8. The Neoliberal Tourism System: Strategies of Production and Distribution of Travel

Tourism is one of the most representative social phenomena of our age, not only because it combines economic, symbolic, and relational aspects but, above all, because the possibilities it offers for the analysis of changes in cultural practices and lifestyles of a very large part of the population that has within its reach this form of spatial mobility associated with leisure. In order to understand the travel industry, attention must be paid to the production and distribution of tourism products and services. The digital technology revolution has radically transformed the global consumer society, and particularly tourism industry, which has taken on a set of models of consumption couched in an attractive and revolutionary rhetoric but that also, in terms of trade and labor, contribute to a system of neoliberal economic activity. In the following pages, I shall analyze the ins and outs of this tourism system characterized, among other things, by the disaggregation of services, the management of revenues, and hyper-segmentation, within a context of an increasingly less conventional mass consumption. The growing gap between premium and low-cost customers, as a social trend, anticipates a scenario of total inequality of tourist travel. In an economy of niches, the industry, ranging from the most elitist and exclusive to the alternative and collaborative, deploys communicative strategies, emotional and experiential marketing, and, taken together, advertising speeches that create sensibilities, conditions attitudes, and modes of purchase.