25 LUXURY IN TOURISM – Contributions by Antonia Correia
25 LUXURY IN TOURISM – Contributions by Antonia Correia
“People wish to be judged not as they are but as they appear to be” (Mandeville, 1714)
Introduction
This contribution discusses the concept of luxury tourism under several ways, in order to understand the role luxury plays in the tourist choices and perceiving the leading forces that motivate tourists to choose tourism destinations based on the sense of achieving prestige and social recognition.
Luxury influences many decisions to buy. Although, today, it is widely accepted as a positive externality in the economy, it is far from being understood as a “positive” behaviour. The pejorative sense given to this type of consumption for ages, probably justifies the absence of studies around this topic. The few economists who tried to explain luxury consumption on the light of economic theory were called pejoratively sociologists and not considered, as this behaviour arose from social motivations. It was assumed that this behaviour had no economic impacts, because this does not fit any classical or neoclassical notions of value and utility and because this was seen as an irrational behaviour unfeasible to be modelled, as this represents the behaviour of the minorities (Veblen, 1902). luxury consumption was, therefore, a controversial topic in economics which has been neglected by economists for ages and it is, because of that, my favourite topic.
Only in the 1980s the growing importance of conspicuous consumption has made it an issue that deserves the attention of the economists, mainly due to its impact on economic development. At this age luxury behaviour was finally recognized as a field of knowledge within the bounds of economy, sociology, and psychology. Our first contribution on this topic is to establish the historical boundaries of this controversial topic (Correia, 2009); the second is to define luxury from from a theoretical perspective (Correia and Moital, 2009) and the third to search for a luxury definition from an applied perspective, Correia and Kozak (2012), Correia, Kozak and Kim (2018), Correia, Kozak and Gonçalves (2018).The fourth contribution relies on content analysis to enrich the meaning of luxury, Correia, Kozak and Reis (2014); Correia, Reis and Ghasemi (2020) and Correia, Kozak, and Del Chiappa (2020)
1. Historical Perspective
Signs of prestige consumption emerged in the early beginnings of roman society. In the roman empire, the authorities introduced laws to suppress conspicuous consumption. Those laws where extended until the seventeenth century and never worked effectively, with some minority groups behaving outrageously. In the seventeenth century the attempt to control the conspicuous consumption had been largely abandoned. Simultaneously, the economists started to question the impact this consumption had on the economy.
Conspicuous consumption appears associated with the concept of vanity (Smith, 1759) and interpersonal factors (Bentham, 1789). According to Smith (