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Beach Tourism

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The SAGE International Encyclopedia of
Travel and Tourism
Beach Tourism

Contributors: Felicity Picken

Edited by: Linda L. Lowry
Book Title: The SAGE International Encyclopedia of Travel and Tourism
Chapter Title: "Beach Tourism"
Pub. Date: 2017
Access Date: March 6, 2018
Publishing Company: SAGE Publications, Inc
City: Thousand Oaks
Print ISBN: 9781483368948
Online ISBN: 9781483368924
DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781483368924.n51
Print pages: 135-136
©2017 SAGE Publications, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
This PDF has been generated from SAGE Knowledge. Please note that the pagination of
the online version will vary from the pagination of the print book.
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Beach tourism is one of the earliest modern forms of tourism and a staple of the tourism
industry. This kind of tourism at coastal resorts is often considered to result from an inevitable
attraction to the beach, but the relationship is one in which tourism and leisure are an
inherent part of the formation of the desirability of beaches. As a resort-styled destination, the
beach is almost synonymous with the makings of modern tourism. This is partly because the
beach as a desirable pleasure space did not become notable until the 19th century, following
the defeat of sentiments of danger and strangeness through its gradual reinvention as a
coastal resort and playground for pleasure.

Beginning with the cool beaches of the north and spreading to the warmer beaches beyond,
first the wealthy requiring a cure, then the mass day-trippers on trains and families on
holidays, and now international tourists of various types make up the market of one of the
most successful forms of tourism. Today’s mature beach tourism sector, where high-amenity
lifestyles describe the pleasure of sun, sea, surf, and sex, is a recent, if highly popular,
invention.

Development of Beach Tourism

Although pleasurable beaches have become naturalized and seemingly inevitable, they were
developed through distinctly modern principles and rules of engagement. Cautionary tales of
the sea and coast have a longer history than modernity and modern forms of travel. Today’s
taken-for-granted coastal attraction was inconceivable as little as 200 years ago and
depended on cultural processes that demystified coastal areas, first as medicinal havens for
the wealthy in the early development of popular resorts.

Before this, the Judeo-Christian coast, for example, was always the result of catastrophe, a
remnant of ruination caused by the destructive force of the Biblical flood putting an end to the
paradisiacal Eden. At this time, the sea was a mysterious and dangerous place, unknown and
unknowable, sporadically delivering havoc on land that was completely alien to it. Religious
belief, alongside the persistent knowledge of superstition and myth, continued to align the
beach with danger and undesirability. This incited distrust and fear until the Enlightenment,
challenging both of these, marked the beginnings of a modern system of appreciation.

Image 1 From the shore of a beach resort, visitors watch waves in Cancún, Mexico.
While the original appeal of beach tourism involved cooler climates, warmth and
sunshine now define beach tourism’s appeal.

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Source: Richard Wilkie

Once freed from narratives of “the fall” and opened up to a scientific gaze, people were able
to relate to the sea in a rational as well as romantic way, the latter most notable through the
aesthetic of the sublime. Science and technology began to tame, harness, and exploit the
coast for the uncontested improvement and advancement of modern “empire,” as oceans
began to connect and globalize the territories of the world rather than disconnect and
regionalize them. Sublimity and science opened up a beach that became both safe and
poetic, setting the stage for what we recognize as beach tourism today.

In remaining somewhat undisciplined, the appeal of the beach as a place of pleasure and
also for liminal experiences was able to develop. The restless movement of the sea served as
a reference point to its unpredictable and tempestuous nature that, crucially, formed the basis
of excitement that propelled the allure of the beach as a space for reinvention, rejuvenation,
and recreation.

In the second half of the 20th century, this liminality transpired through the gradual
popularization of surfing, nudism, and rituals associated with sexual experimentation and the
spectacle of the body freed from usual attire and placed on display. The warm climates soon
gained appeal over earlier cool beach resorts in the United Kingdom, adding to the
languorous and relaxing properties of the beach and permission to invert the everyday
realities of predominantly urban, noncoastal life.

Before this, the earliest developments of beach tourism began as a form of health tourism as
people were drawn out from rapidly urbanizing hinterlands toward the sea. By the mid-18th
century, the “seaside,” as a comparatively tamed version of the coast, was attracting wealthy
patrons to the curative properties of salt water and sea air. They, and their entourages,
brought with them a set of expectations that developed opportunities for the provision of
services and entertainment in coastal places.

This began the prototypical British seaside resort, putting the curative properties of the
seaside in contrast with the pathological properties of the cities and towns that were

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undergoing rapid growth through industrialization. Through the twin emphasis on health and
the patronage of the wealthy, darker notions of the sea and coastline became brighter notions
of seasides that were increasingly designed for pleasure. Further popularity followed,
increasing industrialization and literally paving the way to the coast through railways.
Increasing dissatisfaction with the emergent urban way of life was nevertheless met with the
compensatory surge in economic prosperity and increased amounts of leisure, enabling the
first mass tourism to the United Kingdom coast and prototypical seaside resort.

Resort Model of Beach Tourism

During the late 19th and 20th centuries, the diffusion of this U.K. resort model was
successfully transferred to the Mediterranean and Americas. South Africa, New Zealand,
Australia, and Canada spread a universalized aesthetic, a set of activities, motivation, and
model of development for the popularization of beach tourism. This model of development is
well known in the “tourism area life cycle” as proposed by Richard Butler, closely
approximating the product life cycle but attuned to a tourist destination through stages of
exploration, involvement, development, consolidation, and decline or rejuvenation.

This cycle is discernible and often applied to biographies of well-established seaside resorts
such as Brighton and Blackpool in the United Kingdom, Coney Island in the United States,
and Coolangatta in Australia. Combined with the motor vehicle, these resorts soon attracted
family-style tourism, providing the opportunity to get away for summer holidays. Families were
attracted to the beach resort model’s logic of spatial containment where beach tourism
followed a daily staple of activities for parents and children in the safe environs of the resort.
As markets became increasingly differentiated, resorts became ever more elaborate in order to
compete for the annual family holiday. This developed the resort-based approach to beach
tourism into its familiar form today.

Although the U.K. models of beach or seaside tourism were based on cool beaches and
climates, warmer beach resorts soon overtook their popularity and in some cases became
saturated, in the common aim of exploiting the sun, sea, sand, and sex themes in the warm
waters of the Mediterranean region and the Caribbean. Places such as the Riviera Maya in
Mexico, as well as the popular and opulent-styled resorts on the Pacific in places such as
Acapulco and the islands of Hawaii and Fiji, are now successfully rivaled by the popularization
of beach resorts in Southeast Asia, including higher rates of growth in places such as Penang
in Malaysia, Phuket in Thailand, and Bali in Indonesia.

So routine is the opportunity of golden sands for tourism that the prevalence of beach tourism
is difficult to measure. The beach is most often included in measurements of “nature-based
tourism” through activity scales or in visitation to islands or adjacent cities. For example, Bondi
Beach and the Gold Coast are among Australia’s most popular tourist attractions, but visitors
are counted among metropolitan statistics, whereas many of the regional beach areas are
described by rural or ecotourism statistics.

The popularity of the beach resort not only diminishes its distinctiveness in terms of visitor
accounting, but tourist destinations reliant on the resort model have increasingly fallen prey to
the difficulty of differentiation in highly competitive beach destinations. So successful is the
beach as a tourist destination that, increasingly, countries reliant on beach tourism are faced
with the problem of how to maintain distinctiveness when this form of tourism has become so
routinized.

Page 4 of 6 The SAGE International Encyclopedia of Travel and Tourism

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New tourist practices and trends are now pushing the limits of beach tourism in the opposite
direction, developing complementary hinterland attractions, including rural, culinary, and wine
tourism as well as increasingly developing attractions “out to sea.” This expanded horizon of
pleasure beyond the literal zone exploits the increasing willingness of tourists to immerse in
undersea environments and encounter new innovative leisure attractions, including
underwater museums, art galleries, restaurants, and hotels. Coastal hinterlands are also
being drawn on to differentiate the limitations of the resort model by expanding the destination
offerings to include adjacent cities or rural areas and diversify the tourist product.

At the same time, coastal areas are increasingly attractive to the competing interest of
residential development as beachfront property vies for a space on the coast and with this,
exclusive rights to adjacent beachfront areas. In these cases, tourist resorts are often
regarded as unruly and unwanted catchments for undesirable behavior with detrimental
environmental and cultural impacts.

As hedonistic expectations and activity incited increased levels of crime, exceeded carrying
capacity, and caused a decline in the quality of desirability of the resort experience, exclusivity
in resort and tourist offerings now seek to replace the masses with more desirable forms of
niche tourism. Relatively underdeveloped coastal areas are then sought at a premium price to
ensure exclusive experiences that generally encompass a more holistic set of experiences that
are not singularly focused on the pleasure beach but offer a range of activities and attractions
aimed at more discerning tourists.

Felicity Picken

See alsoButler’s Tourism Area Life Cycle and Its Expansion to the Creative Economy;
Cancún, Mexico; Culinary Tourism; Fiji; Phuket, Thailand; Wine Tourism

Further Readings

Butler, R. (2004). The tourism area life cycle in the 21st century. In A. Lew, C. M. Hall, & A.
Williams (Eds.), A companion to tourism (pp. 159–170). Oxford, England: Blackwell.

Corbin, A. (1994). The lure of the sea: The discovery of the seaside in the Western world.
Berkeley: University of California Press.

Demars, S. (1979). British contributions to American seaside resorts. Annals of Tourism

Research, 6(3), 285–293.

Franklin, A., Picken, F., & Osbaldiston, N. (2013). The changing nature of the Australian
beach tourism in a low carbon society. International Journal of Climate Change: Impacts and
Responses, 5(1), 1–10.

Hunstman, L. (2001). Sand in our souls. Melbourne, Australia: Melbourne University Press.

Laderman, S. (2014). Empire in waves: A political history of surfing. Berkeley: University of

California Press.

Obrador Pons, P., Crang, M., & Travlou, P. (2009). Cultures of mass tourism: Doing the
Mediterranean in the age of banal mobilities. Surrey, England: Ashgate.

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 SAGE SAGE Reference
Contact SAGE Publications at http://www.sagepub.com.

Preston-Whyte, R. (2001). Constructed leisure space: The seaside at Durban. Annals of

Tourism Research, 28(3), 581–596.

Shields, R. (1991). Places on the margin: Alternative geographies of modernity. London,

England: Routledge.

Travis, J. (1993). The rise of the Devon seaside resort: 1750–1900. Devon, England: University
of Exeter Press.

Urbain, J.-D. (2003). At the beach (C. Porter, Trans.). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press.

tourism
beaches
resort
seaside resorts
seas
coasts
coastal areas

Felicity Picken
http://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781483368924.n51
10.4135/9781483368924.n51

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