The Objectivity Myth: Why Identity, Perspective, and Bias Matter in Tourism Messaging

This article was originally published in July 2021. It has been extensively rewritten and republished to reflect the present day.

When people have a world full of travel choices to select from, destinations and travel brands try to stand out with promises of “beautiful beaches,” “mouth-watering cuisine,” and “friendly people.” Destination marketing and public relations (PR) professionals have the tough challenge of enticing visitors to choose one place instead of another while distancing themselves from their messaging. There is a traditional industry assumption that this messaging can and should be entirely “neutral” or “objective” – but that is completely impossible.

From the moment each of us became aware of our surroundings, our personal stories started to take shape. What we saw, heard, interacted with, and encountered through our senses shaped our understanding of the space around us and our particular place in it. Our unique identities (based on race, socio-economic class, gender, nationality, religion, etc.) added context to our lived realities. Over time, these encounters and experiences molded our opinions, attitudes, values, and belief systems. These, in turn, provide each of us with a blueprint for understanding, making sense of, and interpreting the world on a day-to-day basis.

This is our positionality, and we can’t escape this social and cultural matrix that functions as a subconscious lens through which we interpret the world. This means phrases like “beautiful beaches” and “friendly people” are subjective, or not based in fact. They are opinions, and they are informed and chosen because of our unique positionality. We all have a lens, and honest tourism-related storytelling begins when we acknowledge what this lens is.

Coming to terms with this reality allows us to acknowledge that neutrality is an illusion. Every piece of marketing copy, PR pitch, or guiding script speaks from a specific viewpoint framed by active choices about what words to use, what details to highlight, what to minimize, and what to leave out entirely.

The challenge, then, isn’t achieving objectivity by reaching for pleasant but “neutral” phrasing. Rather, it is embracing true narrative integrity by intentionally acknowledging positionality and ensuring a destination’s story isn’t minimized to a single, dominant gaze.

A Subconscious Mirror: How Internal Bias Shapes External Messaging

Most people don’t think much about how their identity impacts the way they see and experience the world because it is the default way they move through spaces. In fact, many people believe they live, work, and play with a completely untainted perspective, but that is simply not true. 

We have all been shaped by our personal histories and experiences. We all shoulder baggage shaped by our lived experiences and understanding of the world. We all carry bias and perceptions that we aren’t aware of or don’t recognize. Each one of us looks through a lens shaped by all these things. 

There is nothing wrong with any of this, per se. However, when we fail to examine how our identity is reflected in the way we approach people and places, our positionality can silently leak into travel-related storytelling and the destination’s narrative ecosystem, flattening local realities and minimizing the robustness of a place’s people and culture.

In-House Communication

When we think about travel-related storytelling, most people think about tourism marketing and public-facing promotional materials, such as social media posts, website copy, press releases, and printed collateral. To create these materials, the marketing team must navigate an astounding number of decisions: what imagery to use, what attractions or businesses to highlight, who to interview or profile, and which angles to use to approach stories. Importantly, marketing decisions also include what not to profile, who not to include, which words not to use, and which storylines not to platform.

Traditionally, a communication team’s default gaze dictates which neighborhoods are deemed “marketable” or which historical narratives are edited down for traveler consumption. They often lean on narratives that are palatable, pleasant, and expected – narratives that have worked in the past and are easily reinforced, even if these are inaccurate, incomplete, or cause ongoing harm.

On-the-Ground Communication

But consideration about positionality is relevant along every step of the traveler’s journey – even, and especially, once people have arrived at a destination. This is where the importance of local storytellers and tour guides comes into play. Good guides can recite information, nail pacing and timing, and engage people in thoughtful dialogue – but if they don’t know a place intimately, they are limited in how and what they can share.

Local guides are the human bridge to a place, and their lived identity shapes how history is told in real-time. They have watched their neighborhoods evolve, witnessed the landscape changing, and embodied the cultural traditions defining a place. They should have the freedom and space to share their lived experience, which likely challenges the dominant narrative in some way. Forcing guides to stick to an over-sanitized, sterile, and censored script is an intentional erasure of their unique positionality.

Embracing Positionality: Shift Your Travel Messaging

Acknowledging how your personal history, culture, and heritage shape your perspective is the first step in embracing your unique positionality. It affects the experience you have, the people you talk to, the way people interact with you, the way you interpret your surroundings, and the way you share your experiences with others. 

Your presence has an impact – positive and/or negative – in a particular place, at a particular time, and in a particular context, and positionality plays a role in that. Being a responsible global citizen, storyteller, and tourism professional requires keeping this at the forefront. With this in mind, here are several other immediate, granular, and language-level actions copywriters, marketers, and guides can take to instantly strip bias, exoticism, and clichés out of travel-related messaging.

Provide Context

Content consumers don’t know your positionality; they don’t know where you’re coming from. They aren’t in your head, nor do they know what background research you’ve done or lived experiences you’ve had. This means they don’t know why you’ve made certain decisions in shaping or sharing this particular story in this way.

When possible, offer any additional historical, cultural, or personal context to aid in understanding.

Search for Sneaky Adjectives

Many adjectives are obvious: beautiful, stark, mouth-watering, difficult, dirty, pristine. But there are many others that aren’t as obvious, like “just,” “very,” and “only.”

These “sneaky” adjectives are conditional statements that imply the way someone thinks about something. For example, saying the nightly rate for an accommodation is “just $50” implies it is not expensive. If it isn’t used in comparison with something else (“every hotel in this city costs at least $200 a night, but this one costs just $50”), this is a value statement that shows a personal bias.

Cut Empty Clichés

While everyone has different thoughts on what “barren” and “spicy” mean, there’s at least a general consensus of what someone is trying to convey when they use these words. They can be useful and used with the right context. 

However, there are other subjective adjectives that are empty clichés that don’t mean anything. This includes words like “fantastic” and “unbelievable.” Empty clichés like these are generally used to fill space when someone doesn’t know what else to say. They are also commonly used when people haven’t actually visited a place or had an experience, so sensory details are unavailable.

Use Descriptive Language

To bring places and experiences alive – and to differentiate them from each other – lean into sensory detail: What does the trail feel like under your hiking boots? What is the texture of the beach sand? What colors are the sunset? What spices can you smell in the soup?

Using descriptive language, you remove personal beliefs and judgment statements from messaging and minimize the need for subjective adjectives.

Actively Counter Stereotypes

According to researcher and psychology professor Patricia Devine, one way to combat implicit bias is to actively counter it. If you find yourself leaning into a particular stereotype, actively find examples that break the mold. Spend time with this example, actively thinking about and internalizing the characteristics that keep it from fitting into a stereotypical model. Like a bad habit, over time that stereotype loses its credibility and that implicit bias loses its potency.

This is particularly relevant in tourism, as there is a great need and opportunity to adapt regenerative language that moves messaging away from saviorism and deficiency framing (what a community lacks) toward local autonomy and asset framing (the community’s inherent agency, knowledge, and value).

Ask Deeper Questions

Don’t accept the first story you hear as the definitive story of a place – and that includes your own story. Alternatively, remember that any single person’s story (even your own) is only a single perspective. How a place is understood and defined depends on each individual, so seek out a diverse array of perspectives to get a more well-rounded picture.

Ask deeper questions from a place of curiosity and make observations about the world around you. For example, what is daily life like for the people who live in a place? What current events are shaping their current reality? Seek to uncover the nuanced historical, social, and/or environmental context behind why a place is the way it is.

Shifting the Traveler’s Lens: Designing the Visitor Journey

Once you have a grasp of how positionality guides your work in the tourism industry, don’t stop there. Just as we (as individuals and collectively as a tourism community) can mindfully acknowledge and navigate our identities, we can help travelers do the same – and it’s important that we take this next step. Keep in mind that traditional tourism marketing has prioritized palatable, consumable, and shareable messaging, but it has misrepresented reality and failed to provide context and nuance. Over time, this has also inappropriately shaped travelers’ expectations and kept them unaware of how they’ve perpetuated harm surfaced through tourism, such as with natural resource extraction and cultural commodification.

More people are intentionally seeking out information and experiences that change the way they travel. Yet, many travelers remain unaware of the negative environmental and social burdens they put on places they visit, local norms and expectations, Indigenous history and culture, and how their financial contributions do (or do not) benefit local people. If travelers don’t have guidance for navigating their unexamined positionalities, tension can arise when biases hit a wall of cultural difference or cognitive dissonance.

The natural tendency within the industry is to insulate travelers from this emotional discomfort. However, this is actually the perfect opportunity to reframe discomfort from a service failure to a space for personal growth, self-reflection, and perspective shifting – a powerful exercise that stays with travelers long after they’ve returned home.

Contextualize the Experience

Equip travelers with historical, cultural, and social background before they arrive so they don’t interpret local customs solely through their own learned belief systems. Engage and amplify more diverse storytellers to share more diverse, transparent stories about destinations, sites, and experiences. This helps people challenge what they think they know by surfacing differing opinions and lived experiences.

Also, as tempting as it is to lure people in with those appealing words and images, it’s important to be transparent about the struggles destinations face as well as the community-focused solutions in place.

Promote Active Learning and Listening

There will always be travelers who only want to kick back and relax on holiday, but there are many ways to help people move from passive consumers of an experience to intentional guests who honor local boundaries and engage in stewardship.

Active, hands-on learning involves people in activities rather than keeping them at arms length. When people are engaged in experiences like citizen science and cultural immersion, they’re more likely to feel personally connected and motivated to learn more. Similarly, using travel experiences to encourage active listening (which requires actually hearing what someone is saying) is an invitation for people to think critically about what they are learning, question their preconceived notions, and sit with discomfort without needing to respond right away.

Encourage Self-Reflection

So much travel-related content stops at where people go and what they do there. Craft prompts and create spaces that ask travelers to interrogate why they feel surprise, judgment, or discomfort, and how their own positionality plays into the way they move through and experience a place. For example, instead of asking “Did you enjoy your trip?” in a post-tour email, ask “What is one local custom or way of life you encountered on this trip that challenged an assumption you held before arriving?”

These kinds of questions and conversations can turn travel into an internal tool for personal development and growth.

The Power of Thoughtful Curation

Even though our personal identities underpin many of our reactions, feelings, and decisions, many of us don’t spend much time thinking about them. Who we are is simply who we are. Yet, taking the opportunity to examine our uniqueness and consider our positionality is a critical chance to also consider how we show up in our tourism-related work.

To be clear, embracing positionality and linguistic awareness isn’t about removing yourself from your storytelling and creating hyper-sanitized corporate messaging. Rather, this is about honoring the multi-dimensional truth of places and people – and respecting where we fit in within that context. When tourism professionals check their own lenses and actively equip travelers to do the same, tourism stops being an extractive exercise in consumer consumption and becomes a powerful vehicle for shared understanding and mutual respect.