6. Cultures and traditions.

Working in tourism means meeting people from different countries. It also means sending people to different destinations with different traditions and customs. It is important to respect and understand these different traditions and customs.

Flamenco

Flamenco is traditional song and dance that originated in Andalusia in southern Spain. Nobody really knows about its history but it developed over several centuries from gypsy, Moorish, Andalucian and other roots, and then entered polite society in the early 19^th century as café entertainment. The guitar and the rapid handclapping of the singers and dancers set the scene. The dancer doesn’t begin straightaway, but waits, absorbing the rhythm of the guitar, the clapping and the singing until he or she is inspired to dance. And flamenco is improvised. It represents the dancer’s spontaneous expression of the moment’s emotions. And those who aren’t singing may shout encouragement like: ole! baile! baile! – dance! dance!

The Highland Games

The Highland Games is a festival held every year since the beginning of the 19^th century in different towns in modern Scotland with competitions in sports, music and dancing. Of course, if you go to the games you’re bound to see many men wearing kilts and playing traditional music on the bagpipes. Typical sports include throwing a heavy ball at the end of a chain and what we call tossing the caber. Here each contestant has to lift and throw a huge piece of wood shaped like a tree trunk. You have to be extremely strong and skilful because a caber weighs about 60 kilos and is over five metres long. This is a uniquely Scottish event and the games represent our pride in being Scottish and our history and national heritage.

7. Specialized tourism

The second half of the 20^th century was characterized by the arrival of mass tourism, which became possible through the use of jet aircraft and the introduction of package holidays. Tourism today continues to offer package tours, but at the same time attempts to see the tourist as an individual. Two key issues here are

- how to respond to individual tastes, and so promote difference in tourism

- how to respond to each tourist’s rights, and so promote equality in tourism.

As people have traveled more, the need to experience something different, something special has also grown. The result is ‘niche tourism’. Tour operators have realized there is a market for the specialist tourist, and it is a market that often spends more than the ‘package-holiday’ tourist. This market is perhaps the fastest-growing market in the tourism industry.

Literally anything has the potential to become a niche tourism product, from cosmetic surgery to discovering your family’s past (genealogy). Niche tourism has a thousand different faces – holidays for senior citizens, tours for disabled, garden tours, gastronomic holidays, tours geared towards the gay community, photographic holidays, ‘dark’ tourism (visiting places with sinister and macabre histories), and many more.

Certain broad categories of niche tourism seem to be developing just now:

• cultural – art, history, religion, education, customs and traditions;

• environmental – observing wildlife or sports activities in the wilder areas of the world;

• rural – activities in non-urban areas, normally directly related to rural lifestyles;

• urban – city-based activities, including business tourism.

Specialized tourism is trying to address the needs of the disabled traveler. In the past tourism was a luxury, today it is an indicator of a minimum quality of life and in many countries is seen as a right.