Essentials of Tourism

Chris Cooper

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781529737288
• Edition: 3
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Hospitality, Travel & Tourism Industry
• Index: Business

Will robots take over serving us in hotels? Will flight shaming prevent us travelling in the future? How has the rise of social media impacted upon tourism marketing? – and what has been the impact of airbnb on tourism cities? For answers to these and many other contemporary tourism questions, simply turn to the third edition of Essentials of Tourism by Chris Cooper. From artificial intelligence, robotics and digital marketing to assessing the impact of events, every tourism student will find this book essential reading for not only grasping the key issues but applying them to real problems faced by professionals in the tourism industry. The book includes many new case studies from every continent around the world including cases to give you a truly global approach to how tourism theory can be applied in an international context. This is combined with a lively and accessible writing style which will support and guide you through how tourism has been affected and will continue to be shaped by technology, changing government policy and sustainability concerns. Key features of the new edition:

• ?Focus on Technology? and ?Focus on Employment? boxes included in every chapter.
• Three current case studies included in each chapter to bring context to the reader.
• Classic papers - introduces students to relevant academic research and refers to the selected paper throughout the chapter.

Part 1 Tourism Essentials: An Introduction

Tourism is both a victim and a vector of many contemporary trends in the world – climate change, for example, will impact severely upon destinations, but it can be argued that tourism is also a partial cause of climate change. In a complex world of constant and unexpected change, it is important to take a disciplined and analytical approach to the teaching and learning of tourism. This is particularly the case when tourism is the focus of so much media attention – newspaper travel supplements, TV programmes and an explosion of social media coverage and travel literature. Tourism, too, is a controversial activity, not just in terms of climate change – tourism is high-carbon activity – but also there are other consequences of tourism for, say, indigenous peoples. Again, it is important to provide a balanced view, taking into account the evidence and the burgeoning literature. It is important, too, to recognise that, as tourism matures as a subject area, there are new approaches to studying and analysing tourism to complement the more traditional ways of thinking. Examples here include the mobilities paradigm and the critical turn in tourism studies, based upon taking perspectives of cultural studies, feminism, ethics, postmodernism, power/politics and world-making and applying them to tourism (Ateljevic et al., 2018). This adds up to tourism as an exciting subject to study – after all, most of us have experienced tourism and can relate the material in this book to our own experiences.

This first chapter sets out to provide a framework for the book and a way of thinking about tourism. The chapter begins with a historical perspective on tourism before introducing the concept of a tourism system. It goes on to outline the role of a tourism system in offering a way of thinking about tourism and in providing a framework of knowledge for those of you studying the subject. This framework is particularly important in the twenty-first century when the world is increasingly complex and experiencing rapid and unexpected change caused by both human and natural agents. In addition, tourism has now become a major economic sector in its own right and this chapter demonstrates the scale and significance of tourism. At the same time, the chapter identifies some of the issues that are inherent both in the subject area and in the study of tourism. In particular, it emphasises the variety and scope of tourism as an activity and highlights the fact that all elements of the tourism system are interlinked, despite the fact that they have to be artificially isolated for teaching and learning purposes. Finally, the chapter considers the difficulties involved in attempting to define tourism and provides some ideas as to how definitions are evolving.

1 Tourism Essentials

Learning Outcomes

This chapter focuses on the concepts, history, terminology and definitions that underpin tourism. It also provides a framework for the study of tourism to guide you through this book. The chapter is designed to provide you with:

• an awareness of the historical background to tourism;
• an understanding of the nature of the tourism system;
• an awareness of the issues associated with the academic and practical study of tourism;
• an appreciation of the vexed terminology associated with tourism; and
• a knowledge of basic supply-side and demand-side definitions of tourism.

Introduction

In a world of change, one constant since 1950 has been the sustained growth and resilience of tourism both as an activity and an economic sector. This has been demonstrated despite the ‘shocks’ of ‘9/11’, other terrorist attacks and natural disasters. Despite a number of more recent crises, it was the events of ‘9/11’ that triggered changes in both consumer behaviour and the tourism sector itself, changes which impacted on travel patterns and operations around the world. Yet, even with these challenges, the World Travel and Tourism Council (WTTC; www.wttc.org) demonstrate the tremendous scale of the world’s tourism sector:

• The travel and tourism industry’s percentage of world gross domestic product is 10.4 per cent.
• The world travel and tourism industry supports 319 million jobs (1 in 10 of world jobs).
• By 2018 there were 1.4 billion international tourism trips and well over 6 billion domestic trips.

It is clear that tourism is an activity of global importance and significance and a major force in the economy of the world. It is also a sector of contrasts. It has the capacity to impact negatively upon host environments and cultures – the raw materials of many tourism products – but it can also promote peace, help alleviate poverty and spearhead both economic and social development.

As the significance and diversity of tourism as an activity have been realised, increased prominence has been given to tourism in United Nations summits such as the World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg in 2003, when tourism featured for the first time. International mass tourism is at best only 50 years old, and the ‘youth’ of tourism as an activity – combined with the pace of growth in demand – has given tourism a Cinderella-like existence; it is important, but it is not taken seriously. This has created three issues for the sector:

1. As well as demonstrating sustained growth, tourism has been remarkable in its resilience to adverse economic and political conditions. Natural and man-made disasters clearly demonstrate the sector’s ability to regroup and place emphasis on a new vocabulary, including words like ‘safety’, ‘security’, ‘risk management’, ‘crisis’ and ‘recovery’. Inevitably, though, growth is slowing as the market matures and, as the nature of the tourist and their demands change, the sector will need to be creative in supplying products to satisfy the ‘new tourist’.
2. Technology increasingly pervades the tourism sector: from the use of the Internet to book travel and seek information about destinations, through to the use of mobile technology to revolutionise the way that tourism information can be delivered direct to the user in situ at the destination, to the innovative role that the Internet of Things and Big Data play in managing and curating the visit to destinations. Tourism is ideally placed to take advantage of developments in information technology. But change has come at the price of restructuring the distribution channel in tourism and in changing the nature of jobs in the sector as artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics arrive on the wave of the fourth industrial revolution.
3. International organisations support tourism for its contribution to world peace, its ability to deliver on the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals – in particular poverty alleviation, the benefits of the intermingling of peoples and cultures, the economic advantages that can ensue, and the fact that tourism is a relatively ‘clean’ industry. But an important issue is the stubbornly negative image of tourism as a despoiler of destinations, a harbinger of climate change, and even the employment and monetary gains of tourism are seen to be illusory in many destinations. The International Labour Organization (ILO), for example, views tourism jobs as of low quality, arguing that the sector should deliver ‘decent work’, not just create jobs of low quality. A critical issue, therefore, for all involved in the successful future of tourism, will be to demonstrate that the tourism sector is responsible and worthy of acceptance as a global activity. The WTTC has been an influential lobbyist in this regard (see www.wttc.org). As the representative body of the major companies in the tourism sector, it has led an active campaign to promote the need for the industry to take responsibility for its actions and for close public and private sector coalitions. Nonetheless, there is a backlash against the fact that tourism is a ‘high carbon activity’, reflected in the campaign against flying, as explained in the major case study at the end of this chapter.

All of these points connect to mean that the tourism sector must take responsibility for the consequences of tourism as an activity, particularly as a high-carbon activity. This will involve engaging with the big issues of this century – ensuring that tourism wholeheartedly embraces the green economy and reduces its carbon footprint to help alleviate climate change; that tourism does not exacerbate the global issues of food and water security; and that tourism makes a real contribution to poverty alleviation. And, of course, despite the relative youth of international mass tourism, other types of tourism have, in fact, a very long history, dating back thousands of years. In the following section, we turn to the historical development of tourism.

Focus on Technology

Landmarks of Information Technology and Tourism

Information technology has transformed tourism, not only how business is done and organised but also how the tourist searches for and purchases products and enjoys the experience. Of course, the relationship between technology and tourism has evolved over the years as the physical is replaced by the virtual and the analogue by the digital. These are developments that Buhalis (2019) has charted:

• In the 1980s, computing power and rapid communications supported developments such as hotel and airline distribution systems, travel agency systems and the larger global distribution systems. These transformed the travel trade’s approach to ticketing, yield management, customer service, productivity and reservations.
• But it was the Internet in the 1990s that saw the real revolution in how tourism business was done. The Internet levelled the playing field allowing a teenager in their bedroom to have the same marketing reach as a global corporation. It allowed e-intermediaries to decimate old-fashioned, bricks-and-mortar tour operators and agents. It facilitated the development of search engines, online tourism communities, blogs and social media, so transforming the relationship between the consumer and the sector. It also saw the rise of online review sites such as TripAdvisor as ‘user-generated content sites’ and saw the phrase ‘e-word of mouth’ enter the tourism vocabulary.
• In the future, the relationship will change again as the tangible meets the virtual in ‘phygital’ relationships, big data allows for personalised experiences, and new vir...