The Mormon Tour Industry

While looking on www.deseretbook.com this morning for something, I noticed a link to Time Out Tours. I have also noticed that Meridian Magazine has its own tour business. I am sure that there are many others out there (I’d be interested in collecting these links, so if anyone knows of one, please put it in the comments). These tours are interesting to me because they deal with not only educational tours to Book of Mormon lands, Israel/Palestine, and Church History sites, but also trips to Orlando, Cancun, cruises in the Mediterranean, etc. I am interested in the value that these tours offer to their customers, as well as the values that they express.

One of the curious aspects of the educational tours is the way that they are marketed. The tour guides’ qualifications to lead tours to Israel or Gautemala are usually that they are a BYU Religion profressor or have written some humorous or devotional LDS book. Their education, relevant experience, and publications on the subject matter are never mentioned, presumably because they have none of these things. Their qualifications are that they have held prestigious church callings, are nice people, and enjoy the subject matter. Some of these tours center around a cult of personality, like the Proctors, who advertise trips as an occasion to hang out and learn from them. I am quite sure that there is not a lack of competent LDS who work, research, and publish on matters of church history, archeology, history, etc who are perfectly qualified to run such trips. Why don’t they? What is the attraction of popularizers of LDS folklore as tour guides? Is there not a market for experts (or at least competent guides) for Latter-day Saints?

While the other trips to places like Orlando don’t require guides with any training or expertise, I am curious about the reasons that people would want to go to Orlando with a bunch of strangers who happen to be Latter-day Saints. I suppose that I understand the impulse to be around people that share your values and that you don’t have to explain yourself or your beliefs to (you are on vacation, after all). At the same time, I am concerned that people try to bring LDS insulation with them wherever they go. Rather than have to interact with the actual location around them, including people, these tours encourage members to protect themselves within a bubble, to never have to leave home, even when you leave home.