Tourism: The Key Concepts

Peter Robinson, Peter Robinson

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781136251566
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Betriebswirtschaft
• Categoría: Gastgewerbe, Reise- & Tourismusbranche

Tourism: The Key Concepts offers a comprehensive collection of the most frequently used and studied concepts in the subject of tourism. Within the text key terms, concepts, typologies and frameworks are examined in the context of the broader social sciences, blending together theory and practice to explore the scope of the subject. Terms covered include:

• Ethical Tourism
• LGBT Tourism
• Hospitality
• Mobility
• Authenticity
• Quality Management
• Destination Management
• Geographies of Tourism
• Planning
• Sociology in Tourism
• Society and Culture
• Tourism Strategy

Each entry contextualises, defines and debates the concept discussed, providing an excellent starting point for those studying tourism for the first time, and a quick reference for those who are more experienced. With case studies, examples and further reading throughout, this text will be invaluable for all undergraduate and postgraduate tourism students.

TOURISM
The Key Concepts

ACCOMMODATION PROVIDERS

The accommodation sector, usually known as the lodging sector in the US, is a significant component of the global tourism industry. By definition, tourism must include an overnight stay away from the tourist’s normal place of residence. The accommodation sector therefore plays a crucial role in helping to define, explain and understand how tourism operates. Such knowledge is vital if tourism is to be developed, planned and managed successfully. Accommodation not only provides the tourist with a place to stay overnight but also somewhere to eat and drink, a base to explore the surrounding area, a source of local tourist information, and various ancillary services such as laundry, telephone services and Internet connection. Many also provide business services, including meeting facilities and conference centres, as well as overnight rooms for delegates. Such providers often specialize in business tourism.

The accommodation sector is also significant in that it often accounts for the largest part of the tourist’s spending in the tourism destination. Of course, not all tourists stay in paid accommodation in the destination. Many stay in the homes of friends and family: a type of tourism known as ‘visiting friends and relatives’ (VFR) tourism. VFR tourism is difficult both to define and to measure, but is generally considered to represent a substantial element of tourism accommodation in terms of the number of tourist nights (the nights spent in accommodation away from home). For example, Taylor Nelson Sofres Research International Travel and Tourism (2010) report that almost one in six domestic tourism trips in the UK were for VFR purposes in 2009, representing more than one in eight domestic tourist nights. Research has also found that some VFR tourists spend more than tourists staying in paid accommodation (Lee et al, 2005).

It is possible, therefore, to include private homes in a list of categories of accommodation provider. Other major categories include:

• Hotels, motels, apartment hotels, inns, lodges: generally these take the form of serviced accommodation, where one or more meal is provided by the establishment.
• Guest houses, bed-and-breakfasts, farm stays, youth hostels, backpacker hostels: these also tend to be serviced accommodation but usually only breakfast is provided.
• Holiday cottages, gîtes, camping barns, static caravans: these forms of accommodation are usually offered on a non-serviced (self-catering) basis.
• Timeshare apartments, touring caravans, mobile homes, recreational vehicles (RVs), tents: these are usually owned by the tourist, but can also be hired. Most are mobile and as such are not fixed to a specific destination, although some may be ‘sited’ at a caravan park or holiday home complex. They are usually non-serviced, although many campsites will provide services such as electricity hook-ups, water supply and bathroom facilities.

The distinction between serviced and non-serviced types of accommodation is by no means rigid. Indeed, many accommodation styles offer room-only tariffs, while others serve meals to residents for a separate charge. Many hotels also offer room service, where meals and refreshments are served in the guests’ bedrooms.

A further characteristic of the accommodation sector is the wide array of providers involved, ranging from large multinational business organizations with hundreds of thousands of rooms worldwide, through to micro-businesses with just one guest bedroom in the family home. The latter are often seasonal businesses, opening for the peak tourist season and then closing down for the rest of the year. For some tourism accommodation providers the season may be very short – for example, some residents of the Wimbledon area in London rent their homes to visitors to the annual tennis tournament, which lasts for just two weeks. Many hotels are part of global chains. The world’s five largest hotel chains as of 2009 were the Intercontinental Hotels Group, with 619,851 rooms worldwide, followed by the Wyndham Hotel Group, with 592,880 rooms, Marriott International, with 545,705 rooms, Hilton Hotels Corporation, with around 500,000 rooms, and Accor, with 478,975 rooms (Hospitalitynet, 2011).

The distinction between the accommodation sector and other tourism sectors has always been somewhat blurred and has become more so in recent times. Thus, for example, transport companies often provide accommodation for their travellers in the form of sleeping compartments on trains and cabins on ferries. Airlines technically provide accommodation for travellers on long-haul flights and there has been a growing trend towards providing flat beds in first-class cabins. Many airports also provide hotel accommodation for travellers next to or even within the terminal building. A new breed of in-airport hotels now provides basic budget accommodation for those waiting for flight connections. These offer rooms that are larger than capsule hotels of Japan but are still much smaller than standard hotel rooms. Yotel, for example, already has branches at London Heathrow, London Gatwick and Amsterdam Schiphol airports, and has plans under way to expand its operations to New York and Abu Dhabi. Yotel’s rooms are compact but comfortable, each featuring a flat-screen television, free Wi-Fi connection and 24-hour room service.

Further blurring of the boundaries between the accommodation and transport sectors exists in the cruise industry, which has experienced a significant consumer boom in recent years. The Florida-Caribbean Cruise Association (2011) estimates that a record 13.45 million passengers took a cruise holiday in 2009, an increase of 440,000 passengers over 2008. Of these guests, 10.3 million originated in North America. Meanwhile the Caribbean continues to be the dominant cruise destination, accounting for 37 per cent of all holidays in 2009. These figures represent a 3.4 per cent increase in worldwide cruise passengers on 2008: a significant increase given the effect of the worldwide recession on international tourism spending generally. There are also accommodation establishments that are visitor attractions in their own right. An example is the Gleneagles Hotel in Scotland, which is renowned worldwide for its golf course. Famous train services, such as the Orient Express, clearly occupy conceptual ground that crosses over between the transport, accommodation and visitor attraction sectors.

Another way in which distinctions between accommodation providers and the rest of the tourism industry are being blurred is through the development of destination resorts. These are tourist resorts that contain all the necessary components of the service product – including accommodation, hospitality, attractions, leisure shopping and entertainment facilities – so that it does not have to be located near an existing destination in order to operate. Examples include Atlantis in the Bahamas and Sun City in South Africa. Some are so large that they are termed ‘mega-resorts’. Many operate on an ‘all-inclusive’ (AI) basis, meaning that guests pay a fixed price that is inclusive of meals, most drinks, entertainments, and so on. Examples include Club Med in the Mediterranean and Sandals resorts in the Caribbean. Resort destinations effectively integrate various elements of the tourism product that would, under other circumstances, be provided by a range of different organizations.

Another significant development in recent times has been the stretching of the hotel market at both the luxury and budget ends into what are known as the boutique hotel and budget hotel sectors. A boutique hotel is an upmarket hotel, usually small in size, where the rooms have been individually designed and furnished to a high standard. Most aim to provide exceptional standards of service and make this their selling proposition. Boutique hotels are often based in a distinctive, possibly restored, building. The term is said to have originated in 1981 with the opening of Blake’s Hotel in London, UK. Budget hotels, in contrast, emphasize low cost. This means that many have no public rooms, except perhaps for a breakfast room. They also tend to offer few, if any, additional services, with food and drink perhaps provided through vending machines in the lobby. The most modern budget hotels even have computerized booking and checking-in facilities, with guests using their credit cards as room keys. Budget hotels typically aim for the short-stay market and high-occupancy rates. The market for budget hotels has grown significantly in recent times, following the rising trend of budget tourism. Examples of budget hotel chains include Accor’s Formule 1, Travelodge and Travel Inn in the UK, and Motel 6 in the US. Another example of the stretching of the tourist accommodation market is the phenomenon known as ‘glamping’, which involves camping in high-specification accommodation, such as yurts, tipis, safari tents and airstream caravans.

Marketing tourist accommodation has traditionally been difficult because of the general lack of benchmarks available to guide the consumer about the quality of the accommodation that they can expect, especially when they are first-time guests and are buying the room unseen. Websites such as Tripadvisor are nowadays playing an increasingly important role in tourist decision-making. Before the existence of the Internet, however, the solution adopted by accommodation providers was to subscribe to one or more of the grading schemes that had been set up for that purpose. These remain important marketing tools in the accommodation sector today. Accommodation quality schemes are usually administered at the national or regional level, often through the country’s National Tourism Organization (NTO), although in some parts of the world there are systems that operate either alongside or instead of the national system, such as that operated by the American Automobile Association (AAA) in the US. Such systems may either be voluntary or compulsory. Many have emerged from classification schemes, which tend to rate accommodation according to easily quantifiable variables such as size of rooms, room facilities (e.g. whether rooms are en suite) and amenities offered, thereby making no explicit reference to quality. Many of these have later been converted into grading schemes by the addition of an additional element to reflect various aspects of service quality. A grading scheme typically awards a number of stars to applicants, usually ranging from zero to five. This accounts for the term ‘five-star’ hotel. Some very large hotels advertise themselves as six star or even seven, but this grading is entirely unofficial. No formal grading scheme anywhere in the world currently awards more than five stars.

A good example of an accommodation grading scheme is the star-based system operated across Great Britain by Visit Britain, Visit Scotland, Visit Wales and the Automobile Association (AA). Previously, each organization operated its own grading system, with its own unique set of grading criteria. This led to some accommodation providers applying to more than one grading system, allowing them then to advertise the one that gave them the most stars. In 2006, however, the four organizations collaborated on the development of a harmonized system that uses a single set of criteria to grade properties. It covers the breadth of the accommodation sector and also includes the attractions sector (where it is known as the Visitor Attraction Quality Assurance Scheme). The scheme is voluntary and combines both quantitative and qualitative considerations into a unified set of grades, both of which have met with some criticism. The voluntary nature of the scheme means that guests cannot be sure whether accommodation that does not display grading is simply of too low a standard to reach one star or is actually of a high standard but has chosen not to join the scheme. The combination of both quantitative and qualitative information has been criticized because it can obscure high quality. For example, a hotel that has very high standards of service quality may not be able to achieve more than a three-star grading simply because it does not have a customer lift. Grading systems are also widely accused of encouraging standardization rather than the pursuit of individual excellence.

Further reading

Cooper, C., Fletcher, J., Gilbert, D., Fyall, A. and Wanhill, S. (2008) Tourism: Principles and Practice, 4th edition, Prentice Hall, Harlow, UK

Lee, G., Morrison, A. A., Lheto, X. Y., Webb, J. and Reid, J. (2005) ‘VFR: Is it really marginal? A financial consideration of French overseas travellers’, Journal of Vacation Marketing, vol 11, no 4, pp340–356

Page, S. J. (2007) Tourism Management: Managing for Change, 2nd edition, Butterworth-Heinemann, Oxford and Burlington

Dr. Brian Garrod

ADVENTURE TOURISM

Tourism and the notion of ‘adventure’ have always been inextricably linked; from the days of the early explorers to modern times, the idea of adventure in whatever capacity is never far from the concept of tourism. There is also a link between sport and adventure in terms of the categorization of activities; however, what separates sport from adventure is the idea of risk-taking, with the inherent risks involved in adventure tourism not generally perceived as being significant within the concept of sport.

Adventure tourism has grown rapidly in recent years (Buckley, 2006a). This is a growing segment of the tourism industry and growth is predicted to continue as consumers demand authentic and inspirational experiences. As with all sectors of the economy, expenditure fell during the recession; but the market is expected to be resilient in the long term. Studies differ on the exact profile of an adventure traveller; but the group tends to include those in professional/managerial occupations (often referred to as the AB social group), usually well educated with reasonable disposable income. The average age is disputed but tends to be around 40+, with an increasing number of fitter third-age participants. Both males and females participate in such trips (Page and Connell, 2009; George Washington University School of Business et al, 2010).

Often categorized as ‘soft’ and ‘hard’ activity, adventure tourism means different things to different people; but it is generally defined as a type of tourism that requires significant physical or mental effort, may involve real or perceived risk, involves generating a certain level of excitement, and engages a person in physical, natural or cultural ex...