Introduction to Tourism

Leonard J Lickorish, Carson L Jenkins

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2007
• ISBN:
  9781136391910
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Hospitality, Travel & Tourism Industry
• Index: Business

An Introduction to Tourism is the essential guide to the tourism industry. It provides a comprehensive and authoritative introduction to all facets of tourism including:
the history of tourism; factors influencing the tourism industry; tourism in developing countries; sustainable tourism; forecasting future trends.
Tourism has changed radically in recent years with the onset of many technological and economic changes and an ever increasing concern for the environment. This book provides a down-to-earth introduction to this complex and multi-faceted industry.This invaluable introduction is written for all students of tourism and all those involved in the industry who want to know more about the structure, component activities and environment within which they work.

1 The nature and characteristics of the tourism industry

Introduction

Tourism is an activity which cuts across conventional sectors in the economy. It requires inputs of an economic, social, cultural and environmental nature. In this sense it is often described as being multi-faceted. The problem in describing tourism as an ‘industry’ is that it does not have the usual formal production function, nor does it have an output which can physically be measured, unlike agriculture (tonnes of wheat) or beverages (litres of whisky). There is no common structure which is representative of the industry in every country. In France and Italy, for example, restaurants and shopping facilities are major attractions for tourists; in Russia they are not. Even the core components of the tourism industry, such as accommodation and transport, can vary between countries. In the UK many tourists use bed and breakfast accommodation in private houses; in Thailand such facilities are not available. In the transport sector, levels of car ownership and developed road networks cause many tourists to use their cars or buses in Western Europe and the USA. In India and Indonesia, most tourists travel by air. It is some of these problems of definition which have caused many writers to refer to the tourist sector rather than the tourist industry. Sometimes the terms are used interchangeably, as they are in this book.

Problems of definition

The problem of definition is a serious and continuing difficulty for analysts of tourism. In particular the amorphous nature of the tourism industry has made it difficult to evaluate its impact on the economy relative to other sectors in the economy. Techniques have been developed to facilitate measurement of impact (Chapter 5) but there is no universally accepted definition of what constitutes the tourism industry. The World Tourism Organization (WTO) has attempted to address this problem in its publication A Standard Industrial Classification of Tourism Activities (SICTA) which is evaluated in Chapter 3. Most academic writers tend to craft their definitions to suit their specific purposes. For purposes of this book the definition given by Burkart and Medlik (1981) is accepted:

the phenomenon arising from temporary visits (or stays away from home) outside the normal place of residence for any reason other than furthering an occupation remunerated from within the place visited

However, there are a number of features associated with tourism which are quite explicit. For example, tourism implies that a person undertakes a journey: the journey may be for less than a day (day tripper/visitor); or it may be a journey within a national boundary, therefore constituting a domestic tourist trip; or it might be a journey which crosses an international boundary, therefore being classified as an international tourism trip. These particular definitions are dealt with in Chapter 3. However, it is not only the nature of the journey which constitutes tourism, but is also the purpose of the journey which very broadly should be for leisure or business. In looking at the development of tourism historically, most attention has been given to the concept of international tourism, i.e. journeys across international boundaries.

Although the components of the tourism industry will differ between countries, there are certain subsectors which are clearly identified as being components of tourism activity, such as the accommodation sector which would include not only formal accommodation, hotels, guest houses, etc., but also camping sites, rooms in private houses and bed and breakfast type arrangements. Travel agents and tour operators are recognized as comprising another distinct subsector. Transport – airlines, shipping, rail and car hire, cars and coaches – will also be seen as being important inputs to the tourism sector. In some countries, shopping and production of handicrafts is another associated activity of tourism. In all these examples we have one major problem, which is to measure the extent to which the output of the various sectors input to the tourism industry. This gives rise to many difficulties in attempting to define the economic value of tourism; for example, in a country like Singapore a very high proportion of a tourist’s discretionary expenditure is spent on shopping. In other cases we may find that shopping is almost exclusively confined to duty free purchases, such as in Barbados. These are problems in trying to measure the magnitude and importance of tourism and are referred to in Chapters 3 and 5.

Changes within the industry

If we use 1945 as being the year when the development of the major growth in the tourism industry began, we can make some general observations relating to the changes which one can discern in the tourism industry.

Before the 1950s, tourism was very much an industry which was fragmented; hotels, transport operators, travel agents, tour operators all tended to work independently of each other. Hotels were largely in the business of selling bed nights. Airlines and railways were in the business of selling seats. Travel agents of course, were selling travel and holidays but in each case they tended to operate very much as individual businesses. From the mid-1950s onwards, particularly in the UK, the growth of tour operators began to change the nature of the industry from essentially individual business activities to more integrated activities. Hotels, for example, were beginning to see customers as wanting a range of services rather than simply buying accommodation. So hotels began to develop shopping arcades and later to offer secretarial centres to try to increase the spend of guests within the hotel complex. Transport operators, particularly in the airline business, saw the sale of transport services as being integral to a much wider need. Airlines offered insurance and accommodation booking for travellers. By the 1980s many airlines were offering complete travel services including holiday arrangements, medical services, car hire, etc.

What we have seen since the 1950s is the emergence of a holiday and travel industry which is offering more integrated services. This is particularly noticeable with the forward and backward integration of some of the very large tour operators. To some extent this was determined by the nature of demand which is discussed in Chapter 4. In other cases it was a business opportunity to integrate demand and provide a service at a much more competitive price and to maintain and increase market share. By 1990 the structure of the tourism industry, certainly in the UK and Europe, was influenced by the growth of some very large companies. In the USA, American anti-trust laws discouraged, if not prohibited, the development of large integrated companies. The American experience in tour operation has been very different from that within Europe, particularly compared with the UK.

As the structure of service provision changed so did the nature of holiday taking. Up until 1946, i.e. the period between the world wars, much of international travel was for the privileged, wealthy and elite groups in society. From 1950 onwards a combination of factors, for example, increase in leisure time availability, increase in paid holidays, development of package tours, development in air transport – all combined to provide a much wider potential holiday-taking market. This market was different in terms of socioeconomic groups from the pre-1950 era.

The 1950s was the time when international travel for holiday purposes was democratized, the changing nature of demand being one of the factors which changed the structure of the tourism industry. This phenomenon of democratization is sometimes referred to as ‘the development of mass tourism’. However, the volume of tourism differs greatly between countries and to use ‘mass’ in an isolated rather than a relative sense can be very misleading.

The changing nature of holidays was reflected in the social groups taking holidays, and in the distances which people were prepared to travel to holiday destinations. One of the major demand changes was the increased availability of leisure for a wider group in society. Rising real incomes, paid holidays and growing propensity to demand foreign holidays, or a combination of these, were important and continuing factors stimulating international tourism demand. These factors were not simply economic determinants but also social. As the world recovered from the Second World War there was growing evidence to indicate that people were spending more time on leisure activities and on travel. These tendencies were reflected in the protection that many people gave to holiday expenditures, these expenditures being the last to be surrendered in the face of income changes. These factors are discussed in more detail in Chapter 4.

An analysis of international tourism travel trends reveals a number of features. First is the continuing but declining concentration of international tourist movements within Europe and between Europe and North America. Inter-country tourist movements between the USA, Canada and Mexico generate very large numbers. The traditional tourist-generating countries in Western Europe and the USA are seeing more travel to long-haul destinations in the Caribbean, the Pacific, Asia and Africa. Tourism is becoming a more global activity, and as real per capita incomes and discretionary leisure time availability increases, some of the traditional tourist-receiving countries such as Japan, Hong Kong, Singapore and within certain social groups in India, are now generating increasing numbers of outbound tourists. Many of these ‘new tourists’ are travelling for leisure rather than business purposes. Table 1.1 indicates the volume, value and distribution of international tourism movements.

Table 1.1 International tourist arrivals and receipts

* Subject to revision.

Source: World Tourism Organization, 1995.

The table should be interpreted with caution as it is compiled by the WTO from data supplied by member countries which do not always have reliable or definition-consistent statistics. Furthermore, the international receipts figures do not include air fares generated by tourist movements which constitute a substantial input to the airlines’ receipts in many countries.

This development of long-haul travel could not have taken place without the increasing specialization of the travel trade. The emergence of tour operators in particular tended to concentrate activities either in the short-haul or the long-haul market. Within Europe, for example, the growth and consolidation of very large tour operators like Thomson Holidays in the UK, Neckermann and TUI in Germany and Tjerborg in Denmark was indicative of the demand for international travel. Within this trend there was also an increasing supply of specialist tour operators normally looking to meet the demand for a lower volume but a higher per capita spend tourist who wanted to travel to distant countries or enjoy a special interest experience. Specialism within the travel field has been one of the features which has helped change the structure and the nature of the travel industry.

The role of government

In addition to the structural changes within the industry, it is relevant to note the role of government (Chapter 11). Government, particularly in developed countries, has often played a supportive but essentially background role in the development of tourism. In the UK, for example, in 1969 the government through its Development of Tourism Act not only supported through funding the development of new hotels within the UK, but also set up the various National Tourist Boards in Wales, England and Scotland and also the British Tourist Authority. Government has tended in most developed countries to take a ‘hidden’ hand role, i.e. it provided the infrastructure and intervened as necessary to direct and to encourage the growth of tourism. However, in the developing countries we find that governments have had to take a much more active and pro-interventionist role (Chapter 12).

There is considerable debate about the role of government in the tourism industry. One proposition is that in most developed countries government has tended to play the role of supporting tourism development, as mentioned above, by providing infrastructure and a representative national tourism authority. Many governments offer investment incentives to encourage development of the tourism industry. In developing countries such as India, the government through the Indian Tourism Development Corporation has invested in tourism facilities, such as ski resorts and hotels, and also in tourism services such as travel agencies, buses, car hire and airlines. There is no definite pattern which reflects the role of government in the development of the tourism industry. For example, in the USA the Regan government abolished the United States Travel Services which was to later re-emerge in a smaller form as the United States Travel and Tourism Agency. The Clinton government has now abolished it.

In the early 1990s, institutional pressure from international bodies such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund encouraged, if not coerced, many governments in the developing world to relinquish their commercial activities to the private sector. The Structural Adjustment Programmes agreed with many governments insist on a progressive privatization of governments’ commercial assets and activities in return for financial support as part of the economies’ restructuring process. In tourism, this means that more governments in the developing world are now providing support for tourism rather than taking an entrepreneurial role. These changes are discussed in Chapter 12.

Global tourism

Mention has been made of the globalization of tourism. This term is frequently used, but has ambiguous interpretations. It should be used to refer not only to the scale of tourism activity, but also to include the distribution of tourism activity. Tourists are not only travelling to the traditional destination countries, but also new tourism destinations and generating countries are represented on the global tourism maps. Within Asia, intraregional tourism is particularly important, and ‘new’ destination countries such as Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia are emerging. Within Africa, the political changes in South Africa have stimulated tourist arrivals within the Southern African region; with the cessation of the civil wars, countries such as Mozambique and Angola can become significant tourist destinations in the future.

The globalization trend does not simply replicate past trends. There are different groups of people travelling and travelling longer distances. As people become more sophisticated travellers, the travel trade has adapted to meet their needs. Safety, comfort and reassurance are still travel prerequisites. In Europe, the European Union’s Package Tour Directive attempted to improve conditions on travel and holiday contracts which aimed to ensure the provision of quality standard promised in the tourist receiving countries. The worldwide concern for environmental quality and protection is beginning to influence the travel trade in the way it selects its partners, and also in the conditions which tourists expect to find at the destination. Destination management is becoming an increasingly important issue in the tourism industry.

In Europe, the ageing population has provided a reservoir of mature tourists with both the leisure time and disposable income to travel. This so-called third age tourist has become an important, and will remain an important, segment of international tourism demand. As many of these tourists are retired and therefore have the choice of when to travel, they can help to overcome seasonality problems in some destinations.

Although there is a trend towards more independent travel, the inclusive tour has not lost its vitality or importance. The in...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• 1. The nature and characteristics of the tourism industry
• 2. How tourism developed – the history
• 3. The measurement of tourism
• 4. Factors influencing demand for tourism
• 5. Economic impacts of tourism
• 6. Social and cultural aspects of tourism
• 7. Tourism and the environment
• 8. Tourism trades
• 9. Marketing
• 10. Tourism policy, planning and development
• 11. The role of government
• 12. Tourism in developing countries
• 13. Tourism by world region
• 14. Future trends
• Index