Abstract
In March of 1963, one of Sweden’s largest newspapers broke the story of “scandalous tours” (skandalresor)—a pernicious trend affecting leisure travelers.1 The article described how Sweden’s booming leisure-travel industry—especially package tours by air—failed to deliver the experiences depicted in travel companies’ advertising. “Travel and get rich,” one brochure of the time proclaimed.2 The travel experience, within Sweden and abroad, would provide all things glorious, memories to enrich and last a lifetime. Ads and brochures extolled the virtues of everything from the luxurious hotels to the accessible beaches and ease of transportation.
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Notes
Thomas Kaiserfeld, “From Sightseeing to Sunbathing: Changing Traditions in Swedish Package Tours: From Edification by Bus to Relaxation by Airplane in the 1950s and 60s,” Journal of Tourism History 2 (2010): 149–63.
Ruth Oldenziel, Adri A. Albert de la Bruhèze and Onno de Wit, “Europe’s Mediation Junction: Technology and Consumer Society in the 20th Century,” History and Technology 21 (2005): 107–39.
See also Ruth Schwartz Cowan, “The Consumption Junction: A Proposal for Research Strategies in the Sociology of Technology,” in The Social Construction of Technological Systems, ed. Wiebe E. Bijker, Thomas P. Hughes, and Trevor Pinch (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989), 261–80;
Karin Zachmann, “A Socialist Consumption Junction: Debating the Mechanization of Housework in East Germany, 1956–1957,” Technology & Culture 43 (2002): 73–99.
A discussion on the Swedish welfare state and consumption can be found in Helena Mattsson and Sven-Olov Wallenstein, “Introduction,” in Swedish Modernism: Architecture, Consumption and the Welfare State, ed. Helena Mattsson and Sven-Olov Wallenstein (London: Black Dog Publishing, 2010), 6–33; Mattias Tydén and Urban Lundberg, “In Search of the Swedish Model: Contested Historiography,” in Swedish Modernism, 36–49.
Peter J. Katzenstein, Small Countries in World Markets: Industrial Policy in Europe (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985);
Bo Rothstein, Den korporativa staten: Intresseorganisationer och statsförvaltning i svensk politik (Stockholm: Norstedts, 1992);
Bo Rothstein, “State Structure and Variations in Corporatism: The Swedish Case,” Scandinavian Political Studies 14 (1991): 149–71.
Orvar Löfgren, “Längtan till landet Annorlunda,” in Längtan till landet Annorlunda: Om turism i historia och nutid (Hedemora: Gidlund, 1990), 9–49.
Lena Eskilsson, “Svenska turistföreningen från fjäll till friluftsliv: Från den vetenskaplige vildmannen till den cyklande husmodern,” Historisk tidskrift 116 (1996): 257–82;
Lena Lötmarker and Bo-A Wendt, Resmål till salu: Svenska turistbroschyrers textuella och språkliga utveckling under hundra år (Lund: Sekel, 2009).
Mary Blume, Côte d’Azur: Inventing the French Riviera (London: Thames & Hudson, 1992);
Paolo Capuzzo, “Spectacles of Sociability: European Cities as Sites of Consumption,” in Urban Machinery: Inside Modern European Cities, ed. Mikael Hård and Thomas J. Misa (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008), 99–120.
For an analysis of Americanization and Swedish everyday life, the conclusion of which is that Sweden was Americanized in a very Swedish way, see Tom O’Dell, Culture Unbound: Americanization and Everyday Life in Sweden, new ed. (Lund: Nordic Academic Press, 2012).
Adrian Franklin and Mike Crang, “The Trouble with Tourism and Travel Theory?” Tourist Studies 1 (2001): 5–22;
Pau Obrador Pons, Mike Crang, and Penny Travlou, eds., Cultures of Mass Tourism: Doing the Mediterranean in the Age of Banal Mobilities (London: Ashgate, 2009).
The reason that no major changes were made in the 1940s to the labor laws has been attributed to the fact that unions as well as employers gave priority to economic growth. Later, vacationing was promoted as a cheaper way to cut working time, compared to shorter workdays or workweeks. See Carina Gråbacke, När folket tog semester: Studier av Reso 1937–1977 (Lund: Sekel, 2008), 43;
Hans Hellström, Struktur, aktör eller kultur? Arbetstidspolitik i det industrialiserade Sverige (Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell International, 1992), 103–85.
Regarding the debate on Sweden’s relations with Nazi Germany, see Ingela Karlsson, “Sig själv närmast,” in En (o)moralisk hållning? Sveriges ekonomiska relationer med Nazityskland, ed. Charlotte Haider (Stockholm: Forum för levande historia, 2006), 7–39.
Gustav Endrédi, Resekonsumtionen 1950–1975 (Stockholm: Industrins utredningsinstitut, 1967), 83–4, 86.
Roger Marjavaara, “Mot Fjärran land—svensk flygcharterturism 1962–1993” (Master’s thesis, Umeå University, 1998).
Neal Moses Rosendorf, “Be El Caudillo’s Guest: The Franco Regime’s Quest for Rehabilitation and Dollars after World War II via the Promotion of U.S. Tourism to Spain,” Diplomatic History 30 (2006), 367–407.
Frank Schipper, Driving Europe: Building Europe on Roads in the Twentieth Century (Eindhoven: Aksant, 2008), 231–40.
Göte Rosén, Vägen till Palma. 25 års “luftaffärer”: en memoarbok om charterflygets utveckling (Malmö: CEGE, 1970), 63–4.
NATO Archives, DES(94)2, Part XIV, Miscellaneous Documents, 1955–1958, 4–5, accessed October 22, 2010, http://www.nato.int/archives/tool2.htm; Leif Klette, “The European Air Traffic Crisis: NATO’s Search for Civil and Military Cooperation,” NATO Review 39 (1991), 24–9.
Richard Pells, Not Like Us: How Europeans Have Loved, Hated, and Transformed American Culture since World War II (New York: Basic Books, 1997), 137.
Klas Grinell, Att sälja världen: Omvärldsbilder i svensk utlandsturism (Gothenburg: Acta Univesitatis Gothenburgensis, 2004), 164.
Kaiserfeld, “From Sightseeing to Sunbathing.” Trips by plane became even faster with jet airliners, which reduced the flight time between Copenhagen and Athens from eleven to six hours, for example. See östen Johansson, “Börja i god tid med att förverkliga semesterdrömmen,” Råd och rön 10, no. 2 (1967): 26–8.
This is a theme that has been overlooked in tourism research. See Armando Montanari and Allan M. Williams, eds., European Tourism: Regions, Spaces and Restructuring (Chichester: Wiley, 1995).
Arne Rosenberg, Air Travel within Europe (Stockholm: The National Swedish Consumer Council and Norstedts, 1970), 22. The number of Swedish airplane charter tourists multiplied seventeen times between 1955 and 1962: “133 000 svenskar reste förra året med charterflyg,” Svenska Dagbladet (A edition), March 24, 1963 (No. 82), 5.
Ole Wæver, “Nordic Nostalgia: Northern Europe after the Cold War,” International Affairs 68 (1992): 77–102.
Douglas C. Pearce, “Mediterranean Charters: A Comparative Geographic Perspective,” Tourism Management 8 (1987): 291–305.
Göran Andolf, Sverige och utlandet 1930–1975: Indikatorer för mätning av Sveriges kulturella beroende (Lund: Lund University, 1977), 32–3.
Ibid., 71; Göte Rosén, Orädd att flyga (Uppsala: Nybloms, 1976), 79.
Thomas von Seth, Charterhistoria (Lidingö: Vivlio Förlag, 2008), 57–8.
Sophie Elsässer, Att skapa en konsument: Råd och Rön och den statliga konsumentupplysningen (Gothenburg: Makadam, 2012), 79–81, 126–35.
Johansson, “Börja i god tid med att förverkliga semesterdrömmen”; Östen Johansson, “Planerar ni för sällskapsresa?” Råd och rön 11, no. 3 (1968): 16–23.
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Kaiserfeld, T. (2015). Exploring European Travel: The Swedish Package Tour. In: Lundin, P., Kaiserfeld, T. (eds) The Making of European Consumption. The Palgrave Macmillan Transnational History Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137374042_9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137374042_9
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