Here, we think and work (always!) in and with tourism. It means that we are interested in people's movements away from their own habitat natural or everyday, when in search of new experiences in unknown places or new experiences in places already visited many times. What matters is the desire to go, the motivation that makes them leave home in search, mainly, of pleasure and leisure. There are also those "service" trips that are not always desired or dreamed of, but that, if we know how to take advantage of them, will provide us with new knowledge.
One of these days, taking a walk through the world wide web, looking for nothing, specifically, I came across the term ludambile. Neologism proposed by Antônio de Castro Lopes, philologist, Latinist and Brazilian poet as a synonym – or substitute – for Tourist in English or its translation, tourist. According to Lopes, the word has Latin origins in ludus (fun, pastime) and Ambulo (I walk). From then on we would have ludambulism (tourism) and ludambulistic (tourist).
The expression has not gained notoriety, but it can inspire us to reflect on some aspects of tourism and travel. Renato Pincelli, from site hypercubic, states that Castro Lopes considered his creation as something linked to or analogous to "somnambulist".
In the face of so much information that is offered to us today and considering the enormity of the proposals to experience "the new", this association between the ludambulist and the somnambulist led me to consider the true experiences of current travel. There are so many stimuli! There are so many news! There are so many experiences!
In times of so much technology and greater ease of movement, people are urged to "move" more and more on the Earth's surface. Those who work directly in the tourism sector are dedicated to showing the destinations in order to delight their potential consumer customers, like a flutist wizard attracting followers. The numbers show that they have been very successful – humans travel in search of new experiences, even if they often do not even dedicate themselves to enjoying them literally. It is really important to photograph and post on your social networks.
I think there is a contradiction here, deserving of another pause for reflection: research seems to indicate that today's travelers are "more demanding", that they "care more about environmental issues", that they "want to get to know new cultures and interact with people". I have some doubts about this – yes, I believe that many are, in fact, people with this profile; But I also think that there is still a large portion of those who travel "for the sake of traveling", in a kind of dromomania – another new term that I recently discovered.
If, on the one hand, ludambulism refers to traveling for pleasure, for fun and leisure, dromomania alludes to an "intense and recurring desire" to travel, to leave home. For many, routine is a problem and, in this case, the dromommam may feel stressed to the point of not concentrating on work, for example, to plan and think about their next trip.
In this case, it seems to me that the ludambulist, from the perspective of the somnambulist, resembles the dromomiac, the one for whom what matters is the journey, the movement and not the experience itself, since, it seems, he does not fixate on it because he is thinking and planning the next one. Thus, the two types, perhaps, can be seen from the perspective of sleepwalking – that situation in which part of the brain is asleep while the other performs some actions...
The poet Fernando Pessoa wrote in one of his poems that to travel is to "be constantly other" and Erico Verissimo stated that "the true journey is never in the present time, but in the past, in the future or in that fourth and mysterious time that I don't know if I call desire, dream or imagination".
Given this, what can we do to actually attract and win over tourists?
