The Management of Tourism

Lesley Pender, Richard Sharpley, Lesley Pender, Richard Sharpley

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2004
• Print ISBN: 9780761940227, 9780761940210
• eBook ISBN: 9781446233955
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Management
• Index: Business

The Management of Tourism considers and applies management concepts, philosophies and practices to the business of tourism. The book goes beyond a conceptual discussion of tourism, to cover management perspectives both in operational and strategic terms. It has been written to provide students with an understanding of the fundamental business management aspects of tourism, together with the specific techniques required for successful management of the variety of tourism businesses.

The text places the management of tourism in a structured framework, ordered around four principal themes:

- Managing the Tourism System

- Managing Tourism Businesses

- Managing Tourism in its Environment

- Contemporary Issues in Tourism Management

Each chapter is written by an acknowledged subject specialist, and highlights current challenges and appropriate management responses to its particular arena. At the same time, each chapter also includes an illustrative case study, and provides suggestions for further reading that offers a more general perspective.

PART 1: MANAGING THE TOURISM SYSTEM

1 Introduction

Lesley Pender

Chapter objectives

The purpose of this chapter is to establish a context for the consideration of the management of tourism businesses that follows. It introduces the tourism system and outlines the characteristics of tourism businesses. Having completed this chapter, the reader will be able to:

recognise the debate that has surrounded definitions of tourism

understand the tourism system

recognise the variety and scope of tourism businesses

appreciate the scale and significance of tourism at both global and local levels

identify the important linkages between different types of tourism business

understand the main implications of the service nature of tourism businesses

Chapter contents

Introduction: Aims and objectives of the book

The scope, scale and significance of tourism

Definitions, concepts and structure of tourism

The tourism system

The impacts of travel and tourism

Key themes

Management issues

Structure of the book

Conclusion

Discussion questions

Suggested further reading

Introduction: Aims and objectives of the book

This introductory chapter sets the context for the remainder of the book by illustrating the aims and objectives at the same time as providing relevant background information on tourism. The scope, scale and significance of tourism, as discussed below, make management issues highly important at every level in the system. It is the aim of this book to provide detailed coverage of the breadth of issues involved in the management of tourism businesses. It is hoped that the text will support the fundamental business management aspects while examining specific techniques required for the successful management of the broad spectrum of tourism businesses. The fundamental aim, therefore, is to consider and apply management concepts, philosophies and practices to the ‘business’ of tourism. This is something that few texts have addressed, as many have focused instead on the theories that have evolved within the tourism area. There has been a move away from more generalist research and teaching of tourism towards a more specific approach, as evidenced by the proliferation of more specialist journals. This book aims to develop some of these issues with a management focus in recognition of the increasing understanding and knowledge of tourism as a discipline.

Themes and issues relevant to contemporary management of travel and tourism are examined, with discussion and argument incorporated into the chapters. Each of the following chapters takes management as its starting point while assuming a degree of understanding and knowledge of tourism on the part of the reader. This primary management theme is reflected through a variety of perspectives on effective management within travel and tourism.

This chapter attempts to summarise the debate that has surrounded definitions of tourism and to extract from this the key elements that are important in terms of management. The chapter also identifies some of the key issues in relation to the study of tourism management, which later chapters go on to develop. It then considers the services nature of tourism businesses and the implications thereof. The chapter starts by outlining the scope, scale and significance of tourism.

The scope, scale and significance of tourism

Tourism is an economic activity of immense global significance. However, the precise measurement of travel and tourism has not always been easy. This stems in part from different definitions and methods of accounting adopted by different countries. Efforts by the World Tourism Organisation (WTO) and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) have helped in this respect, as discussed below.

Vellas and Becherel (1995) describe the WTO as the principal source of statistics on international tourism. According to the WTO, tourism is now the largest industry in the world. In 2000 an estimated 35 million UK tourists travelled abroad with expenditure reaching an estimated £15 billion, a 4% increase in expenditure on the previous year (Mintel, 2001). According to the World Travel and Tourism Council (WTTC), the travel and tourism economy, which includes the industry itself plus indirect activities, contributed 10% to global GDP in 2002 and 7.8% of global employment, amounting to 198,668,000 jobs, or one in every 12.8 jobs. In 2002 there were 702.6 million international tourist arrivals recorded worldwide. In the same year worldwide receipts for international tourism amounted to US$474 billion (€ 501 billion). WTO forecasts that international arrivals are expected to reach over 1.56 billion by 2020. Of these, 1.18 billion will be inter-regional and 377 million will be long-haul travellers (www.world-tourism.org/marketresearch/facts/highlights/Highlights.pdf).

Travel and tourism as a whole (international and domestic) is expected to generate US$4,235.5 billion of economic activity; that is, it is a US$4.3 trillion industry according to the WTTC (2002c). Travel and tourism is therefore a major activity by any standard. It is also an activity that impacts on many other areas, as the following discussion illustrates.

Demand for travel and tourism has grown at a faster rate than demand for most areas of economic activity. Tourism experienced sustained growth towards the end of the last century and this continues at the start of the new millennium. France et al. (1994) describe the increase in international tourist numbers since the end of the Second World War as dramatic: only 25 million international tourists were recorded worldwide in 1950 as against approximately 476 million tourists by 1992. They describe a pattern of moderately steady growth, with periods of interruption associated with particular events and economic downturns.

Tourism education has also been an area of significant development in recent decades. Masters programmes in tourism have been available in the UK since the 1970s and undergraduate degrees have been developing since the 1980s. Tourism has, in recent years, increased greatly in popularity as a subject of study at diploma, undergraduate and postgraduate levels. By the late 1990s some 64 undergraduate courses existed in the UK alone, accounting for an estimated 5,000 students enrolled in 1998. In addition to this were the many students studying tourism as an option on related courses such as geography. A further, more recent, significant development in this field has been the emergence of themed MBAs, such as those offered at Westminster and Bradford universities.

At an international level, according to Centre International de Recherches et d’Etudes Touristiques (CIRET), there are currently 543 academic institutions in 86 countries and 2,296 individual researchers in 95 countries specialising in tourism, leisure, outdoor recreation and the hospitality industry. CIRET has created directories of these on its website (http://www.ciret-tourism.com). Along with the growth in the provision of teaching of tourism and research in this area has been a growth of literature, as evidenced by new tourism collections and scientific reviews. CIRET’s website also contains a thesaurus of more than 1,100 key words, a geographical index and access to the analysis of in excess of 116,974 documents of tourism literature, including books, articles and reports. Despite this growth in teaching, research and publications, tourism is still considered relatively immature as an academic discipline.

Tourism as an academic subject is offered within and often between a variety of broader fields of study, including economics, business and management, geography and the social sciences. The majority of tourism courses, however, are offered by schools of business and management. Their primary focus is on the scope and significance of tourism as a business. The approach taken by this book is in keeping with such courses. In research terms, tourism is a subject of many separate disciplines but also the subject of multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary research.

While early tourism had always been socially selective, according to several writers, including Urry (1990), it was in the second half of the nineteenth century, with the expansion of the railway, that there was an extensive development of mass travel by train. In the twentieth century the car and the aeroplane further democratised geographic movement. Certain destinations then began to become synonymous with mass tourism. Holloway (1994) details the origins of the mass tourism movement.

Definitions, concepts and structure of tourism

Mass tourism is therefore a relatively young phenomenon and, despite exceptional growth rates, is still characterised as immature, or only just reaching maturity, especially as a field of academic study. There have been definitional problems in relation to tourism and these in turn have led to measurement difficulties.

Different authors have taken different approaches when proposing definitions, but one thing that most seem to agree on is the difficulty they attach to defining tourism. Further difficulties exist in defining precise forms of tourism. Holloway (1994) describes as problematic establishing clear lines between shoppers and tourists, for example.

There is no universally agreed definition of the tourism industry. Indeed, there is no agreement that tourism can be described as an industry. Mill and Morrison (1998), for example, argue that it is hard to describe tourism as an industry given that there is a great deal of complementarity as well as competition between tourism businesses. They place definitions of tourism in context by highlighting the link between travel, tourism, recreation and leisure. However, they go on to describe this link as ‘fuzzy’ and to make the distinction that all tourism involves travel yet all travel is not tourism. Nevertheless, tourism is often described merely as an activity:

Tourism is an activity. It is an activity that takes place when, in international terms, people cross borders for leisure or business and stay at least 24 hours but less than one year. (Mill and Morrison, 1998: 2)

The WTO’s definition of tourism is now the one that is most widely accepted around the world. The definition, provided at the International Conference on Travel and Tourism Statistics in Ottawa in 1991, is

The activities of a person outside his or her usual environment for less than a specified period of time and whose main purpose of travel is other than e...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• List of Abbreviations
• List of Contributors Preface
• Part 1: Managing the Tourism System
• Part 2: Managing Tourism Businesses
• Part 3: Managing tourism in its environment
• Part 4: Contemporary Issues in Tourism Management
• Conclusion
• References
• Index