Presentation short abstract

Planetary Touristification worked as a fix to the 2008 crisis, but COVID-19 exposed its vulnerabilities. Drawing on Moore, we argue capitalism faces an epochal crisis marked by the end of cheap nature—and cheap travel—, while the ruling classes shift toward promoting tourism for the rich.

Presentation long abstract

Since the 2008 crisis, the world-capitalist system has entered a prolonged period of turbulence. Despite the deployment of spatio-temporal fixes aimed at sustaining accumulation the crisis continues to deepen (Robinson, 2025a), being tourism became one of the key fixes (Fletcher, 2011). Although this phase has often been labelled “overtourism,” the term fails to capture the capitalist dynamics at play. We instead employ the concept of touristification to highlight tourism-based accumulation (Cañada et al., 2023a).

The COVID-19 crisis, the most severe in tourism’s history, revealed profound structural vulnerabilities (Cañada & Murray, 2021). In its aftermath, Tooze (2022) introduced the notion of polycrisis to describe interconnected global disruptions. Yet this framework does not fully capture what we understand as an epochal capitalist crisis—the Great Implosion (Moore, 2025; Robinson, 2025b). The capitalist world-system can no longer expand through the appropriation and exploitation of new commodity frontiers of cheap nature (Moore, 2015).

The end of Cheap Nature also signals the end of Cheap Travel. In a context of global crisis and resurgent fascisms, dominant classes are increasingly advancing a political project centred on “tourism for the rich.” This shift echoes what Ginzberg (2024) terms the “1933 syndrome,” in which exclusionary political and economic strategies gain ground.

This paper mobilises the idea of the end of cheap travel and the rise of “tourism for the rich” to open a necessary debate on how to reorganise popular tourism under conditions defined by the Great Implosion (Cañada et al., 2024).