Politicized Tourism Consumption.

This commentary examines the increasing politicization of tourism and attempts to theorize the phenomenon through a multilevel analysis. Tourism scholars have examined the link between politics and tourism through the prism of sustainability, terrorism, geopolitics, and tourism development. However, these studies have focused on different tourism activities or encounters without theorizing the relationship between politics and tourism consumption. This commentary argues that the increasing influence of nationalism in global politics, which also affects tourism consumption, requires a new conceptualization. The theoretical premise of political consumption is used to guide the multilevel (macro, meso, and micro) analysis of two recent tourist boycotts: 1) the THAAD incident between South Korea and China and 2) the APA boycott by Chinese tourists. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]