Tourism mobilities from emerging world regions: a response to commentaries

摘要

In Cohen and Cohen (2014), 'A mobilities approach to tourism from emerging world regions', we attempted to move beyond the Eurocentric bias in tourism studies (see Cohen & Cohen, in press, on Eurocentrism in tourism research) by applying a modified version of the mobilities paradigm to the comparative study of tourism from Asia, the Middle East, Latin America and sub-Saharan Africa. Here we respond to the three commentaries on Cohen and Cohen (2014) published in this issue. We thank the commentators -Chris Rogerson, Jingfu Chen and T. C. Chang, and Tim Coles for their interest, insightful comments and innovative analyses. We are gratified to note that all commentators appreciated our effort to create a platform for the comparison of Western tourism with that from the emerging regions; however, while not offering a fundamental criticism, they raised several significant points, which might help to deepen and expand our analysis. These relate primarily to three issues, which we address in turn: the incorporation of business mobilities into the study of tourism from the emerging regions (Rogerson, 2014), the call to deepen the analysis of power in the study of 'non-Western' tourism (Chen and Chang, 2014) and the need to incorporate into the analysis the less mobile population of these parts of the world (Coles, 2014).