Dean MacCannell on what defines a travel attraction

“The point is that anything that is remarked, even little flowers or leaves picked up off the ground and shown a child, even a shoeshine or a gravel pit, anything is potentially an attraction. It simply awaits one person to take the trouble to point out to another as something noteworthy, as worth seeing. Sometimes we have official guides and travelogues to assist us in this point. Usually we are on our own. How else do we know another person except as an ensemble of suggestion hollowed out of the universe of possible suggestions? And how else do we begin to know the world?”
–Dean MacCannell, The Tourist (1976)