If you’re looking for a book about the experience and adventure industry, a manual in designing authentic places, tips on how to market an attractive destination, or a guide for event fixers, then you’ve picked up the wrong book. If, on the other hand, you’re looking for critical depictions of the grip that tourism has on our existence, you have come to the right place.

Privileged Mobilities contributes to a growing school of critical studies of tourism. Mobility is about power and space. In this anthology, a series of questions are raised regarding privileged mobiles –who travels, where and whence, and why – not least from the standpoint of class, gender, ethnicity and citizenship. The authors portray tourism as a force of re- and de-terrritorialization: tourism conquers, re-encodes and exploits everything from sea bottom to outer space: places, cultures, histories and life sequences.

To paraphrase Guy Debord, tourism “is the mode of appropriation of the natural and human environment by capitalism, which true to its logical development toward absolute domination, can (and now must) refashion the totality of space into its own decor.” In a touristified world, we all become tourists and are fostered to see, experience and act accordingly - whether we want to or not. The tourist emerges as the ideal subject: an a-political being, steeped in experience, adventure and enjoyment.