased with inferior substitutes have been reported (de Albuquerque and McElroy, 2001). Pearce, Kim, and Lussa (1998) identified that Westerners in Indonesia reported that small shopkeepers and street vendors who fol-lowed them, who touched them, and who pushed and shoved for atten-tion were a major source of unpleasantness.
As with some of the other service and local encounters, it is perhaps overextending the ambit of the present chapter to call these forms of inter-personal contact relationships. In some senses it is likely that tourists recall these multiple minor interactions as a stereotype of the intrusive harassing vendor—a generic relationship with the locals rather than an identified personal encounter.
Conclusion
The focus of this chapter has been on the specific relationships that tourists develop during their travels. It has not considered the wider impact of these relationships on the visited community in terms of cul-tural change, social structure, and business performance. Many of these wider implications, together with the effects of tourist infrastructure itself, have been reviewed in studies on tourist impacts, such as in previous edi-tions of this volume (see Archer and Cooper, 1998; Mercer, 1998; Pearce, 1998; Swinglehurst, 1998).
A remaining issue pertaining to the present focussed interest is the con-struction and development of conceptual schemes to better understand and interpret the relationships described in this chapter. Such conceptual schemes will need to be sufficiently expansive and flexible to address the full range of relationship perspectives portrayed in Figure 6.3 and expanded on in the section on companionship tourism.
There would appear to be several viable candidates for the next phase of developing our understanding of tourist–tourist and tourist–local tionships. The potential candidates include conceptualising tourist rela-tionships as an extension of the in-group–out-group approach (Yagi and Pearce, 2002), the development of the concept of threshold and liminoid space for tourist settings (Selanniemi, 2003), innovative dramaturgical and performative accounts (Daniel, 1996; Donlon and Agrusa, 2003), and theories combining social exchange and social representation approaches 118 Global Tourism
(Pearce, Moscardo, and Ross, 1996). What is certain in this area of inquiry is that relationships are pivotal to tourism, and it can be a goal of both the analytical and the managerial dimensions of tourism to enhance these interpersonal encounters.
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