Drive Tourism

Trends and Emerging Markets

Bruce Prideaux, Dean Carson

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2010
• eBook ISBN: 9781134007875
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Hospitality, Travel & Tourism Industry
• Index: Business

Since the post World War Two boom in private automobile ownership, Drive Tourism has transformed the tourism landscape by facilitating dispersal and the growth of attractions and tourism related infrastructure beyond the zones that had previously emerged around seaports and railway terminals. The automobile has made regional dispersal possible and created opportunities for many small rural communities to supplement rural economies with a tourism economy. Drive Tourism is a popular form of tourism activity that has significantly contributed to the development of Tourism in many nations, but has received relatively little attention in the literature.

This book is the first attempt to provide a global comprehensive review and scholarly investigation into this popular and growing form of tourism. It draws on a vast range of geographical locations to critically explore the impacts of drive tourism in developed and underdeveloped regions. It evaluates tourism authorities' response to the Drive Tourism Experience, and offers operational insights into the management of the drive experience as well as providing original empirical research and insights into the field that will contribute to future investigation. In doing so it explores the many forms of drive tourism from caravanning to fly drive touring.

Part I
International trends

1
The structure and role of drive tourism

Bruce Prideaux and Dean Carson

Although an important component of the tourism industry, researchers have generally shown little interest in undertaking research into drive tourism (Connell and Page 2008). The lack of research into the role of the car in shaping tourism demand and increasing the accessibility of many tourism resources is surprising. As Timothy (this volume) notes, cars carry more tourists in the US than any other mode of transport, a position that is echoed by the use of cars for leisure travel in Europe and other developed nations. Given this gap in the literature, the aim of this book is to present a scholarly and comprehensive review of drive tourism from a variety of perspectives. While the authors make no claim to an exhaustive treatment of every aspect of drive tourism, the book does bring together a range of drive tourism-related research that we believe will assist to move the study of drive tourism from its current peripheral position to a more central place in the tourism research agenda.

In this book, the term drive tourism is used to describe travel by any form of mechanically powered, passenger-carrying road transport, with the exclusion of coaches and bicycles. Coaches are excluded because they generally operate on a commercial basis and, with the exception of charter buses, on fixed schedules along a predetermined route. Bicycles, while a form of road transport, are not mechanically powered and are sufficiently different to other forms of road transport that they constitute a separate area of study. The range of road-based travel encompassed by the broad description of drive tourism includes day trips and overnight travel in a family car or a rental car, travel in four-wheel-drive vehicles (4WD), caravanning, travel in recreational vehicles (RVs) and motorhomes, and touring by motorcycle.

Most of the chapters in this book consider the contemporary structure of drive tourism either from a geographic perspective based on the drive market in a particular country, or as a market sector based on a specific form of drive tourism such as day tripping or motorcycling. While an understanding of the contemporary structure and operation of drive tourism is important, it is also desirable to consider how emerging issues, including climate change mitigation strategies and the impact of peak oil, will affect the structure of the drive tourism sector in the coming decades. Figure 1.1 was developed as an attempt to synthesise the range of factors that shape the structure and operation of the drive tourism sector and collectively create the experience that lies at the heart of drive tourism. The following discussion outlines aspects of the role that drive tourism has in the overall tourism transport task. This is followed by a discussion of the drive tourism model (Figure 1.2), which illustrates the many forces that make up the drive experience. The possible future impact of a range of issues, including climate change, new technologies and peak oil, are then discussed within the context of how they may affect the shape and operation of the drive tourism sector in the future.

Before examining aspects of drive tourism as an area of enquiry, it is worth looking at an overview of the global scale of the automobile sector and the manufacturing industry that it supports. In 2002 there were an estimated 590 million passenger vehicles, along with a further 216 million commercial vehicles (Brandt 2007) that consumed an estimated 1.2 trillion litres of petrol and diesel annually. According to figures published by the International Organization of Motor Vehicle Manufacturers (OICA) (2009a), the auto industry employs over 9 million people directly, which is just over 5 per cent of the global manufacturing workforce. In 2008 total global production of cars was 52,637,206, with the largest producers being Japan (9.9 million), China (6.7 million), Germany (5.5 million), USA (3.8 million), South Korea (3.4 million), Brazil (2.6 million), Spain (1.9 million) and India (1.8 million) (OICA 2009a). Ownership levels of cars are highest in the developed nations, where North American, Australian and New Zealand cities lead the way with an average of over 500 cars per 1,000 persons, followed by European cities, with 414 cars per 1,000 persons, while in China the average level of ownership in cities is 26 cars per 1,000 persons (Kenworthy 2003). In the US, the average car passenger kilometres per capita was 18,000 compared to 6,200 in Western Europe and 814 in China. It is interesting to note that, while China and India have emerged as major automobile producers, in line with their emergence as global economic powers, ownership and usage rates of private cars is low compared to the US and Western Europe. As ownership and usage levels rise, it may be expected that interest in drive tourism will increase, particularly as car ownership is associated with personal wealth.

The structure and role of drive tourism

The essential task of the tourist transport system, which is described as the sum of the capacity of road, rail, sea and air transport modes to convey passengers between generating regions and destinations and between and within destinations, is to facilitate travel by an individual from home to a destination and then back home. The distance between the generating region and destination is a major factor in the selection of the transport mode used by tourists. Where the distances are relatively short and where the tourist owns or has access to a car, it is often the preferred method of travel. As distances and costs increase, there is generally a shift away from cars to rail, sea or air travel. Leiper (1990) encapsulated the role of the transport system within the tourism system in a simple yet elegant model that shows how a transit zone consisting of one or more transport modes connects a tourism-generating region with one or more tourism destinations. Building on the idea of a transport system that performs the transport elements of the supply side of the tourism system, Prideaux (2009) identified four tasks that the transport system undertakes in its support of the tourism industry. These are:

1 passenger travel to and from a destination via a transit zone;

2 passenger transport within the destination;

3 passenger transport between destinations; and

4 the transport of freight, in this case to support the tourism industry.

In this book we focus on the role of drive tourism within the transit zone, within the destination and for travel between destinations. Specific issues relating to freight transport are not considered.

The type and structure of drive tourism found in any region or destination is governed by a number of factors, including:

• The distance between the generating region and the destination. Where the distance is relatively short, travel by car is popular but, as the distance increases, the model preference will generally shift from car to mass transport systems such as air transport or, in some cases, rail. The Transport Cost Model (Prideaux 2000) provides a theoretical foundation that illustrates the relationship between cost, distance and transport modes selected by tourists. In general terms, as the distance between generating regions and destinations increases, there is a corresponding decline in travel by car and a parallel increase in mass public transport use, including rail and air travel. In the era of heavily discounted airfares made possible by the Low Cost Carrier model (Whyte and Prideaux 2008), the attraction of low airfares combined with the ability to rent a car once at a destination has seen a shift, at least in some destinations, from long-distance travel by private car to fly-drive holiday travel patterns. The substitution of the car by air travel has lead to a fall in drive tourism volumes in some countries, affecting the revenue of tourism-related businesses operating in the highway transit zone.

• The quality of the road network between the generating region and the destination. As Timothy (this volume, Chapter 14) points out, the development of a national highway system in the US, which commenced as early as the 1920s but particularly in the 1950s, laid the foundation for the emergence of that nation’s current drive tourism industry. Similar trends in the rapid growth of drive tourism have been observed in many parts of Europe, Australia and South Africa (van Heerden, this volume, Chapter 6), and more recently in China (Yu et al., this volume, Chapter 8) and Brazil (Lohmann et al., this volume, Chapter 4).

• National levels of car ownership. As national GDP increases and private ownership of a car becomes possible, the demand for drive tourism experiences generally increases (Yu et al., this volume, Chapter 8; Hardy and Gretzel, this volume, Chapter 15, for a discussion on the growth of drive tourism in China), although as Cooper (this volume, Chapter 3) demonstrates, this has not been the case in Japan.

• The structure of the journey between the generating region and the destination. As Hardy (2003) observed, the journey between home and the intended destination may take a number of forms, including: a simple transit trip where the objective is to drive to the destination as quickly as possible without spending time visiting highway-located tourist attractions; a more leisurely journey where time is spent visiting highway-located attractions during the journey; and where the highway and its attractions are the central focus of the journey, with the highway effectively becoming the destination. The structure of the journey and the manner in which specific tour patterns are structured have been explored by a number of researchers, including Lue et al. (1993) and more recently by Connell and Page (2008).

• Visitor driving skills. Driving in a new environment where conditions are different from those usually encountered in their day-to-day driving activities poses a range of risks for drivers. The most obvious example is where a tourist who normally drives on the left visits a country where cars drive on the right. Becoming familiar with having to drive on the opposite side of the road poses a number of risks. Similarly, having to drive on open highways, particularly where the distances between attractions are large, also poses risks, such as fatigue and encountering situations not experienced in their home environment. Road rules and road etiquette may also vary. As Wilks and Pendergast (this volume, Chapter 20) highlight, the number of accidents per 100,000 persons tends to be higher for visitors than for residents.

• Development of highway-located tourism infrastructure. Over time, a complex drive tourism system based on servicing the needs of the drive tourist has emerged. The essential components of this system include the quality of the highway network, the provision of fuel and other vehicle-centred services, including breakdown services, accommodation, attractions, policing, marketing and destination management, and the creation of drive routes to connect the drive tourist with the experiences available along a specific section of highway (see Figure 1.1). Compared to other forms of destination marketing, where a Destination Marketing Organisation (DMO) is tasked with marketing a defined geographic entity, destination marketing of the drive tourism system is complex because it involves coordination of multiple destinations (and their DMOs) to create and operate an identity that is the sum of the experi...

Table of contents

• Routledge advances in tourism
• Contents
• Figures
• Tables
• Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Part I International trends
• Part II Modes of transport
• Part III Managing the drive market
• Index