- Email: [email protected]
The tourism industry: An international analysis
Books
impact of tourism on the province of Antwerp confusingly begins by stating that Belgium is ‘not a highly popular international tourist destination’ (perhaps the authors have never visited nearby Bruges, although that city is of course in a different province) and that tourism is not of vital importance to the province’s economy, yet concludes by saying ‘tourism must be considered an industry of some significance in the economy of the province for . . . its impact on employment, instance, is about as large as that of the financial and insurance sector’. Surely editors are supposed to pick up inconsistencies like this? Other contributions look at manpower policy in Nepal (highly mathematical), tourism multipliers in Malta (nothing new), visitor flows in Chepstow (this paper’s authors actually admit their selected survey research methodology resulted in an unrepresentative sample of visitors) and the effects of tourism projects in Ireland on employment. So what is one to make of these two volumes overall? Whilst one has to admire the tenacity which the two editors must have had in securing written texts from nearly 40 authors and the hard work which must have gone into editing and updating such disparate material, one must sadly question the justification for the whole exercise. As a regular conference attender, my own experience is that only a small percentage of conference papers have any long-term future or hold real interest to an audience wider than those attending the conference itself. This applies very much in this case because, like the proverbial curate’s egg, the current collection of essays is of very variable quality indeed. In any case the collection simply does not hang together as a whole. Even if it might have been a little damaging to the egos of authors whose papers were not included in the book, surely it would have been better for the editors to have been more selective and to have produced a singlevolume collection. Quite apart from anything else, a f70 price tag for the pair of hardback volumes (incidentally they could easily have gone into a single book - 450 pages is not beyond
76
the capability of most binding equipment) is likely to be a deterrent to many would-be buyers, especially when the content of many of the papers has to be of restricted relevance beyond the immediate confines of the conference hall. To whom might this collection appeal? The back covers of each volume (there are no dust jackets) suggest they are aimed at academic researchers, governmental policy makers and ‘tourism analysts within the industry and financial sector’ [sic]. I have to say that I see the usefulness of both books as strictly limited to those in the academic world and, bearing in mind that with a single exception all the authors are themselves
academics, I really cannot see that these books could hold much interest for marketers or researchers in either the private or public sector. Nor, considering the fact that many of the contributions are put forward as reports of work in progress, do these two volumes offer much to the travel and tourism teacher. This is not to deny that a small handful of the papers would have been worth preserving, perhaps in a less expensive singlevolume paperback. Peter Hodgson Managing Director Travel and Tourism Research Ltd 39c Highbury Place London N5 lQP, UK
Gapsin the literature THE TOURISM INDUSTRY: An International Analysis edited by M. Thea Sinclair and M.J. Stabler CAB International, Wallingford, UK, 1991, XI + 244 pages, f30
The anthology The Tourism Industry consists of 12 chapters. Chapter 1 by Sinclair and Stabler is kind of an editorial. The editors suggest that key gaps in the literature will be filled. Those areas requiring further investigation are identified by providing a threepage review and evaluation of past research on the tourism industry. Due to its minimal length the review of the literature given by Sinclair and Stabler cannot but be grossly incomplete. Mathieson and Wall, after all, needed a full book just to review the impacts of tourism. What is more important, however, is that is it erratic and unbalanced. Important publications by such authors as Cohen,’ MacCannell,* Williams and Zelinsky,3 Greenwood,4 and Nash6 are neglected. Graburn, Although eight specialist geographical journals publishing material on spatial aspects of tourism development are listed, all specialist journals in development studies, which publish articles on tourism and development, such as Economic Development and
TOURISM
Cultural Change, Social and Economic Studies, Development and Change and the Journal of Development Studies.
are ignored, as is the well-established tourism journal Tourism Recreation Research. The statement on page 3 that early discussions of the economic, social, cultural and political effects of tourism development are included in the 1979 anthology edited by De Kadt supposes that De Kadt’s inventory has been comprehensive and ignores early contributions not mentioned in his book, such as those by Cumper, Nunez, Akoglu, Frentrup, Hamouda, Ben-Salem, Levitt and Gulati, Bryden and Faber, Sessa, Cazes and Lundgren (whose publications are listed by Theuns)‘. The booklet by Lea is provided as an example of geographical research on tourism in developing countries. As may be clear from the review by Cohen,’ this choice is not to be applauded. Chapter 2 by Stabler outlines a new model approach to analyse the tourism industry. The approach is built on the confrontation of industry opportunity sets and consumer opportunity sets. It is an interesting exercise to which applies, however, what Kent (p 168) notes with regard to the 1990 publication by Urn and Crompton: ‘Problems surrounding such an approach . . . include the inability to
MANAGEMENT
February
1993
Books
make the concept operational and predictive rather than simply descriptive, the absence of identified parameters for the demarcation of one set from another, and no firm empirical evidence that a multi-stage choice process is actually operative in holiday decision-making’. Chapters 3-5 focus on the travel intermediaries. In Chapter 3 Bennett and Radburn provide a review of the impact of information technology, including computerized reservation systems (CRS), on travel agencies and tour operation businesses. Chapter 4 by Bote Gomez and Sinclair focuses on ownership, market share and vertical integration in the travel industry in the UK and Spain. In Chapter 5 Goodall and Bergsma provide a comparative analysis of tour operators’ strategies in the UK and Netherlands market for skiing holidays. In Chapter 6 Redmond examines the growing importance of sports and health tourism in North America and Europe. Chapters 7-9 are marketing oriented. In Chapter 7 Ashworth analyses inter afia destination images, providing examples from the Mediterranean area. As observed earlier by Din’ for Malaysia, he notes that tourism images may be incompatible with desired national or international images. Chapter 8 by Edwards is on guest and host perceptions of rural tourism in south-west England and northern Portugal. This contribution contains an interesting conciusion on the lack of individual evaluation of farm accommodation and the presence of a universality of appeal. From this universality of image, guidelines may be derived for cooperative marketing of similar small-scafe and scattered forms of accommodation used by foreign independent travellers, particularly in Third World destinations. Chapter 9 by Kent is on holiday choices. In discussing the fact that preferences, like motivations, may be either intrinsic (personal preference) or extrinsic (socially conditioned), and the importance to be attached to the social context of individuals as tourists the chance to draw on the early pub-
TOURISM
MANAGEMENT
lication by Knebel” is forgone. The author further states (p 168) that the tourists make their holiday decisions from positions which are bounded by the limits of attainability and awareness. Within such limits, it is argued, choice itself can be considered to be an attempt to make an optimal decision from a suboptimal position. However, the concept of bounded rationality, as coined by Simon, is more embracing. It includes the possibility that consumers take decisions quite independently of the cost/benefit ratio which they can calculate.” The empirical results on holiday choices derived from a postal questionnaire survey are atypical. independent tourists were found to possess the lowest social class scores for all the groups. have the highest percentage of families in the sample and the greatest average age. Since disaggregation of groups shows inter afia that the highest average age was found for independently booked hotels, the group of independent tourists seems to be too broadly defined. The fact that this category evaluates place images most frequently with a place which is cheap to holiday in, combined with the low social class scores, indicates that in this category the family budget-type holidaymakers prevail. The results are thus atypical in view of both the highbudget FITS and the low-budget explorers. In Chapters 10-12 the distributional aspects of tourism development and the role of the public sector in an economy in transition to a market economy are examined. In Chapter 10 Sinclair provides an interesting analysis of the foreign exchange ‘leakages’ from safari and beach tourism in Kenya. The concept of leakages is, however, given a highly unorthodox and confusing interpretation in that it is taken to include the percentage of the holiday expenditure that does not reach the destination. Moreover, according to Sinclair, the concept of foreign exchange leakage is also used to refer to the evasion of foreign currency controls. Not mentioned, however, is the transfer of factor income. By way of an intricate method the author manages to calculate estimates of the Kenyan shares in foreign
February 1993
tourists’ expenditure on safari and beach package holidays. Overall the results compare reasonably well with the 1984 cost structure of inclusive tours sold through British travel agents as given in the 1989 book by Pearce.” The comparison made by the author with the figure on leakage of foreign exchange from tourism mentioned by Green is invalid as the latter uses an orthodox concept of foreign exchange leakage providing information on the ratio between gross and net earnings, whereas Sinclair’s concept is on the ratio of gross foreign exchange inflow to the total cost of package tours. While Sinclair concentrates on international distributional effects of tourism development, Long in Chapter 11 analyses in a Mexican case study the effects of an unequal internal distribution of benefits from tourism development. The author wrongly presents Perez as a protagonist of international tourism, nota bene on the basis of an article in a Marxist journal. In Chapter 12 Pearce provides a case study of tourism development in Split, Croatia. The problems of transition from a socialist self-managed economy to a market economy may be compared to those connected with the transition from a centrally planned economy to a market economy both in Eastern Europe and Southeast Asia. In summary it may be concluded that The Tourism Industry is an interesting but heterogenous collection of essays. In setting the aims for the anthology the editors have been too ambitious. They declare (p 5) that the anthology seeks, by providing an analytical, interdisciplinary emphasis, to fill important gaps in the literature and to provide new perspectives on key issues in the tourism industry and new methodological directions which might be pursued. Underpinning the book is, reportedly, the theme of the internationalization of tourism’s industrial structure. Due to the incomplete and erratic review of the Iiterature the gaps indicated are chance hits. The gaps are, moreover, haphazardly covered. The resulting analysis of the internationalization of the tourism industry is consequently only par-
77
Books
tial and scanty. Although some effort at integration of the chapters has been made by occasionally referring to each other’s chapters or by passingly pointing to the model approach developed by Stabler, the coherence is weak. This is not to say that the anthology is not worth studying. As this review has pointed out, some of its chapters provide useful insights into the complexities of the development of tourism. H. Lao Theuns Department of Economics Tilburg University PO Box 90153 5000 LE Tilburg
The Netherlands ‘Erik Cohen, ‘Toward a sociology of international tourism’, Social Research, Vol39, No 1,1972, pp 164-182; Erik Cohen, ‘Who is a tourist?: A conceptual clari~cation’, S~of~i~l Review, Vol 22, No 4, 1974, pp 527-555. 2D. MacCannell, ‘Staged authenticity: arrangements of social space in tourist settings’, American Joumai of Sociology, Vol 79, No 3, 1973, pp 589-603. 3Anthony V. Williams and Wilbur Zelinsky, ‘On some patterns in international tourist
flows’. Economic Geography, Vof 46, No 4, 1970, pp 54Q-567. . 4Dawdd J. Greenwood. ‘Tourism as an ageni of change: a Spanish Basque case’, Ethnology, Vol 11, No 1, 1972, pp 80-91. 5Nelson H.H. Graburn, ‘The anthropology of tourism’, Annals of Tourism Re&ear& Vol 10, No 1,1983, pp Q-33. 6Dennison Nash, ‘Tourism as an anthropological subject’, Current Anthropology, Vol 22, No 5, 1981, DD461-481. ‘H. Leo Theuns,’ kbirci World Tourism ffesearch 1950-7984; A Guide fo Literature, Peter Lang, Frankfurt am Main, 1991. *Erik Cohen, ‘Neo-colonialism in the Third World; review of Tourism and Development in the Third World by John Lea’, Tourism Management, Vol 10, No 2, 1969, p 177. ‘Kadir H. Din, ‘Towards an integrated approach to tourism development: observations from Malaysia’, in Tej Vir Singh, H. Leo Theuns and Frank M. Go, eds, Towards Appropriate Tourism: The Case of Devefoping Countries, Peter Lang, Frankfurt am Main, 1989, pp 181-203. ‘“Hans-Joachim Knebel. Sozidlooische
S~ru~~~andl~ngen im m~emen ?ourismus, Ferdinand Enke Verlag, Stuttgart, 1960. “Richard D. Sartel, ‘The failure of armchair economics: interview with Herbert A. Simon’, Challenge, Vol 29, No 5, 1986, pp 18-25. ‘2Douglas Pearce, Tourist Development, 2 ed, Longman, Harlow, 1989.
Cont~mpopa~tourism issues THE GOOD TOURIST by Katie Wood and Syd House Mandarin, London, 7992, f5.99
The objectives of this book, written for the ‘intelligent, caring traveller’ are ‘to provide a balanced analysis of the good and bad aspects of tourism; to offer tips and advice to prospective tourists; to promote a more responsible form of tourism - the “good tourist” concept - and to provide information on the range of holidays available that conform to the basis of good tourism’ (preface). As one would expect from such experienced authors, The Good Tourist on the whole achieves these objectives and does so in a readable, stimulating manner. The book serves both as a good read and as a reference text combining interesting, perceptive, subjective material with a wide range
78
of relevant factual information - of particular note are the array of examples of tourism impact and a useful Appendix of Contact Organizations. However, the book does not fully address the central issue of whether the good tourist concept - the core theme of the book and one that is promoted with vigorous conviction-is actually an effective method of dealing with the negative impact problems as outlined in the book. Wood and House acknowledge that ‘some have tourism argued that “responsible” alone is not a real answer: it can be construed as a middle-class, educated and elitist cop-out for those who are caught up in the groundswell of green issues. It is small scale, slow and attempting steady, controlled, and thus sustainable, growth. Is it really the answer to the enormous problems of mass tourism dealing with the movement of enormous numbers of
people? The answer is probably no, not in itself, but it can be part of an overall approach to tackling the problems. Such an approach must encompass a whole range of potential solutions each of which may be appropriate according to the situations and circumstances’ (p 70). While this may seem reasonable, to me this nebulous ‘overall approach’ remains vague and conveniently circumspect. Despite the authors’ recognition that the good tourist concept can only be ‘part of a whole’ there is a danger that the impression given by the book is that the good tourist concept and the overall approach are, in fact, synonymous. Wood and House state categorically that it is ‘impossible to go out and verify a whole country’s environmental tourist policy’ (p 234) and that therefore it is a pointless exercise to rate countries in terms of ‘greenness’. Nevertheless they feel it appropriate to endorse (by way of inclusion in the book) certain tour operators. Even on this considerably less ambitious scale I still, however, wonder to what extent it is possible to conduct a comprehensive environmental audit of all these firms and of the impact of the tourist using them? Tourists are encouraged to ‘environmentally audit yourself’ - surely in practice a rather questionable exercise (exorcise?). We are advised to travel out of season and to ‘consider travelling and visiting places not as well known as the normal’ (p 104). Certainly the tour operators detailed in the book, with their impressive marketable names Discover the World, Arctic Experiences, Ecosafaris, Remote Travel Company etc - dovetail nicely here, catering for demand to those appealing faraway places with strange sounding names. Their product prices, not surp~singly, are often as inaccessible as their destinations. However, according to The Good Tourist ‘money is no longer the stumbling block it once was for travellers’ (p 105). The philosophy espoused is that it is worth paying more for a product that is environmentally friendly. Maybe it is - if you have the money. The logic employed to justify choosing the correct travel method and tour
TOURISM MANAGEMENT February 1993
impact of tourism on the province of Antwerp confusingly begins by stating that Belgium is ‘not a highly popular international tourist destination’ (perhaps the authors have never visited nearby Bruges, although that city is of course in a different province) and that tourism is not of vital importance to the province’s economy, yet concludes by saying ‘tourism must be considered an industry of some significance in the economy of the province for . . . its impact on employment, instance, is about as large as that of the financial and insurance sector’. Surely editors are supposed to pick up inconsistencies like this? Other contributions look at manpower policy in Nepal (highly mathematical), tourism multipliers in Malta (nothing new), visitor flows in Chepstow (this paper’s authors actually admit their selected survey research methodology resulted in an unrepresentative sample of visitors) and the effects of tourism projects in Ireland on employment. So what is one to make of these two volumes overall? Whilst one has to admire the tenacity which the two editors must have had in securing written texts from nearly 40 authors and the hard work which must have gone into editing and updating such disparate material, one must sadly question the justification for the whole exercise. As a regular conference attender, my own experience is that only a small percentage of conference papers have any long-term future or hold real interest to an audience wider than those attending the conference itself. This applies very much in this case because, like the proverbial curate’s egg, the current collection of essays is of very variable quality indeed. In any case the collection simply does not hang together as a whole. Even if it might have been a little damaging to the egos of authors whose papers were not included in the book, surely it would have been better for the editors to have been more selective and to have produced a singlevolume collection. Quite apart from anything else, a f70 price tag for the pair of hardback volumes (incidentally they could easily have gone into a single book - 450 pages is not beyond
76
the capability of most binding equipment) is likely to be a deterrent to many would-be buyers, especially when the content of many of the papers has to be of restricted relevance beyond the immediate confines of the conference hall. To whom might this collection appeal? The back covers of each volume (there are no dust jackets) suggest they are aimed at academic researchers, governmental policy makers and ‘tourism analysts within the industry and financial sector’ [sic]. I have to say that I see the usefulness of both books as strictly limited to those in the academic world and, bearing in mind that with a single exception all the authors are themselves
academics, I really cannot see that these books could hold much interest for marketers or researchers in either the private or public sector. Nor, considering the fact that many of the contributions are put forward as reports of work in progress, do these two volumes offer much to the travel and tourism teacher. This is not to deny that a small handful of the papers would have been worth preserving, perhaps in a less expensive singlevolume paperback. Peter Hodgson Managing Director Travel and Tourism Research Ltd 39c Highbury Place London N5 lQP, UK
Gapsin the literature THE TOURISM INDUSTRY: An International Analysis edited by M. Thea Sinclair and M.J. Stabler CAB International, Wallingford, UK, 1991, XI + 244 pages, f30
The anthology The Tourism Industry consists of 12 chapters. Chapter 1 by Sinclair and Stabler is kind of an editorial. The editors suggest that key gaps in the literature will be filled. Those areas requiring further investigation are identified by providing a threepage review and evaluation of past research on the tourism industry. Due to its minimal length the review of the literature given by Sinclair and Stabler cannot but be grossly incomplete. Mathieson and Wall, after all, needed a full book just to review the impacts of tourism. What is more important, however, is that is it erratic and unbalanced. Important publications by such authors as Cohen,’ MacCannell,* Williams and Zelinsky,3 Greenwood,4 and Nash6 are neglected. Graburn, Although eight specialist geographical journals publishing material on spatial aspects of tourism development are listed, all specialist journals in development studies, which publish articles on tourism and development, such as Economic Development and
TOURISM
Cultural Change, Social and Economic Studies, Development and Change and the Journal of Development Studies.
are ignored, as is the well-established tourism journal Tourism Recreation Research. The statement on page 3 that early discussions of the economic, social, cultural and political effects of tourism development are included in the 1979 anthology edited by De Kadt supposes that De Kadt’s inventory has been comprehensive and ignores early contributions not mentioned in his book, such as those by Cumper, Nunez, Akoglu, Frentrup, Hamouda, Ben-Salem, Levitt and Gulati, Bryden and Faber, Sessa, Cazes and Lundgren (whose publications are listed by Theuns)‘. The booklet by Lea is provided as an example of geographical research on tourism in developing countries. As may be clear from the review by Cohen,’ this choice is not to be applauded. Chapter 2 by Stabler outlines a new model approach to analyse the tourism industry. The approach is built on the confrontation of industry opportunity sets and consumer opportunity sets. It is an interesting exercise to which applies, however, what Kent (p 168) notes with regard to the 1990 publication by Urn and Crompton: ‘Problems surrounding such an approach . . . include the inability to
MANAGEMENT
February
1993
Books
make the concept operational and predictive rather than simply descriptive, the absence of identified parameters for the demarcation of one set from another, and no firm empirical evidence that a multi-stage choice process is actually operative in holiday decision-making’. Chapters 3-5 focus on the travel intermediaries. In Chapter 3 Bennett and Radburn provide a review of the impact of information technology, including computerized reservation systems (CRS), on travel agencies and tour operation businesses. Chapter 4 by Bote Gomez and Sinclair focuses on ownership, market share and vertical integration in the travel industry in the UK and Spain. In Chapter 5 Goodall and Bergsma provide a comparative analysis of tour operators’ strategies in the UK and Netherlands market for skiing holidays. In Chapter 6 Redmond examines the growing importance of sports and health tourism in North America and Europe. Chapters 7-9 are marketing oriented. In Chapter 7 Ashworth analyses inter afia destination images, providing examples from the Mediterranean area. As observed earlier by Din’ for Malaysia, he notes that tourism images may be incompatible with desired national or international images. Chapter 8 by Edwards is on guest and host perceptions of rural tourism in south-west England and northern Portugal. This contribution contains an interesting conciusion on the lack of individual evaluation of farm accommodation and the presence of a universality of appeal. From this universality of image, guidelines may be derived for cooperative marketing of similar small-scafe and scattered forms of accommodation used by foreign independent travellers, particularly in Third World destinations. Chapter 9 by Kent is on holiday choices. In discussing the fact that preferences, like motivations, may be either intrinsic (personal preference) or extrinsic (socially conditioned), and the importance to be attached to the social context of individuals as tourists the chance to draw on the early pub-
TOURISM
MANAGEMENT
lication by Knebel” is forgone. The author further states (p 168) that the tourists make their holiday decisions from positions which are bounded by the limits of attainability and awareness. Within such limits, it is argued, choice itself can be considered to be an attempt to make an optimal decision from a suboptimal position. However, the concept of bounded rationality, as coined by Simon, is more embracing. It includes the possibility that consumers take decisions quite independently of the cost/benefit ratio which they can calculate.” The empirical results on holiday choices derived from a postal questionnaire survey are atypical. independent tourists were found to possess the lowest social class scores for all the groups. have the highest percentage of families in the sample and the greatest average age. Since disaggregation of groups shows inter afia that the highest average age was found for independently booked hotels, the group of independent tourists seems to be too broadly defined. The fact that this category evaluates place images most frequently with a place which is cheap to holiday in, combined with the low social class scores, indicates that in this category the family budget-type holidaymakers prevail. The results are thus atypical in view of both the highbudget FITS and the low-budget explorers. In Chapters 10-12 the distributional aspects of tourism development and the role of the public sector in an economy in transition to a market economy are examined. In Chapter 10 Sinclair provides an interesting analysis of the foreign exchange ‘leakages’ from safari and beach tourism in Kenya. The concept of leakages is, however, given a highly unorthodox and confusing interpretation in that it is taken to include the percentage of the holiday expenditure that does not reach the destination. Moreover, according to Sinclair, the concept of foreign exchange leakage is also used to refer to the evasion of foreign currency controls. Not mentioned, however, is the transfer of factor income. By way of an intricate method the author manages to calculate estimates of the Kenyan shares in foreign
February 1993
tourists’ expenditure on safari and beach package holidays. Overall the results compare reasonably well with the 1984 cost structure of inclusive tours sold through British travel agents as given in the 1989 book by Pearce.” The comparison made by the author with the figure on leakage of foreign exchange from tourism mentioned by Green is invalid as the latter uses an orthodox concept of foreign exchange leakage providing information on the ratio between gross and net earnings, whereas Sinclair’s concept is on the ratio of gross foreign exchange inflow to the total cost of package tours. While Sinclair concentrates on international distributional effects of tourism development, Long in Chapter 11 analyses in a Mexican case study the effects of an unequal internal distribution of benefits from tourism development. The author wrongly presents Perez as a protagonist of international tourism, nota bene on the basis of an article in a Marxist journal. In Chapter 12 Pearce provides a case study of tourism development in Split, Croatia. The problems of transition from a socialist self-managed economy to a market economy may be compared to those connected with the transition from a centrally planned economy to a market economy both in Eastern Europe and Southeast Asia. In summary it may be concluded that The Tourism Industry is an interesting but heterogenous collection of essays. In setting the aims for the anthology the editors have been too ambitious. They declare (p 5) that the anthology seeks, by providing an analytical, interdisciplinary emphasis, to fill important gaps in the literature and to provide new perspectives on key issues in the tourism industry and new methodological directions which might be pursued. Underpinning the book is, reportedly, the theme of the internationalization of tourism’s industrial structure. Due to the incomplete and erratic review of the Iiterature the gaps indicated are chance hits. The gaps are, moreover, haphazardly covered. The resulting analysis of the internationalization of the tourism industry is consequently only par-
77
Books
tial and scanty. Although some effort at integration of the chapters has been made by occasionally referring to each other’s chapters or by passingly pointing to the model approach developed by Stabler, the coherence is weak. This is not to say that the anthology is not worth studying. As this review has pointed out, some of its chapters provide useful insights into the complexities of the development of tourism. H. Lao Theuns Department of Economics Tilburg University PO Box 90153 5000 LE Tilburg
The Netherlands ‘Erik Cohen, ‘Toward a sociology of international tourism’, Social Research, Vol39, No 1,1972, pp 164-182; Erik Cohen, ‘Who is a tourist?: A conceptual clari~cation’, S~of~i~l Review, Vol 22, No 4, 1974, pp 527-555. 2D. MacCannell, ‘Staged authenticity: arrangements of social space in tourist settings’, American Joumai of Sociology, Vol 79, No 3, 1973, pp 589-603. 3Anthony V. Williams and Wilbur Zelinsky, ‘On some patterns in international tourist
flows’. Economic Geography, Vof 46, No 4, 1970, pp 54Q-567. . 4Dawdd J. Greenwood. ‘Tourism as an ageni of change: a Spanish Basque case’, Ethnology, Vol 11, No 1, 1972, pp 80-91. 5Nelson H.H. Graburn, ‘The anthropology of tourism’, Annals of Tourism Re&ear& Vol 10, No 1,1983, pp Q-33. 6Dennison Nash, ‘Tourism as an anthropological subject’, Current Anthropology, Vol 22, No 5, 1981, DD461-481. ‘H. Leo Theuns,’ kbirci World Tourism ffesearch 1950-7984; A Guide fo Literature, Peter Lang, Frankfurt am Main, 1991. *Erik Cohen, ‘Neo-colonialism in the Third World; review of Tourism and Development in the Third World by John Lea’, Tourism Management, Vol 10, No 2, 1969, p 177. ‘Kadir H. Din, ‘Towards an integrated approach to tourism development: observations from Malaysia’, in Tej Vir Singh, H. Leo Theuns and Frank M. Go, eds, Towards Appropriate Tourism: The Case of Devefoping Countries, Peter Lang, Frankfurt am Main, 1989, pp 181-203. ‘“Hans-Joachim Knebel. Sozidlooische
S~ru~~~andl~ngen im m~emen ?ourismus, Ferdinand Enke Verlag, Stuttgart, 1960. “Richard D. Sartel, ‘The failure of armchair economics: interview with Herbert A. Simon’, Challenge, Vol 29, No 5, 1986, pp 18-25. ‘2Douglas Pearce, Tourist Development, 2 ed, Longman, Harlow, 1989.
Cont~mpopa~tourism issues THE GOOD TOURIST by Katie Wood and Syd House Mandarin, London, 7992, f5.99
The objectives of this book, written for the ‘intelligent, caring traveller’ are ‘to provide a balanced analysis of the good and bad aspects of tourism; to offer tips and advice to prospective tourists; to promote a more responsible form of tourism - the “good tourist” concept - and to provide information on the range of holidays available that conform to the basis of good tourism’ (preface). As one would expect from such experienced authors, The Good Tourist on the whole achieves these objectives and does so in a readable, stimulating manner. The book serves both as a good read and as a reference text combining interesting, perceptive, subjective material with a wide range
78
of relevant factual information - of particular note are the array of examples of tourism impact and a useful Appendix of Contact Organizations. However, the book does not fully address the central issue of whether the good tourist concept - the core theme of the book and one that is promoted with vigorous conviction-is actually an effective method of dealing with the negative impact problems as outlined in the book. Wood and House acknowledge that ‘some have tourism argued that “responsible” alone is not a real answer: it can be construed as a middle-class, educated and elitist cop-out for those who are caught up in the groundswell of green issues. It is small scale, slow and attempting steady, controlled, and thus sustainable, growth. Is it really the answer to the enormous problems of mass tourism dealing with the movement of enormous numbers of
people? The answer is probably no, not in itself, but it can be part of an overall approach to tackling the problems. Such an approach must encompass a whole range of potential solutions each of which may be appropriate according to the situations and circumstances’ (p 70). While this may seem reasonable, to me this nebulous ‘overall approach’ remains vague and conveniently circumspect. Despite the authors’ recognition that the good tourist concept can only be ‘part of a whole’ there is a danger that the impression given by the book is that the good tourist concept and the overall approach are, in fact, synonymous. Wood and House state categorically that it is ‘impossible to go out and verify a whole country’s environmental tourist policy’ (p 234) and that therefore it is a pointless exercise to rate countries in terms of ‘greenness’. Nevertheless they feel it appropriate to endorse (by way of inclusion in the book) certain tour operators. Even on this considerably less ambitious scale I still, however, wonder to what extent it is possible to conduct a comprehensive environmental audit of all these firms and of the impact of the tourist using them? Tourists are encouraged to ‘environmentally audit yourself’ - surely in practice a rather questionable exercise (exorcise?). We are advised to travel out of season and to ‘consider travelling and visiting places not as well known as the normal’ (p 104). Certainly the tour operators detailed in the book, with their impressive marketable names Discover the World, Arctic Experiences, Ecosafaris, Remote Travel Company etc - dovetail nicely here, catering for demand to those appealing faraway places with strange sounding names. Their product prices, not surp~singly, are often as inaccessible as their destinations. However, according to The Good Tourist ‘money is no longer the stumbling block it once was for travellers’ (p 105). The philosophy espoused is that it is worth paying more for a product that is environmentally friendly. Maybe it is - if you have the money. The logic employed to justify choosing the correct travel method and tour
TOURISM MANAGEMENT February 1993