engleski

Tourism, inter-cultural understanding and world-peace: real or imagined relationships?

The belief that travel contributes to greater inter-cultural understanding and, subsequently to world peace, is time-honoured, deeply rooted and widespread. Contact facilitated through travel is generally thought to contribute to the better mutual understanding of people of different national origins. With the exponential growth of tourism in contemporary society, it is not surprising that tourism is considered by some to be the world&#8217 ; s great peace industry. However, those critical of tourism&#8217 ; s role argue firstly, that modern-day travel does not offer real contact opportunities and, secondly, they question the nature of these contacts. There is a paucity of empirical evidence on the topic and the few studies conducted to date are atheoretical in nature and were conducted on small subsections of homogeneous travellers, such as educational tours or full-organised bus trips. Therefore, three studies reported here were designed to asses the nature and type of contact that travellers had with their hosts and the influence of these contacts on post-trip attitudes. The first was of Australian Japanese language students on a cultural immersion tour to Japan representing travel experience considered by the proponents of tourism &#8211 ; world peace argument to be most beneficial in the process of fostering inter-cultural understanding. The second study was of the Croatian students on a fully-organised trip to Spain, Greece and Czech Republic. This sample resembled fully-organised travel revolving around visiting major attractions in a tightly packed itinerary representing the travel situations that critics use to support their side of the arguments. Finally, the third study was of a broad study of Australians travelling-abroad designed to sample a range of travel styles and thus overcome the generalisability problems associated with the first two studies. Contrary to expectations based on previous research, in spite of the intense and pleasant contact that the Australian students had with their hosts, the actual travel experience had a minimal impact on students&#8217 ; attitudes. It appears that such travellers were already favourably predisposed to their hosts for travel experience to affect their attitudes further. On the other hand, the travel experience of Croatian students&#8217 ; whose trip offered minimal contact opportunities, represented the types of travel that critics of the tourism &#8211 ; intercultural understanding nexus used to support their side of the arguments. In spite of the nature of the trip, there was a small group of students who had a more meaningful contact with locals and who, as a consequence, returned home with improved post-trip attitudes towards the people and country visited. There was also a positive relationship between contact and post-trip attitudes. Finally, the results of third study of Australians&#8217 ; travelling abroad revealed that contact with locals was much more frequent than often assumed by critics, with almost two-thirds reporting either making friends with locals or frequently chatting with them. As with the study of Croatian students, post-trip improvements in attitudes towards the people and the country visited, as well as their overall trip satisfaction were proportional to the nature and quality of contact with local residents. Although these results provide some tentative evidence that travel, indeed, contributes to increased intercultural understanding providing that a pleasant and meaningful contact between travellers and their hosts takes place, the results should be taken with caution. Firstly, it appears that both the trip in itself and the contact with locals had little impact on the tendency to stereotype foreign people. Secondly, more deeply rooted social attitudes of ethnocentrism also appeared not to be affected and it was only in the Australian sample that travel increased inter-cultural orientation. However, as there was a positive relationship between past travel experience and these attitudes, there is a possibility of travel having a cumulative effect on these. Thus it remains highly questionable whether improvement in post-trip opinions about the people and the country visited is of sufficient relevance to produce world-peace.

tourism; inter-cultural understending; peace

nije evidentirano