Get on the train, take a plane, get on board, hit the road. “Travelling is a pleasure,” the song said. But maybe that was before. The writer Anna Pacheco has infiltrated three luxury hotels in Barcelona. There she has seen how her workers live and she has added that experience to a broad reflection on tourism in I was here and I remembered us (Anagrama). The author's conclusions do not invite optimism: “All tourism is destructive in itself,” she says. In this interview with La Vanguardia she recounts in detail what she saw in those hotels and warns that the current way of traveling may be doomed to disappear.
You have infiltrated three four and five star hotels in Barcelona. Why and what did you find there?
I was interested in knowing how labor relations are interwoven in high-end hotels, those elitist and exclusive places that the people who work there will never be able to afford. There is precariousness, consumption of anxiolytics to meet the expectations generated by a five-star hotel. There is a lot of pressure to offer that luxury experience. I realized that luxury is almost an exclusive responsibility of the worker in the form of care and affection towards the client. Many times the facilities are already somewhat obsolete and it is the employees who give the hotel its status.
One of the main problems is unpaid overtime. But a recent law requires recording the entry and exit of employees to calculate working time...
The laws must be complied with, but the responsibility of hoteliers who postpone the matter and say “we will resolve the overtime issue” cannot be denied either.
The worker always has the possibility of completing his hours and leaving...
Power, maybe, but that has dire consequences: from dismissal to simply the supervisor understanding that you are not the docile and enthusiastic worker he expected. So everyone works overtime. And that is in the case of regular employees, because there are also many temporary ones, especially housekeepers, who come from subcontractors, from ETT, who are in a weaker position, in a situation of absolute vulnerability, one day they are there working, the next day, not anymore.
You say in the book that when you were young you went on a cruise. How was that experience?
I was a teenager. I went with my parents and I remember that feeling of the accumulation of cities. The truth is that he spent his nights drinking with the rest of the young people on the ship. My father was worried because he did not attend to the tour guides he had paid for and for him it was a waste. I would be lying if I said I didn't have a good time, but my memory is vague. There was then an application where you marked the cities you had been to. And that is the tourism model that exists now: put likes, take a photo and post it on the networks.
In the past, a trip to Italy was made to deepen knowledge. Is there still a difference between tourism and travel?
I don't make that distinction. Some feel like travelers so as not to see themselves as vulgar tourists, but any of these practices are equally exploitative and extractivist of the destination places. The idea of the intrepid and bohemian traveler is just another branch of tourism crossed by the logic of capital. Furthermore, this idea that associates seeing the world with awakening the mind, opening it to new cultures and learning is ultimately an element of distinction and classism towards people who cannot travel.
However, the tourism that does the most damage is mass tourism: bachelor parties, cruises...
All tourism is destructive in itself and each one has its own particularity. It is often repeated that luxury tourism is good because it brings money, but that idea is not real. The maids told me real atrocities that the rich carry out with total impunity in suites that can cost up to 9,000 euros a night. They leave them absolutely dirty, destroyed and treat the staff terribly. There are abusive practices in all types of tourism and it must be pointed out to avoid elitization because otherwise only the posh will be able to travel.
How do you see the future of tourism?
We are heading towards a future of ecological scarcity that will force us to set limits whether we like it or not. This will serve to challenge some practices such as taking a crazy flight to go to a city for three days. We have been told that this was the best we could do with our time and our money, but is standing in line to see, for example, the five tourist attractions in Rome really the best we can do? The tourism of the future has to be slow, but workers do not have a slow life. We also don't have summer houses. Mass tourism exists because it is an option accessible to everyone. That is why we should not criminalize it but rather collectively look for future alternatives to travel.
Is Barcelona a city colonized by tourists?
By tourists and by expatriates, what is worse. Their presence here causes rents to rise and that has to do with our ability to survive. Furthermore, the fact that tourists come with money does not imply that there is a better distribution of income.
