Tourist – Host Interactions

I’d like to share with you next about tourists-guests relationships and interactions. When tourism is promoted and one of the major benefits from the social and cultural perspective is that facilitate and encourages social cultural exchange, learning of other cultures. So we are looking here in this particular picture with the tourists, with the African,you know in a social situation. We go to the next picture, and we look here and this is the typical and probably most common type of interaction that tourist wills have hosts. And that is in a commercial business situation where the main contact between the tourists and the hosts is a commercial one where you are coming and buy something and it’s merely a commercial transaction.

So when we look at tourists-hosts interaction,yes, it could be predominantly social,it could be primarily business or it could be a mix of both.

When referring to social interactions, you want to generate cultural understanding and awareness between societies and culture. And de-personalize commercial relationships, it’s not only about business making money,it’s about getting to know your tourists. Who are they?What are they like? What are they preferences?

We also need to think in terms of social norms and quite often an opportunity to prompt interaction between hosts and guests. It’s a sharing of national holiday or regional celebrations with the tourists. But them coming an experience, the things that the local community experiences and enjoys. We need to be careful about the development of stereo-types of tourists. Is this stereo-type positive? Negative? And unfortunately,sometimes the stereo-types may be inaccurate. Generally speaking,stereo-types tend to be negative in nature. Where people formulate opinion of a particular person or a group of people based upon missing information or inaccurate information or lies or rumors that may have been spread.

And we need to be very careful of what types of stereo-types developed between different societies and different cultures.

There are morality and religions norms that we need to consider when we think in terms of social and cultural impacts. Often we may see changes in crime rates, prostitution,theft and gambling. With the increasing in tourists, some thefts may prey upon the tourists, or sometime we unfortunately find instances where some tour group members are steal from them.

When we talk about cultural ways and activities, often they may be a breakdown of traditional cultural activities and customs. To give you an example of this, we often find the certain celebrations and rituals are held on a daily bases for the benefit of tourists when that particular celebration should only be celebrated on particular days of the years on particular occasions. And when it is perform on the daily bases, it’s significant that it’s meaning is lost with the local community and local residents. And certainly when we talked about cultural impacts, we always looking for opportunities for cultural and educational exchanges.

In terms of day-to-day activities, tourism may introduce rapid change in the community.

And we often aware that tourism offer facilities, the modernization of more traditional societies in developing countries, multination is not a problem because over time people do change,societies do change. But how rapid and how quick that is change take place is the question we need to consider. And then there is a competition for local resources use of the beaches,of the park,the restaurants.

Sometimes a benefit of tourism is that you have more restaurant and better restaurant. On the other hand, if we look at this from the negative perspective, there are too many tourists, I cannot go and patronize my favorite restaurant because there are too many tourists.

We need to understand there are certain limits to quality interactions. And we need to understand about the nature of social interactions in the tourism setting. First and foremost is that the interaction that occurs is transitory. It’s temporary interaction with the tourists comes for a short period of time. It may be for an afternoon,it may be for a diet, and that’s it and the visitor has gone. It’s bound by special and temporal constrains. Accessibility the number and arrange and a scope attraction available in your destination, your attraction exist, people have limited time and they may not have the opportunity to visit all the places that they need to visit to truly experience, the wonders of the attractions available in your community.

There is lacking in spontaneity, in particularly in situations where there is a lot number of tourists. As a service provider, it’s difficult to continue smiling all day. When constantly you have guests coming in and it’s easy to tired and when a visitor enters your store or comes to your attraction. The interactions may be unbalanced less than equal.