Tourism-Led Rentier Capitalism: Extracting Rent and Value from Tourism Property Investment

Abstract

A highly heterogenous group of actors develops, owns, manages, and purchases tourism property around the globe. In this paper, we discuss the rise of “tourism-led rentier capitalism”—which is a particular fraction of capital—and its variegated dimensions. Although tourism property investors do not operate as a monolithic bloc or a socio-economic class, they share similar interests and collectively reshape tourism destinations by extracting tourism rent, a form of monopoly and differential rent, which can be derived from natural and public goods or sign values and imaginations of places that imbue meaning and value into locational attributes. As such, they contribute to unevenly developed and variegated geographies of property investment which are nonetheless driven by common, underlying mechanisms and spatial practices. The conversion of tourism destinations into financialised accumulation frontiers is one broader outcome of tourism-led rentier capitalism. The extraction of tourism rent is another.