in lodges and camps, in travel agencies and tour operators, in
the national park administration and other similar organizations that serve
the tourists or the nature photographers and film producers. Tourism is a
labour-intensive industry at various levels of the employment scale. Every
hotel needs maids, porters and bartenders as well as directors and reception
clerks (Elliott, 2001: 57). Local people also sell souvenirs, or work in shops
that sell them, and locally purchased souvenirs are the major, and sometimes
only, direct expenditures of tourists at the locality itself beyond the pre-paid
package. Small cottage industries develop around traditional crafts now
directed towards the production of tourist souvenirs (van den Berghe, 1980:
383).
Obviously, the aforementioned occupations are at the bottom of the
employment scale. They are low-wage, seasonal and non-secure jobs. They
may be construed as indicators of economic marginality compared to other
groups and sectors engaged in the tourism industry. The tourism industry is
highly centralized and internationalized as part of the same globalization that
pushes it forward (Dieke, 2000: 416). The high level of vertical integration in
the tourism industry, involving western travel agencies, airlines and hotels,
means that much of the economic gains do not reach the country that is the
tourism destination. Even within that country, most of the profits go to the
elite, the middle people, persons already wealthy and with political influence.
Some of those are not even of the same ethnic group as the people who are
the objects of tourist attraction, as with Mestizos in Peru or Kikuyu in Kenya
(van den Berghe, 1980: 381–3; Sindiga, 1984: 33; Crick, 1989: 316–17; Bruner
and Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, 1994: 443).
Relatively little trickles down to the locality that is the tourist destination.
However, the little that does trickle down is still very significant