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(something) which marks (represents) it for a tourist (someone). The use of
the term “marker” is here extended by MacCannell to cover any kind of
information about a sight, including for example what could be found in
travel books and in stories told by persons who has visited it before. Today
information on the Internet would certainly qualify as important markers.
A tourist attraction is thus a combination of “meaning and matter”
(Gren 1994), a sight transformed through markers into something that may
fascinate a tourist. This duality, this combination of what we are able to
grasp by the perception of our bodily senses and what we can signify and
understand by and through language, goes into the very heart of tourism as
such. It is not restricted to a semiotic account of the tourist attraction.
More generally it can be said that any tourist experience is in
practice the outcome of an embodied encounter with something material
that simultaneously is being braided with an interpretation of its meaning.
In a similar way, tourism denotes real locations with tangible tourist
attractions that real people can travel to and visit. On the other hand,
tourism connotes a range of intangible qualities, like various touristic
amenity values that may be experienced in situ through direct bodily
encounters, as well as through an indirect at-a-distance engagement with
images of various sorts.
This characteristic of tourism, as in-between meaning and matter, is
also present in one of its most important contemporary manifestations: as a
commodity.
The commodity & tourism
Today tourism is being produced and consumed very much like any other
commodity. Tourism products may have some specific features that make
them different from many others, e.g. their intangibility but as an industry
tourism is subject to economic rationality and firmly embedded in the orbit
of capital transactions.
Long gone are the days of the old relationship between guests and
hosts that was knitted together by a thin string of altruistic human
hospitality, which meant to grant shelter and provide a bed for a travelling
stranger without knowing whether one would ever get anything in return.
Nowadays the relationship is one of customers and producers. Tourism
has, in a short period of modern times become an industry operationalised
with business and economic rationality. On the market of supply and
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