BY HELEN J. CATALBAS
TOURISM is about storytelling. We mean stories about how to get to a certain destination, what to see and do there, where to stay, what are the unique attributes of the place in the bucket list, what experiences to avoid and what to pursue, etc., etc., ad infinitum.
Stories sell tourist products sometimes, even if a tourist product is raw or crude as the case maybe. But who can tell which tourist product is raw or crude or developed as the case may be? After all, there is a market for every product no matter the state the latter is in.
It’s not about what satiates the auditory and visual senses that matters much if we mean tourism in the real sense of the word.
Tourism is more than the hypnotic deafening sounds and the blazing bizarre colors. This sensuality is at best a means of fleeting entertainment with diminishing returns from the onlookers’ position but, of course, not from the cash registers’ perspective. At least, it is a reason for selling and spending.
These audios and visuals will acquire deeper meaning and significance if and when accurate stories about them are told and retold from one generation to the next. In turn and over time, this meaning and significance will rub on tourists who will do a repeat visit because it is not a case of you-see-one-you-see-all.
Stories about natural tourist attractions never cease to fascinate us, each one of us being an interesting part of nature ourselves.
For one reason or the other man recreates nature over and over again in more ways than one. Let us take the case of gardens on the roof deck of a towering giant that is a manmade structure identity of a Southeast Asian tourist destination. We may also cite a massive multi-storey building with each one occupied by fish cages in an East Asian tourist favorite.
Those of us who live in surroundings that are abundantly blessed with natural attributes should hype this reality to the hilt instead of just a part of it that after all is so highly seasonal, so expensive and so chemical-laden from production to consumption and other processes in between.
Stories, or trivias as some people call it, permeate every aspect of tourism.
Tourism attractions, facilities, accessibility, security, image, safety, and hospitality – we name it, there are stories attached to each. The kind of stories told or untold about a destination determines the quantity and quality of tourists it gets, repeat visitors or first-timers all the time. Two-timers are not excluded, though./PN
