n. 2 / gennaio 2013

The Media Coverage of Nightlife Tourism

Sébastien Tutenges
Centre for Alcohol and Drug Research,
Aarhus University, Denmark.

The photos in this article were taken by Lea Trier Krøll.

Sunny Beach is a holiday destination located in eastern Bulgaria on the Black Sea coast. The resort was founded during the Communist era to meet the growing demand for low-budget holiday facilities in the Soviet Union. During the 1970s and ’80s, Sunny Beach attracted tourists from both the Eastern bloc and from non-Communist countries such as England and Germany (Alexandrova and Vulkov 2004). After the collapse of Communism in the early 1990s, the number of tourists from Western and Northern Europe increased, and the size of the resort rapidly expanded (Iliev 2006). Today, Sunny Beach is the biggest and most popular holiday resort in Bulgaria. Critics call it overdeveloped and claim that it strains the local environment, but it is also an important source of revenue in one of Europe’s poorest countries.
The resort may be designated a “nightlife resort” (Bellis et al. 2003), and it has clear affinities with a number of other destinations around the globe, such as Ayia Napa in Cyprus, Ibiza in Spain, Faliraki in Greece, Rimini in Italy, Surfers Paradise in Australia, Cancun in Mexico and Panama City Beach in the United States (Tutenges 2012). Sunny Beach features several kilometres of beach frontage and a hot and dry summer climate. The permanent population is very small; all services are geared toward the tourists. In the summer months, deckchairs and parasols cover the beach, and sellers wait nearby with supplies of food, drinks, sunglasses and other holiday requisites. Lying on the sand and swimming in the sea are free of charge, but most other activities cost money. And there is no shortage of activities. They include getting a massage, racing in an aqua scooter, riding on an inflatable banana, bungee-jumping, playing mini-golf, smacking a punching ball, and flying over the sea in a parachute that is being pulled by a speedboat. Moreover, of course, there are abundant opportunities for partying in bars, nightclubs, strip clubs and brothels for varying tastes and budgets.

Sunny Beach captured the attention of the Danish media in the summer of 2007 when a 17-year-old Danish man died of alcohol poisoning after going on a pub crawl coordinated by a Danish travel agency. Shortly after that tragedy, a young Swede was beaten to death by Bulgarian bouncers, and reports emerged of robberies, assaults and rapes. An army of reporters subsequently invaded the resort and raised harsh criticism against the Bulgarian authorities and the travel agencies, as well as the young tourists and their parents. Consider the following excerpt from an article in a national Danish newspaper:

"We are not shocked that young people go on holidays to party and get drunk in the southern heat. Neither do we mind that travel companies will arrange the trips, even for very young people. But we are appalled that tour operators, which openly advertise that the purpose of the holiday is binge drinking, do not provide guides certified in first aid and trained in handling the critical situations that are bound to arise, when young people roam around plastered in foreign places [...] Police are nowhere to be found. The area is dominated by mafia types with batons and guns [...] The hotel guard acts violently if one plays music too loudly or pees in a bush. The taxi driver beats up customers who cannot pay their insane prices. The trade in cocaine and ecstasy is rampant." (Ekstra Bladet, 17 July 2007).

The bad press continued the following summer with media headlines such as “Nightmare Holiday”, “Harmful Binge Travels”, and “Awash in Drugs”. Hidden camera stories also appeared exposing Danish tour guides and their reportedly unethical behaviour. One video showed guides doing a striptease and initiating drinking competitions. Another video showed a drunken guide making sexual advances toward an undercover journalist using lines such as: “If you don’t kiss me right now, then I won’t go home with you.” Two guides were fired as a result of the videos.
In recent years, the Danish public has been exposed to numerous stories concerning Sunny Beach (see Table 1). Commentators have used the expression “media storm” to describe the debate (Elling quoted in Kjær 2008), and this seems accurate, at least with respect to the summer of 2007. The majority of the stories took on a negative tone, and relatively few offered positive descriptions of the resort, the young tourists or their guides (see Table 2). The central themes highlighted by the media have been harm and deceit rather than pleasure and gratification. This is not surprising. Journalism plays a critical role in society and is commonly envisioned as the watchdog that protects the public from abuse. Furthermore, when it comes to the topic of “intoxicated youth”, the journalistic angle is almost invariably critical, if not alarmist (Hier 2002). I experienced this firsthand in 2009, when I contacted a well-regarded Danish newspaper in order to diffuse some results obtained from a survey that I conducted together in Sunny Beach. My message was, in short, that illicit drug use is rare among Danish tourists whereas heavy drinking is common. The message resulted in two articles with the loaded headlines, “Teenagers drink 72 units during sun holidays” (Schmidt and Kaae 2008) and “Party, dance, cheap booze – and 60 different illnesses” (Kaae and Schmidt 2008). These two articles, as well as the debates that followed, barely mentioned what I regarded as the most interesting part of the message: that few tourists actually take illicit drugs. Instead, the media focussed on the negative information: that tourists drink a lot. To get across positive news about alcohol and drug use among youth requires skill and determination.

Table 1: Assessment of the number of articles about nightlife tourism in Sunny Beach, Lloret de Mar (Spain) and Kos (Greece).

Table 2: Assessment of the number of articles about nightlife tourism in Sunny Beach that were positive, neutral or negative.

Much has been said and written about the young Danes who holiday in Sunny Beach. But how do they feel about the way they are portrayed by the media? Here are the opinions of a group of tourists:

Sébastien: What do you think about the media coverage?
Brian: It’s some bad shit. We have not been in danger.
Henrik: No, we have not been in danger at all, and I have walked home alone to my hotel many times. I also did that yesterday. I haven’t experienced anything dangerous.
Brian: They are always using the same expression, “binge drinking”, “binge drinking”, “binge drinking”. When reading the newspapers, one gets the impression that the guides just pour alcohol down our throats while we are sleeping.
Henrik: The newspapers don’t see that the young tourists themselves also are responsible for their own behaviour, and that they act responsibly.
Martin: And they also write as if the young tourists don’t know what they are doing. I mean, we actually do.
Henrik: I believe in the media coverage. I do. But I just think that they are good at blowing things out of proportion.
Brian: It’s one big party down here, so it’s unavoidable that perhaps 50 people will get hurt during the course of a month. If you were to read about everything that happens back in Copenhagen, then you would read about knife stabbings and rapes every weekend. I think that it is because they don’t have anything else to write about in the summer holidays.
Thomas: I also read in Ekstra Bladet recently that some boy was paralyzed after falling off a balcony as a consequence of playing some kind of game. And the headline read: “Youth holiday ruined my life”, or something like that. I mean, he was the one who acted an idiot. He is also personally responsible for what happened.

The young people that I spoke with in Sunny Beach were generally very interested in, but also sceptical of, the media coverage they received back in Denmark. Many, such as the men quoted above, felt that they were being patronized and treated like victims without any willpower of their own. Moreover, it was commonly held that the guides were being demonized, that the dangers of Sunny Beach were overstated, and that the journalists were unreliable. For the most part, the tourists sided with the guides and opposed the media.
The media coverage of Sunny Beach is reminiscent of earlier debates about young partygoers, in particular the debates about rave parties that raged in Britain, North America and many other parts of the world in the 1990s and early 2000s (Hier 2002; Hunt et al. 2007). These debates were also dominated by problem-focused stories that condemned the leisure activities of a segment of youth. Rave parties were described as drug-infested events in need of strict control and repression, and the ravers themselves were portrayed as being unstable individuals who posed a threat not only to themselves, but also to “property, propriety, and peace” (St John 2009: 51). Note, for instance, the following quotes from a British newspaper dating back to 1992: “A Village of Nightmares: 25,000 invaders turn rural peace into anarchy [...] Worried families in the village have sent their children to stay with relatives, and others are sleeping with shotguns under their beds [...] The result of the low police presence has been thousands of hippies spending three days dancing, drinking, taking drugs and making love” (Creasy 1992; see also St John 2009: 51).
Many of the arguments and anxieties that marked the debates concerning rave parties have resurfaced in connection to nightlife tourism: fear of crowds, suspicion of mind altering, discomfort with other people’s excesses, concern for the vulnerable youth, the demand for more strict regulation – those talking points are back in the news. However, it is unlikely that the debates over nightlife tourism will lead to the kind of repression that rave parties ultimately faced. In the words of Graham St John, raving “experienced a level of criminalization unprecedented in youth and dance cultures” with laws being passed that made raves illegal, for instance in Britain and the United States, and “para-military-style assaults” on dance events (2009: 10-11). Nightlife tourists do not pose a serious threat to the “rural peace”. Unlike ravers, the music they listen to is often soft and mainstream. Their clothing may be scant, but it is rarely outré. And they tend to party in secluded, commercialized resorts that have been designed for excess. Moreover, nightlife tourists have powerful allies, such as the tourism and alcohol industries, that rally to their cause. As a result, nightlife tourism will probably remain a legal leisure activity, despite all the criticism that the activity receives, and is likely to draw, for years to come.

References
Alexandrova, P. and Vulkov, A. (2004) ‘Bulgaria: Great Expectations’, Transitions Online. Available at: www.ceeol.com.

Bellis, M.A., Hughes, K., Bennet, A., and Thomson, R. (2003) ‘The role of an international nightlife resort in the proliferation of recreational drugs’, Addiction 98: 1713-21.

Creasy, R. (1992) ‘A Village of Nightmares’. Sunday Mirror.

Ekstra Bladet (2007) ‘Lokker unge til at drikke sig ihjel’, Ekstra Bladet.

Hier, S. P. (2002) ‘Raves, risks and the ecstasy panic: a case study in the subversive nature of moral regulation’, Canadian Journal of Sociology 27: 33-57.

Hunt, G.P., Evans, K. and Kares, F. (2007) ‘Drug Use and Meanings of Risk and Pleasure’, Journal of Youth Studies 10(1): 73-96

Iliev, G. (2006) ‘Bulgaria: Tourism on a Roll’ Transitions Online. Available at: www.ceeol.com.

Kaae, M. and Schmidt, A.L. (2008) ”Fest, dans, billig sprut - og 60 forskellige sygdomme”, Politiken.

Kjær, J. S. (2008) ‘Turistsvigt: Unge festaber skræmmer børnefamilier fra Bulgarien’, Politiken.

Schmidt, A.L. and Kaae, M. (2008) “Teenagere drikker 72 genstande på solferien”, Politiken.

St John, G. (2009) Technomad and Global Raving Countercultures. London: Equinox Publishing.

Tutenges, S. (2012). Nightlife tourism: A mixed methods study of young tourists at a nightlife resort. Tourist Studies, 12(2): 135-155.