50 SOCIOLOGY OF TOURISM AND MIGRATION – Contributions by Raquel Huete
50 SOCIOLOGY OF TOURISM AND MIGRATION – Contributions by Raquel Huete
Why did I study Tourism?
When I was a child, I used to play at being a travel agent. My younger brothers were my clients and we would play together, organising trips to faraway countries or even around the world. I was lucky enough to start travelling abroad alone at a very young age, which was unusual in the social context in which I lived. Perhaps the fact that I was born on the border between France and Spain kindled within me an interest in learning about other cultures. It soon became clear to me that I wanted to dedicate my life to travelling, and it seemed that studying a Tourism Studies Degree would be the best way to turn my hobby into my profession. At the age of 22, I started making my first trips as a tour guide. I can still remember the excitement of that first trip to the World’s Fair in Seville in 1992. After that I held various positions in a large travel agency. I really liked that job, but not so much the working conditions. Those were the years in which Spain was undertaking the first legislative reforms aimed at making the labour market more flexible, while at the same time intensive privatisation of large public companies was taking place. Tourism remained on the margins when it came to making major decisions in Spanish economic policy, which is still the case today.
Why did I study Sociology?
While at the travel agency, I started to ask myself why the exact same client could be sold a trip to the Canary Islands, the Balearic Islands or Benidorm indiscriminately. I was also interested in understanding how the relationship between tour operators and retail agencies worked and what the consequences of tourism were for the places whose landscapes were shaped by this activity. At this point, Sociology was beginning to be taught at the University of Alicante (UA) — a city I had moved to for family reasons — which caught my attention. The Sociology of Tourism did not yet exist as a subject in Spanish universities (Huete, 2008). At the time, it was an emerging discipline that was not taught in the degree course I started in 1993, although there were other subjects in the syllabus that helped me to understand how the Mediterranean had been radically transformed by tourism and its accompanying urbanisation processes since the mid-twentieth century. In this way my initial interest in tourism as a profession gave way to social-scientific curiosity.
The reasons that have been suggested to explain the underdevelopment of Sociology of Tourism in Spanish universities are varied but connected: most contributions on the subject have been made from outside formal academic-university contexts; there has been a lack of interest within the Spanish university environment in analysing a process of social change perceived as less important in comparison to other supposedly more conflictive realities; the impact of so-called “mass tourism” took place in regions far from the main ce