Inmaculada DIAZ-SORIA, Escola Universitària de Turisme i Direcció Hotelera - Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Spain
Asunción BLANCO-ROMERO, Dpt. Geografia - Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Spain
The health crisis is directly caused by a virus, but the economic crisis stems from our excessive dependence on hyper-mobility and globalization. The health crisis has highlighted the fragility of our socioeconomic system, as well as the unsustainable nature of the tourism industry, source of great waste of energy and materials. This context of crisis provides us with the opportunity of analyzing the contribution that tourism can make to our personal development. This should lead to a redefinition of tourism as an economic model based on proximity and slowness, which could promote local community control of the value chain, its accessibility to the entire social spectrum or its contribution to the economic complementarity of territories suffering from uneven geographical development. This way, proximity tourism could be a solid and constructive alternative for tourism development, and tourism could effectively contribute to the socioecological transition.
Nevertheless, similar concepts, like staycation or nearcation, have emerged in previous crisis without becoming a consolidated trend for tourism. Based on these previous experiences, proximity tourism could be understood as a passing trend, a lifejacket used by a fragile tourism industry, which would forget about this strategy and its benefits once international tourism recovers. That is likely the case if the main values and principles guiding the tourism development at a global scale are not questioned, nor the contribution of this sector to the periodic socioeconomic crisis.
Based on research conducted during the last ten years, this theoretical proposal aims at discussing the complexity of proximity tourism, which is not a new concept, nor it is the only one regarding the need to rethink tourism in a more sustainable way. However, the emphasis on the idea of proximity as a positive value of the tourist experience might represent a driver for change if it is developed in a strategic and consistent way.
Mots clés : crisis|driver for change|proximity tourism|socioecological transition|tourism model
A102991ID