In other cases, these events take place at certain intervals and are hosted at different venues around the world. The Olympic Games are a global event held every two years, alternating between the summer and winter games. Major cities compete to host the games, not only to bring international attention to the city and country but also to bring investment and tourism. Vancouver, Canada, host to the 2010 Winter Olympic Games, was estimated to have received more than five thousand athletes and officials, ten thousand media representatives, and 2 million on-site spectators. The FIFA (Fédération Internationale de Football Association) World Cup is also a major world event that occurs every four years. The 2010 FIFA World Cup, hosted in South Africa, had an estimated 3 million people in attendance over the course of the month-long event.10
Professional conferences, conventions, congresses, and trade fairs have become so important that major cities all over the world have developed extensive convention facilities and actively compete to host organizations’ events. These events range from just a few hundred participants to tens of thousands. For example, the 2010 Annual Meeting of the Association of American Geographers, held in Washington, D.C., saw more than eight thousand participants from eighty-one countries.11 The majority of these participants must travel to and stay at the event site. While these are events that people may be required to attend for their jobs or for career advancement, the destination may encourage them to participate in other activities while they are there, such as evening entertainment activities, sightseeing, and shopping, or perhaps to stay longer than the required duration of their participation at the event.
The same increased mobilities that have created the dispersed networks of friends and families that play a role in VFR tourism have also generated a type of event tourism. While VFR tourism is considered tourism in which people travel to visit friends and family in their home environments, social events such as family reunions may also be planned so that each family member travels to a set location to meet the others. In some cases, this is a centralized location that is easily accessible to all, but increasingly reunions are being held at vacation destinations to take advantage of the tourism infrastructure as well as maximize the limited time and money many families have available for travel. Likewise, the rise of destination weddings has generated a type of event tourism where the couple, as well as friends and family, travel to a tourism destination for the ceremony as well as related activities.
Service or Volunteer Tourism
Service or volunteer tourism involves traveling to another place to volunteer one’s time providing aid, assisting with local development, contributing to conservation efforts, participating in research projects, and more. This is not always a clearly differentiated tourism product. We may not think of service work that takes place outside of the home environment as tourism because of our long-standing association of tourism with leisure activities and the pursuit of pleasure. Yet, these activities nonetheless fall under that broad definition of tourism consisting of travel to other places for various purposes. Moreover, many people will also participate in leisure activities during the course of their trip.
Service tourism generally involves the movement of tourists from the more developed countries of the world to the less developed ones. However, service tourism destinations may also be impoverished areas of developed countries or those devastated by a natural disaster, such as the hurricane-ravaged Gulf Coast region of the United States. Although the potential market for service tourism includes everyone, experiences may be oriented toward young people, particularly students or recent college graduates.
Service tourists do not easily fit into the tourist “types” (chapter 2). The tourists who are interested in this product will have characteristics in common with drifters and explorers: they wish to visit out-of-the-ordinary places, interact with local people, and have a deeper experience of place. Unlike drifters and explorers who create their own experiences, service tourists must rely on an organization to both create opportunities for service and facilitate their experience. Some activities will be set up by local groups, such as churches, but there are a variety of travel agencies and nonprofits that also organize experiences for various humanitarian, conservation, education, or research purposes. This may, in fact, open more doors for service tourists, allowing them to more effectively penetrate the back regions of a place than even drifters. These tourists have the opportunity to experience life as it is lived in that place by staying, eating, and socializing with local people.
Organizations that create service tourism opportunities may offer some type of sponsorship or financial support for participants, usually exceptional young people. Others may assist in fundraising that will both benefit the project and allow people to participate who wouldn’t otherwise have the means, such as inner-city youth. However, most service tourists pay for their travel, accommodation, and other daily expenses in addition to donating their time and labor. In some cases, they may actually pay more for their experiences—while receiving fewer services—than they would for a traditional holiday. This may be because the tourism infrastructure at the places where service projects are conducted is less developed or because the area is more difficult to reach than a mass tourism destination. Their contribution to a project may also require that they stay at a place for a longer period of time than an average vacation. However, those interested in this experience believe that the intangible benefits are worth the monetary cost.
This product is sometimes considered “alternative tourism” in that it presents tourists with an alternative to other products that appeal to traditional touristic motivations. For example, the “alternative spring break” is targeted at students looking for something other than the typical spring break trip that covers all of the S’s. Service tourists are motivated by their desire for a different type of experience and one that makes a positive contribution to the places they visit. This has more meaning to them than if they simply gave money to a cause, because they were a distinct part of the process and they can see and feel the effects directly. At the same time, service tourism holds distinct benefits for the tourists as well. This product allows for even greater interaction with and immersion in other places and cultures. The experience is not always an easy one, often requiring adjustments to the unfamiliar and the unexpected, but it can be exceptionally rewarding. Many service tourists argue that the personal development resulting from the experience has a more substantial and lasting impact on their lives after they return home than a typical vacation.
Although there are key differences in both motivations and experiences, there may be overlap between service tourism and other products discussed above, depending on the nature of the project. Earthwatch Institute’s South African mammal conservation project could also be considered ecotourism. A Volunteer Latin America project, in which participants learn about and work on an organic farm in Ecuador, could be considered rural or agrotourism. A Go! Overseas Teach Abroad program at a school in one of Rio de Janeiro’s favelas (figure 3.6) could be considered urban tourism, and a Cultural Restoration Tourism Project restoring an ancient Buddhist temple in Mongolia could be considered cultural tourism.
Figure 3.6. In addition to contributions to the destination, service tourism can be a tremendously rewarding experience for tourists. This volunteer says good-bye to the children she taught at a primary school in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. (Source: Heather Camacho)
Conclusion
Tourism is constantly evolving with ever more specialized products to meet the demands of tourists. This chapter introduces only a few of the products now offered by destinations around the world. Moreover, it should be evident from this discussion that each category could be further subdivided into tourism products that reflect a specific interest, activity, or experience (e.g., golf tourism as a part of summer sport tourism as a part of sport tourism), which would require a far more in-depth examination. Nonetheless, this overview contributes to our broad understanding of tourism.
It also provides the necessary context for discussions of the geographic foundation for and the effects of tourism, since different types of tourism and tourism products rely on varied resources and have their own distinct effects.
Key Terms
ecotourism
tourism products
Notes
1. United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, “United Nations Organizations Cooperate to Stamp Out Human Trafficking and Sex Tourism,” April 2012, accessed December 7, 2012, http://www.unodc.org/unodc/en/frontpage/2012/April/united-nations-organizations-cooperate-to-stamp-out-human-trafficking-and-sex-tourism.html.
2. Martin Oppermann, “Sex Tourism,” Annals of Tourism Research 26, no. 2 (1999).
3. United States Census Bureau, “2010 Census Urban and Rural Classification and Urban Area Criteria,” accessed April 28, 2011, http://www.census.gov/geo/www/ua/2010urbanruralclass.html.
4. Bob McKercher and Hilary du Cros, Cultural Tourism: The Partnership between Tourism and Cultural Heritage Management (New York: Haworth Hospitality Press, 2002), 1.
5. United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization, “The Criteria for Selection,” accessed September 10, 2011, http://whc.unesco.org/en/criteria/.
6. Oktoberfest, “The Oktoberfest Is Over!” accessed November 23, 2010, http://www.oktoberfest.de/en/article/About+the+Oktoberfest/About+the+Oktoberfest/The+Oktoberfest+is+over!/2205/.
7. Ohio Sauerkraut Festival, “Festival History,” accessed November 23, 2010, http://www.sauerkrautfestival.com/.
8. Kentucky Derby, “2011 Kentucky Derby,” accessed November 23, 2010, http://www.kentuckyderby.info/.
9. Wimbledon 2010 Official Website, “About Wimbledon,” accessed November 23, 2010, http://aeltc2010.wimbledon.org/en_GB/about/guide/club.html.
10. Fédération Internationale de Football Association, “Lessons from 2006,” July 9, 2010, accessed November 23, 2010, http://www.fifa.com/worldcup/archive/southafrica2010/news/newsid=1270860/index.html.
11. Association of American Geographers, “Washington, D.C: Building Partnerships for Geography,” May 2010, accessed December 1, 2012, http://www.aag.org/galleries/meridian-files/201005Meridian.pdf
Sources
Fennell, David A. Ecotourism. 3rd ed. London: Routledge, 2008.
McKercher, Bob, and Hilary du Cros. Cultural Tourism: The Partnership between Tourism and Cultural Heritage Management. New York: Haworth Hospitality Press, 2002.
Moscardo, Gianna, Philip Pearce, Alastair Morrison, David Green, and Joseph T. O’Leary. “Developing a Typology for Understanding Visiting Friends and Relatives Markets.” Journal of Travel Research 38, no. 3 (2000): 251–59.
Oppermann, Martin. “Sex Tourism.” Annals of Tourism Research 26, no. 2 (1999): 251–66.
Smith, Melanie K. Issues in Cultural Tourism Studies. 2nd ed. London: Routledge, 2009.
Wearing, Stephen. Volunteer Tourism: Experiences That Make a Difference. Wallingford, UK: CABI, 2001.
Williams, Stephen. Tourism Geography. London: Routledge, 1998.
Part II
The Geographic Foundation of Tourism
Tourism is not simply a product of the modern world. People have been traveling for various reasons since ancient times. However, patterns of tourism have historically been spatially concentrated. Certain places became destinations for tourists, because those places were accessible based on the transportation systems available at the time and because they possessed the physical and/or cultural resources that were valued by people in the principal tourist-generating societies during that period. Today, we see the dynamic reshaping of tourism patterns. Places all over the world are more accessible than ever, and new tourist markets are demanding different types of experiences. Trying to understand these ever-changing patterns in places with widely varied circumstances can seem overwhelming. Yet the framework of geography—with its diverse set of topical branches across both physical and human geography—provides us with the means of exploring all of these issues.
This section begins our examination of tourism through the topical branches of geography. In particular, these chapters consider the geographic foundation of tourism. Chapter 4 discusses the historical geography of tourism. While we cannot make a comprehensive study of the historical geography of tourism in this introductory text, this chapter provides an overview of tourism in key past periods and examines some of the geographic factors that contributed to the development of the modern tourism industry. Chapter 5 discusses the transport geography of tourism. It examines the components of the transport system and some of the fundamental issues in tourism transport. Chapter 6 discusses the physical geography of tourism. This chapter illustrates how we can use the tools and concepts of branches in physical geography to understand the physical resources that provide the basis for tourism at destinations around the world and the physical factors that present a barrier to tourism. Finally, chapter 7 discusses the cultural geography of tourism. It draws on the tools and concepts in one of human geography’s most prominent branches to understand the cultural resources used in tourism, as well as cultural barriers.
Chapter 4
The Historical Geography of Tourism
Some of us may daydream about hopping in our car and driving across the West, cruising the Caribbean for four days and three nights, or getting on a plane and flying to Australia. Of course, we may never take these trips, for any number of reasons. But it’s easy for us to imagine because we can do these things, which is something we often take for granted. If we look back, say, two hundred years, it is an entirely different story. At this time, the first expeditions across the American West had only just been completed by explorers like Lewis and Clark. The round trip journey took over two years of difficult travel on foot, on horseback, and in small boats. A sail to and around the Caribbean would take many months, dependent on wind and weather conditions. It could be a dangerous journey, with threats of hurricanes, tropical diseases, slave revolts, pirate attacks, or naval battles. Traveling to Australia would have been virtually unthinkable for an American.
Yet, as hard as it may be for us to comprehend, tourism was already a well-established phenomenon in the world. Clearly there are significant differences between this early tourism and today, but there are surprising parallels as well. Thinking about the past is not just a matter of idle curiosity; it is essential if we are to truly understand modern tourism in all of its complexity.
Historical geography is a topical branch of geography. Like the other branches, historical geography uses the framework of geography to examine topics in and contribute to the study of a particular field—in this case, history (see figure 1.1). Therefore, we can consider historical geography to be the study of the geography and geographic conditions of past periods. Yet, historical geography has another vital role to play. Geography is a means of understanding the world. However, as we examine current patterns and circumstances of places, we cannot truly understand them if we do not understand how they came to be. Thus, historical geography can also be used to examine the processes of change that have taken place over time so that we might better understand the geography of the present. Perhaps taken a step further, if we understand this evolution over time, we might be able to project the geography of the future. As such, historical geography has a part to play in all geography, including the geography of tourism.
Research in tourism studies has often focused on contemporary issues, and tourism has typically been a neglected topic in historical research. Likewise, there has been little relationship between tourism geography and historical geography, despite the fact that the latter framework clearly has potential to contribute to both the study of tourism in past periods and the evolution of tourism over time. Consequently, historical tourism research has been somewhat uneven, focusing on tourism during specific time periods or in particular places. Yet, the evolution of tourism as a mass phenomenon is considered one of the most significant social developments in recent history. The importance of
studying the past to understand the factors that allowed the development of tourism, and the origins of many of the patterns we see today, should be clear.
This chapter continues to lay the foundation for our discussion of the geography of tourism. It provides an overview of tourism in key past periods and the development of the modern tourism industry (figure 4.1). The framework of geography can help us understand the factors that allowed this development to take place. We will consider some of these factors here so that we may begin to develop an appreciation for broad patterns and trends in tourism; however, we will continue to examine these issues as they pertain to the topical branches discussed in the following chapters.
Figure 4.1. We can examine patterns and trends of tourism in past periods to help us understand the circumstances of modern tourism. (Source: Nancy Shumaker)
Studying Historical Tourism
The origin of tourism is a subject of debate among scholars. This is partially attributed to the lack of a clear definition and what motivations and/or activities should (or should not) be considered tourism. Travel has taken place throughout human history, leading some scholars to argue that we can trace this history back to the Sumerians some six thousand years ago.1 Most scholars don’t go back so far, as little is known about this period. However, some scholars point to evidence found in the ancient Mediterranean world among the Greek and Roman civilizations as some of the earliest examples of tourism. Others consider health-related travel and religious pilgrimages as important predecessors of tourism.
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