Introduction: Travel Guidebooks and Tourism Discourse

In Berlin, in the days before the First World War, legend tells us that precisely at the stroke of noon (...), Kaiser Wilhelm used to interrupt whatever he was doing inside the Palace. (...) He would say: "With your kind forbearance, gentlemen, I must excuse myself now, to appear in the window. You see, it says in the Baedeker that at this hour I always do."

Boorstin, 1964: 111

It was probably just a matter of time – as the world metamorphoses into a pre-digested Let's Go/Lonely Planet theme park, the travel guidebook has attained a level of ubiquity crying out to have the piss taken.

Jeffrey, 2003: 29

Introduction

In this book, we explore the use and significance of the travel guidebook in tourism. Tourists with their travel guidebooks are a routine sight at locations of interest around the world. Examples include city visitors debating their next picking from a list of not-to-be-missed sights, sightseers consulting maps and descriptions in a guidebook, foreign package tourists checking the local tour guide's advice against their native-language guidebook, backpackers probing a much-thumbed Lonely Planet or Rough Guide for information on the cheapest and cleanest bed in town. And so on and so on. For at least a century and a half, travel guidebooks have routinely been ascribed a significant impact on the performance of tourism, and the congruent growth of international individual mass tourism and guidebook publication since the 1960s has only strengthened that impression. Yet, while popular representations of guidebook impacts regularly describe a massive and regrettable influence on tourists and destinations, neither the guidebook nor its critique has been subjected to significant academic interrogation. Indeed, scholarly understanding of guidebooks seems often to obliquely buttress a condescending view of guidebooks rather than examining the critique.

The overarching aim of this book is therefore to problematise thinking surrounding the guidebook and, by extending knowledge of this ubiquitous element of travel, to further understanding of the tourism system. We ask how guidebooks have been represented as influencing tourists and their tourism, both historically and in the contemporary scene, and their effect on the creation of tourism places in different contexts. Through critically deconstructing the framing of guidebooks in both popular and scientific writings, we expose and question a number of built-in assumptions about guidebooks and guidebook use. A pervasive component of travel paraphernalia, guidebooks are often mentioned but less scrutinised in the research literature. Yet, despite the lack of research – or perhaps precisely because of it – guidebooks and guidebook use are surrounded by a number of somewhat conflicting understandings.

Chief among these are assumptions at the heart of the customary denouncing of the guidebook and their users as representative of all that is superficial in modern tourism. The fleeting, routine encounters with tourists' guidebook usage described in the opening paragraph temptingly elicit in the mind cultural theorist Roland Barthes' (1972: 76) notorious criticism of the Guide Bleu to Spain as 'an agent of blindness'. Certainly, disdain, even mockery, of guidebooks, and those who carry them, has a long history (see Buzard in Gilbert, 1999: 282). In 1876, readers of the English satirical magazine, Punch (cited in Berghoff et al., 2002: 172), understood well the comedic derision of a rhyme describing a participant on one of Thomas Cook's package tours as bereft of ideas other than those imparted by 'the red book', his Murray's guide or handbook:

Learns to like and to look
By his Guide or his Book
Now he likes his routes Cooked
His opinion red-booked.

Contesting this, however, guidebooks can also be seen as signposting the increasing individualisation of the tourist experience in recent time. From the mid-1950s until the mid-2000s, growth in the guidebook publishing industry suggests a developing influence of guidebooks on tourist decision-making and thus on tourism more broadly. The increasing diversity of guidebooks signifies growing demand differentiation and tourists can now acquire a variety of titles on a destination, including the most remote regions. In this way, the rapid growth of the guidebook industry in the last half century enabled what Koshar (2000: x) describes as the 'individuating functions of tourism'. According to Koshar (2000: 2), the travel guidebook, 'in spite (or perhaps because) of its tightly woven itineraries, creates a space for significant individual practice', a perspective shared by guidebook publishers who represent their series as a liberating rather than a regulating device in the pursuit of travel.

A second common and largely unsupported assumption is that of the power of the guidebook as an arbiter of a destructive mass tourism. In mainstream English-speaking media, growth of the guidebook market over the last four decades is often illustrated by the success of publishers such as Lonely Planet and Rough Guide. As these publishers have a reputation as suppliers of guidebooks to less 'touristed' locations, it is frequently presumed that such guidebooks pave the way for destination development, tourism growth, and cultural change at the tourism periphery. However, there is little evidence to support this. Indeed, it might equally be argued that the causality is in fact the other way around and that the growth of guidebook publications is the result of increasing affluence which has in turn fuelled the expansion of international tourism. Following that train of argument, tourism growth in most locations would have happened with or without the guidebook, which cannot be entirely represented as spearheading such expansion.

This, in turn, offers another angle to the understanding of those guidebooks most commonly associated with destination growth. A simple analysis of publishers' websites indicates that the majority of publications from guidebook publishers, including those once routinely termed 'alternative', cover well-established tourist destinations. Here, guidebooks are but one source of information among a plethora of brochures, leaflets and booklets, oral information provided in tourist bureaux, internet promotion, travelogues, glossy picture books and various forms of social media presence. Thus, it can be argued that in many locations, the popularity of guidebooks is not derived from a need for...