Tourism - Culprit in Commodifying Culture and Traditions?

The growth of tourism has opened up endless possibilities for many countries in terms of information, technology and also cultural exchange. It is a fact that tourism and globalization comes hand in hand when playing a part in commodifying culture and traditions. The opening-up of many countries to tourist has made people into greedy money making machines, only interested in profitability of businesses and giving no regards to the root of our traditions and culture. 

With the increasing need for Culture Heritage Tourism, people tend to want to satisfy the need in order to make a profit out of it. And this leads to unauthenticated tourism experience, mass tourism, commercialization of cultures so on and so forth.With all these problems comes the emergence of 'pseudo-cultures' (i.e. Fake cultures) and the disintegration of what was known to be traditional due to the dilution of the cultures, also the perception of letting tourist see what they want to see and adjusting their traditions and culture making it unreal.I can name more problems that comes with tourism, however, fault does not lie with tourism alone.

Tourist, the host countries, people in general are making cultures and traditions a commodity. Tourism was just a accelerator for this act. Nothing could have made the change if it was not for people's desire to learn, to see and to be educated. Nothing would have made the change if it was not for the people's desire to have fun, to channel their needs and wants and make it obligatory to other people's culture and traditions. Thus, tourism alone cannot be blamed for this effect.

However, after saying how tourism brought about this negative change, I must highlight that there are also positive sides to this situation. 

Without tourism, there would be no awareness of such situation. Tourism has helped highlight the underlying problems of many countries and this in turn served as a wake up call to people to look at their actions and consequences in order to take corrective actions. Without tourism, people will not see that culture and traditions are both important aspects of a country's identity.

Without tourism, there will be no need for us, tourism students, to know and alleviate the underlying causes of all the sinful acts people have brought upon ourselves.

And lastly..

Without toursim, people will not realize the importance of learning and educating each others cultural differences.