Dictionary

class tourism en · NOUN

Meanings

1. (uncountable) The practice by members of the middle class of visiting working class areas or slums out of curiosity or for entertainment.
   • 2002, R. M. Vaughan, interview transcribed in Michelle Berry and Natalee Caple (editors), The Notebooks: Interviews and New Fiction from Contemporary Writers, Anchor Canada, p. 439, I despise those books. They’re nothing but the worst sort of class tourism. The idea that Atlantic Canadians are the colourful peasantry of the nation enrages me.
   • From the beginning, professional photography typically meant the broader kind of class tourism, with most photographers combining surveys of social abjection with portraits of celebrities or commodities (high fashion, advertising) or studies of the nude. 1977, Susan Sontag, “Melancholy Objects”, in On Photography, New York: Picador, published 2001, page 57:
   • As working-class neighborhoods drew curious tourists, so too did the factories where immigrants labored. The novelist and journalist Howard Vincent O’Brien turned the experience of class tourism into reformist literature. 2009, Daniel E. Bender, chapter 5, in American Abyss: Savagery and Civilization in the Age of Industry,, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, page 135:
2. (uncountable) Tourism catering to a wealthy elite (contrasted with mass tourism).
   • 1971, Mary McCarthy, Birds of America, New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, “A Sibylline Interlude,” p. 284, I feared you might be one of those snobs who distinguish between class tourism and mass tourism.
   • The Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association, which opened Washington’s home as a national shrine in 1860, reacted ambivalently toward later proposals for electric streetcar service between Washington and Mount Vernon. They worried that the “wrong sort” of people would flood their property. Indeed, they felt that mass tourism as opposed to class tourism could compromise the diffusion of Washington’s legacy. 2011, Daniel Bluestone, chapter 10, in Buildings, Landscapes, and Memory: Case Studies in Historic Preservation, New York: W.W. Norton, page 242:
   • The matter of whether Hawaii is to be given over to “mass” or “class” tourism will obviously have been settled by then, and in favor of the former, for the early 1970s will see the 500-passenger “Jumbo” jets come winging in. 1968, Richard Austin Smith, chapter 8, in The Frontier States: Alaska, Hawaii,, New York: Time-Life Books, page 151:

Relateds

class tourist

Synonyms

luxury tourism · slumming · high-class tourism