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Poverty is everywhere and anywhere to a different degree but often does not arouse interest. Poverty is not defined in terms of low incomes but uses broader concepts of deprivation and insecurity (Hossain, 2005). Who are the poor? Although ‘poor’ may be a stable descriptive identity for people in some groups, for most, poverty is a situation, not an identity (Narayan, Pritchett, & Kapoor, 2009).
This leads to a number of questions: are poor people actually poor or are the contexts in which they live poor? Conversely, poverty actually creates curiosity because of difference in ways of life. It is a common phenomenon and is one of the top forms of tourism in some parts of the world (Delic, 2011). Examples are common throughout South and Central America as well as in Asian countries which have the same characteristics as the favela in Brazil, the townships in South Africa, or the slums in India, which have led to different definitions of favela, township and reality tourism: places where poverty is more concentrated in neighbourhoods.
In recent times, due to changing social conditions and the development of international tourism, so-called poverty or slum tourism has increasingly come into focus: organised tours of destinations in degradation and poverty, and in some cases also illegal places fully run by gangs. In the past there have been a lot of violent confrontations between these gangs and states (e.g. favela in Brazil, barrio in Colombia).
Tourism today is characterised by diversification and enrichment of the tourist product offered, where the tourist is satisfied not only by the contemplation of a landscape (authentic or romantic) but, intends to turn it into an experience to feel a real part of (Schmitt, 1999). Tourism creates links between people and places, connects different cultures and environments. Moreover, tourism is a major force for global change. Tourism is embedded in other global processes creating constraints and opportunities for its development and it creates political spaces to develop responses to the social question. Research of authentic and unexplored regions, places with forms of social tension and ethical issues, contrasts with the particularities that distinguish purely hedonistic and recreational, traditional tourism.
At the same time, with consumers playing a participatory role in the production and consumption process (Buhalis & Law, 2008), it has become dominant for businesses to use technology to engage consumers in a more individual way. The internet is rapidly becoming the number one information source for travel. In fact, the choices of the consumer are aided by the information picked up through the Internet, which is an ideal place to communicate, promote, and ‘sell’ destinations and where potential clients can undertake comparisons and choices more responsibly. There is plenty of evidence that tourism, helped by digital technologies, has dispersed into urban spaces/places which have not previously been associated much with the tourist gaze (Maitland & Newman, 2009). In this situation, even social inequality, and poverty as such, can become a tourist attraction and at times subject to commodification processes, as research on slum tourism has shown (Burgold et al., 2013, Freire-Medeiros, 2012, Frenzel et al., 2015, Frenzel, 2016, Whyte, 2017). The use of the Internet has become a key competitive tool and essential also for tourist destinations (Murphy et al., 2007) and offers great potential to influence consumers’ perceived images. In addition, internet promotes the mass customization of tourism products as it supports the tourist operators to target niche markets in different geographical locations (Buhalis et al., 2005; 2011).