The essayist and sociologist Rodolphe Christin, 51, is one of the guests at the conference “Tourism of the future”, which opens this Monday afternoon at the Cité des Congrès in Nantes. The author of Anti-tourism handbook and of Real life is here. Travel again? will explain why this industry can not start again “as before” and the need to question the deep notion of travel. Maintenance.
Why do you think it is high time for tourism to reinvent itself?
For several decades, tourism has been part of a logic of unlimited growth, which in my opinion is no longer absolutely compatible with the imperatives of ecological transition. We can cite the artificialization of the territories, the gigantism of cruise ships and its effects on the planet, as well as the planes and the Paris-Lisbon flights at 30 euros which mean that we leave for an offer, without even knowing where we are going …
The crisis, which stopped everything suddenly, also shows that it is a very vulnerable economy. It will also have allowed to open the reflection whereas until now, one more readily criticized the factories, the polluting industries, because tourism still benefited from a form of mystification which suggested that it could contribute to the dialogue between the populations. …
That is to say ?
I think that the idea that tourism was highly virtuous, that it brought wealth and allowed people to live better has cracked in recent years … Masses of visitors have landed, with an overtourism that sometimes affects entire cities! Rent prices have increased, there has sometimes been opposition from local populations who have had to move away because of the touristification of certain neighborhoods. The whole point of the meeting fell through, because in these sectors we only find merchants, or inhabitants who live for tourism, in conditions that are not always very rosy.
To listen to you, should we stop going on vacation?
No, but I think we have to find meaning in our travels, think about “why we’re leaving”, find an almost philosophical dimension in it. Tourism is an economy of compensation that allows you to forget your daily living conditions that are not very stimulating or even overwhelming, so let us ask this question: “what do we look elsewhere that we could find here?” “
Paid holidays and the development of leisure activities have been a way of managing employees, making work bearable, which can raise questions about our working conditions, our daily life. We could also re-examine the role of the route, which could be more important than that of the destination. Make a journey that would be done from his doorstep, longer trips and / or less far. It would be a kind of relocation of travel, which tourism has turned into a product.
The return of the night train, the rise of cycle tourism, or the success of the “destination France” this summer, are they not the first good tracks?
This is going in the right direction but these practices, which also need adjustment and are also subject to marketing, are added and not replaced. As for the success of local tourism, is this really a trend or is it the result of constraints linked to the virus? I am not here to make anyone feel guilty, I think that everyone must act in accordance with their own ideas, but this model will not be able to last very long. The question is political and we need coordinated answers. The sector is in any case at a crossroads: some do not want to start again as before, but it is still too early to know what will happen.