“It is all included – without the stress”

Abstract

The tourist industry is a good case for the study of the commodification of emotions. It is one of the world's largest economic sectors and integrates economic and emotional aspects on a global scale. For hundreds of years, the increasingly secularized western tradition saw nature not as a space of divine revelation or for individual recreation, but as a dangerous and alien place. By the end of the seventeenth century, some philosophers and theological scholars in France and Britain marked the beginning of a transition in the perception of nature. The distinction between the work sphere and the leisure sphere became clearer during the second half of the nineteenth century as an effect of the regularization of industrial time. This distinction is usually discussed in the context of the emergence of consumerism, simply because the combination of defined free time and stable wages led to the swift expansion of consumerist leisure.