The price of cultural tourism

Angkor Wat 1880.

The attraction of cultural tourism is its uniqueness and, most often, its scarcity. It is precisely because a historical monument or a cultural tradition is unique and only found in one place that cultural tourism exist: one must go there to experience the culture. Unlike attraction parks that can be replicated anywhere to meet market demand and spread the traffic, cultural destinations cannot duplicate themselves and cannot expand without compromising or diluting some aspects of their cultural value. Where is the fair and ethical line between preserving virgin state and meeting demand?

A short history of tourism through words

The guides really dressed up back then!

A good way to check the popularity of something is to count how often people talk about it or write about it, sort of like the trending hashtags on Twitter. If you want to see the trending over several decades, way before the Internet, then the best place to look for words would be in books! Google has indexed over 5 millions books going back a couple centuries and they have a really cool application called “Ngram” which lets you plot the frequency of usage of a word over a long period of time. To better grasp the concept, try the words “war” and “peace”, or “internet”, the graphs will be very obvious to understand.

The price of cultural tourism

Angkor Wat 1880.

The attraction of cultural tourism is its uniqueness and, most often, its scarcity. It is precisely because a historical monument or a cultural tradition is unique and only found in one place that cultural tourism exist: one must go there to experience the culture. Unlike attraction parks that can be replicated anywhere to meet market demand and spread the traffic, cultural destinations cannot duplicate themselves and cannot expand without compromising or diluting some aspects of their cultural value. Where is the fair and ethical line between preserving virgin state and meeting demand?