This is the final day of the Canada e-Connect conference in Vancouver - Canada’s first conference on e-Tourism strategy.  I’ve been here since Wednesday, and it has been an “interesting” conference - kudos to Jens Thraenhart for organizing it!

The conference is being held at the Fairmont Waterfront hotel in Vancouver which, in my opinion, served not only as a great venue but, also, really highlighted the new social realities that the tourism industry in Canada needs and is coming to exemplify.  I want to particularly thank Amber on the front desk for making my stay truly excellent.  Helpful, knowledgeable and, above all, great humour in the face of what could have been a problem (if I had been a cranky twit).

In some ways, I find the conference somewhat frustrating, but that’s the academic in me.  Much of he discussion is on the use of Net 2.0 technologies in the tourism industry, and how the social reality has changed.  This is news?  A lot of us have been studying this for 20+ years and, on the whole, we have developed some pretty decent models to understand this.  And yet, there was no mention of these understandings and a very limited “broad brush” picture (in terms of time and social evolution).

It makes me wonder.  I certainly don’t blame the presenters - they have developed their own, generally immediate but, also, with a focus on application that worked.  I’m not sure if I blame my colleagues  in academia either - we have our own professional systems and highly jargonized language.  I think what I am frustrated with is the general lack of talk between the “Ivory Tower” and the “Real World”.  We see this in so many areas that I have to wonder if there isn’t a deeper, structural-symbolic problem in how the academy (specifically the social sciences) and the rest of the world interact.