Travel and experience: the return of the people

I’ve said this many times in this blog: what’s important about travel is the experience. It’s the people, what they think, feel, believe. Many of my persistent complaints about “travel journalism” practiced in my country respond to that absence in many notes. There are no relevant experiences, no people, just actors of the tourism market interested in making the agenda reflect points of view that benefits them.
But the experience can be commercialized by the industry. It’s what the tourism industry has always done: sell sensations, images, transitory situations. But even in the “experience market” there’s a lot to innovate, as you can see in the note published in the english newspaper The Times. And there are interesting examples in the article. For instance, Isango and Black Tomato, specialized in selling travel packages, emphasize on unconventional travel experiences, many times characterized with the ambiguous and unprecise term of “extreme”. Other more traditional sites, such as Lastminute.com, also have joined the trend of adding more experiences to the supply. It’s not just about selling trips, tickets and packages; it also adds to commercialize theater tickets, restaurant reservations and more.
The truth is, in the same way limits between ordinary life and travel become more diffuse, experiences associated to tourism also have more contact points with our “home” lifestyle. Surely, as time goes by, travel and tourism sites will expand its supply to newer areas, not associated to travel before. The process will not be so fast or in short terms, but it surely be happening in the next few years. Or months, if you realize how fast things happen in the Net.
The original The Times article can be found in this link, the reference was originally seen at Hotel Marketing.