Packaging dreams: Canadian tour operators at work

Abstract Canadian package tour operators play a creative role in the definition and marketing of vacation dreams. A look at this market as a cultural unit reveals tourism's symbolic importance as a means of escape and status. Descriptions of holiday and travel as cultural commodities highlight the unique brokerage position held by tour operators. It is concluded that tour operators compete both in terms of the product they sell and the travel images they create. These images are continually being redefined as the Canadian tour industry and travel market interact. Transformations in both market and industry have implications for the scope and nature of international tourism.

[1]  Pauline J. Sheldon,et al.  The tour operator industry: An analysis , 1986 .

[2]  The ideology of class and tourism confronting the discourse of advertising , 1983 .

[3]  E. Cohen.  Primitive and remote: Hill tribe trekking in Thailand , 1989 .

[4]  R. Belk,et al.  Culture and Consumption: New Approaches to the Symbolic Character of Consumer Goods and Activities , 1989 .

[5]  K. Watson-Gegeo,et al.  Tourism as an Anthropological Subject [and Comments and Reply] , 1981, Current Anthropology.

[6]  Richard Schreyer,et al.  Attribute Preferences for Wildland Recreation Settings , 1986 .

[7]  E. Goffman.  The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life , 1959 .

[8]  L. Taylor,et al.  Escape Attempts: The Theory and Practice of Resistance in Everyday Life , 1976 .

[9]  P. Pearce,et al.  Methodology in tourism research , 1988 .

[10]  P. Bourdieu.  Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste* , 2018, Food and Culture.

[11]  Nell Leiper,et al.  The framework of tourism: Towards a definition of tourism, tourist, and the tourist industry , 1979 .

[12]  D. Maccannell.  The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class , 1976 .

[13]  John L. Crompton,et al.  Latent demand for vacation travel: a cross cultural analysis of French and English speaking residents of Ontario and Quebec. , 1988 .

[14]  John Ash,et al.  The golden hordes: International tourism and the pleasure periphery , 1975 .

[15]  A. Morrison,et al.  The Tourism System: An Introductory Text , 1985 .