32 SOCIAL TOURISM – Contributions by Anya Diekmann
32 SOCIAL TOURISM – Contributions by Anya Diekmann
Since my first contact with tourism as a research area, back in the 1990s, its human dimension has always appealed to me. When I did my PhD on heritage site protection and tourism (my background is in heritage and archaeology), it was the use of terms such as ‘overrun’, ‘hordes’ and ‘masses’ that caught my attention. The tourist as an individual seemed not given much weight and was somehow denied a personal identity. Although there is of course the need for heritage protection and overtourism is a reality to be dealt with, I wanted to understand what people draw from travelling and visiting sites and places and whether there is a deeper meaning or societal role for tourism at all. The 1985 Tourism Bill of Rights and Tourist Code (UNWTO, 1985) insists on the ‘human dimension of tourism’. It reiterates that tourism contributes to the social, economic, cultural and educational sectors of national societies and improves the international community (Higgins-Desboilles 2006: 1198). The human dimension, the social exchange (even if only with peer travellers) and the benefits of tourism for mental and physical health give tourism a societal significance. And this is what it makes it so worthy of academic study.
These aspects of tourism are often the principal interest of research in the field of social tourism and consequently it was that, rather than research in commercial tourism, that triggered my curiosity. My first encounter with social tourism was in 2008, when I learnt through a research project funded by ISTO (the International Organisation of Social Tourism – BITS at that time) that the working conditions and social protection of people working in the social tourism accommodation sector were better than those in the commercial tourism sector and how social tourism facilitated holiday participation.
An under-researched topic
While tourism research has looked into many different areas over the past 50 years, social tourism was not, until very recently, included in that growing corpus of knowledge. Few research projects have been dedicated to the field, and those that have been done have tended to be limited to definitions (Hunziker, 1957; Haulot, 1982; Jolin & Proulx, 2005; Minnaert, Maitland, & Miller, 2006) or to outlining provision in a particular country,or to its contribution to the social economy (Caire 2007). A turning point came when the sector itself saw the need for academic research to support it. Thus, a small increase in research in social tourism was sponsored by organisations such as the Family Holiday Association, ISTO, trade unions, local governments and even the European Commission with the preparatory action for CALYPSO in 2008.
I began by researching social tourism within Belgium in the late 2000s’. Shortly afterwards, I met – by chance or destiny – two of the most prominent researchers in social tourism: Scott McCabe and Lynn Minnaert. All three of us were acutely aware of the