Beyond Tips and Sunscreen: Exploring Tourist-host Encounters Through Communication, Culture and Identity

This book explores the sociocultural impacts of tourism in San Pedro, Belize by paying special attention to identity construction of tourists and hosts. This is achieved through a qualitative study that analyzes narratives gathered through formal and informal interviews and contextualized by participant observation. By utilizing a communicative conceptualization of identity and intercultural theorizing, light is shed on the complex negotiation process that tourists and hosts employ when making sense of their experiences, themselves and others through talk. The author demonstrates that the role of communication and the level of adaptation are central to satisfactory outcomes for these (intercultural) tourist-host encounters. She also illustrates the disparate ways tourists and hosts construct identity and negotiate the presence of tourists on the community. By incorporating critical notions of history and power, our understanding is enhanced of problematic tourist communication styles; hosts¿ preference for tourists¿ adaptation; and communicative strategies tourists utilized to reconcile differences in privilege. Finally, practical advice based on these findings is provided.