All-inclusive hotels’ packaging of the northern coast of ...

All-inclusive hotels' packaging of the northern coast of Jamaica: creating and maintaining an environmental bubble

Victoria Eriksson

Institute of Latin American studies Bachelor?s thesis 15 HE credits Tourism research Latin American Studies 180 credits Autumn 2020 Supervisor: Thais Machado Borges

Abstract

This study contributes to the existing discussion about international tourism by exploring the role of all-inclusive hotels in the creation of an environmental bubble on the northern coast of Jamaica. Moreover, it examines what type of Jamaica is being sold by the hotels and who is included and who is excluded from the environmental bubble. The purpose of this study is to analyze how all-inclusive hotels on the northern coast of Jamaica are selling their travel packages. In order to do that, this study makes a qualitative media analysis of digital website advertisement from all-inclusive hotel's websites. Social scientists agree that one characteristic of all-inclusive type of tourism is the separation between guest and host. I argue that the website advertisements by all-inclusive hotels are contributing to this separation. Keywords: Jamaica, local community, all-inclusive hotel, ?environmental bubble?, websites

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Table of contents

Introduction.............................................................................................4 Literature review........................................................................................6

A definition of tourism..............................................................................6 The creation of an environmental bubble.........................................................6 Tourism trends in Jamaica..........................................................................8 Theoretical framework.................................................................................10 The pleasure periphery theory.......................................................................11 The purification of space theory....................................................................12 Methodology...............................................................................................14 Implementation.......................................................................................15 Findings and discussion ................................................................................17 Theme 1: Reggae as a tourist product .............................................................18 Theme 2: Comfort combined with strangeness...................................................20 Theme 3: All-inclusive and the exclusion of the local community.............................22 Frame 1: Jamaica- a tropical paradise.............................................................25 Frame 2: Racial representation............................................................................26 Conclusion...............................................................................................29 References................................................................................................31

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Introduction

There is something special about going online to book the next trip to a new destination. Seeing photos of happy families, white empty beaches and exotic looking parties makes us visualize this new place and wonder how it would be to spend our vacation there. The growing emergence of the "all-inclusive" travel-packages has made travel easier and more comfortable, particularly for people in Western developed countries. Staying in an allinclusive hotel often means that as a guest, one is guaranteed security, one has access to a private beach, varied choice of international restaurants, souvenirs shops inside the hotel, private transportation and entertainment every night (McFarlane-Morris 2019: 2). This may sound comfortable and convenient but the structure of this type of tourism comes with complications, it might put the tourist in something that social scientists have called the ?environmental bubble?. This theory, coined by Erik Cohen in 1972, indicates that there are organized barriers like heavy security presence, souvenirs shops and restaurants owned by the all-inclusive hotels, that will keep the tourists within their environmental bubble and thus isolate them from the local community and its members. This separation is created in response to the psychological need of familiarity and comfort of tourists when experiencing a new place. The all-inclusive hotel industry, through their services, provides an experience of a new place through the protective walls of the bubble. This has consequences for the local community (Cohen 1972: 166).

Travelling back and forth to Jamaica for several years and doing a five-month long internship on the island through Stockholm University, I got the opportunity to experience two complete different sides of Jamaica. On one side, I was a part of the local community and its members, meeting Jamaican people and experiencing Jamaican culture on an everyday basis. I was working with Jamaicans, eating typical Jamaican food in Jamaican owned restaurants, renting a room in Jamaican woman's house and using the public transportation system every day. Two months later, I was a guest in a luxury all-inclusive resort in Ocho Rios, a city on the northern coast of the island famous for tourism, completely isolated from what had been my previous perception of Jamaica. Being a guest at the resort included different amenities, for instance, access to five different restaurants offering international food, access to the hotel's private beach with hired guards whose mission was to ensure that no one outside the hotel could trespass, private drivers ready to drive us wherever we wished to go and entertainment every night, hearing pop music and Abba songs playing while unlimited drinks were served.

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The shift between these two contrasts of Jamaica made me wonder: How is the separation between tourists and the local community created and what type of Jamaica is being sold by the hotels? Who is included and who is excluded in the environmental bubble?

The purpose of this study is to analyze how all-inclusive hotels on the northern coast of Jamaica are selling their travel packages. In order to do that, this study makes a qualitative media analysis of digital advertisement from all-inclusive hotels' websites. I suggest that way all-inclusive hotels represent Jamaica, by using specific words and pictures on their websites, can attract a certain type of tourist. This kind of representation can contribute to increase the already existing separation between tourists and the local community. This study examines the representations of Jamaica and the products and services being sold by the all-inclusive hotels and who is being included and not included in these representations. It does not examine who is included or not included in the actual hotel work, but it does discuss potential implications that could come with this form of tourism.

In the late nineteenth century, the first hotels were built on Jamaica and, although still being limited, the tourist industry started to become organized (Dunn 2002: 4). Since the 1980s, the number of tourists has exceeded one million in a year and in 2019, 4.3 million tourists visited Jamaica with the majority going to the northern coast (Jamaica Tourist Board 2018). The white-sand beaches and pleasant weather of the northern coast of Jamaica has made cities like Montego Bay, Ocho Rios and Negril the main destinations for tourists and will therefore be the focus for this thesis. With this thesis, I hope to make a small contribution to the already existing, but small, research of the environmental bubble theory by Cohen (1972). By connecting this theory to the case of the all-inclusive hotel industry on the northern coast of Jamaica, using a qualitative media analysis of hotel websites, I hope to fill a gap in this field.

This study is divided into five main parts. The section below contains previous research and existing debates regarding international tourism and the specific case of Jamaica. Theories and concepts about international tourism and tourism in southern developing countries are discussed in the second part of this study. Following, the third part is an explanation of the method being used in order to answer my research questions and how it is implemented in this study. Finally, the fourth part is a description and analysis of the results followed by a conclusion where a recap of the main ideas is presented, as well as a condensed version of the core arguments related to the research questions.

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