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UNIT ONE
GEOGRAPHY OF
TOURISM
AND DEVELOPMENT
Course Code GeEs 4012
Prepared By:Mesud Sh .
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 Points for Discussion
• The essence of tourism and tourism
geography 
• The concept of tourism with leisure,
recreation and travel 
• The approaches in the study of tourism 
• The problems in studying the tourism
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• Tourism can be defined in more than one way
depending up on the basis of the study, such as
geography, sociology, psychology or economics.
• A convenient definition that overcomes this
difficulty is the one proposed again by the World
Tourism Organization (1991) which was
subsequently endorsed by the UN Statistical
Commission in 1993:
– ‘‘Tourism comprises the activities of persons
travelling to and staying in places outside their usual
environment for not more than one consecutive year
for leisure, business or other purposes.’’

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 This definition distinguishes the following
types of tourism:
 Domestic tourism involving the
residents of a country visiting their own
country. 
 Inbound tourism involving non-
residents visiting a country other than
their own.
Outbound tourism involving residents
of a country visiting other countries.
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 • These three basic forms of tourism can in
turn be combined to derive the following
categories of tourism:
 Internal tourism which comprises
domestic tourism and inbound tourism 
National tourism which comprises
domestic tourism and outbound
tourism, and 
International tourism which comprises
inbound and outbound tourism.
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 The Relationship between Tourism, Leisure and
Recreation
• The words leisure, recreation, and tourism are often used
to express similar meanings. 
• Leisure is a measure of the time left over after work, rest,
sleep and household chores. Leisure is the time when an
individual can do what he likes to refresh his /her spirits.
• Recreation means a variety of activities which a person
could choose to refresh his/her sprit. It may include
activities as diverse as a game of golf, watching television
or travelling abroad.
• Tourism, therefore, is simply one of these activities which a
person could undertake to refresh his/her sprit. It places
tourism firmly as part of recreation activities spectrum of a
person. 1 7
 Travel and Tourism
• The terms travel and tourism are often
interchanged within the published literature on
tourism.
• But, these two terms tend to be used in differing
contexts to mean similar things.
• Thus, it should be clear that all tourism
includes some travel but not all travel is
tourism, while the temporary and short term
nature of most tourist trips distinguishes it
from migration.
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 Tourism and recreation
• Tourism and recreation are different.
• Tourism is associated with free time as well as
working time ( Business Tourism).
• Recreation occurs totally during leisure time
/free Time/.
• Tourism is always associated with displacement
from ones home community, while not all
recreation is.

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 Leisure and Recreation
• Leisure is the free time you have.
• Recreation is what you do for fun during
that free time.

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 The Study of Geography of Tourism
 


Approaches in the Study of Tourism includes:
1.Institutional Approach
2.Product Approach
3.Historical Approach
4.Managerial Approach
5.Economic Approach
6.Sociological Approach
7.Geographical Approach
8.Interdisciplinary Approaches
9.The Systems Approach
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1. Institutional Approach
• It considers the various intermediaries and institutions
that perform tourism activities.
• It emphasizes institutions such as the travel agency.
 It requires an investigation of the organization,
 operating methods,
 problems,
 costs, and
 economic place of travel agents who act on behalf of the
customer, purchasing services from airlines, rental car
companies, hotels, and so on.
 An advantage of this approach is that it provides a
database for further study.
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2. Product Approach
 It involves the study of various tourism products
and how they are produced, marketed, and
consumed.
3.Historical Approach
 The historical approach is not widely used.
 It involves an analysis of tourism activities and
institutions from an evolutionary angle.
 It searches for the cause of innovations, their
growth or decline, and shifts in interest.
 Because mass tourism is a fairly recent
phenomenon, this approach has limited usefulness.
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 4. Managerial Approach
 It is firm-oriented (microeconomic), focusing on the
management activities necessary to operate a tourist
enterprise, such as planning, research, pricing,
advertising, control, and the like.
 It is a popular approach.
 other perspectives are also being used and it is also
important for all approach.
 It refers to Products change, institutions change, and
society changes.
 It means that managerial objectives and procedures
must be geared to change to meet shifts in the
tourism environment. 1 14
5. Economic Approach
 It concerns about its importance to both domestic
and world economies.
 This approach is useful in providing a framework
for analyzing tourism and its contributions to a
country‘s economy and economic development.
 The disadvantage of the economic approach is
that whereas tourism is an important economic
phenomenon, it has noneconomic impacts as
well. The economic approach does not usually pay
adequate attention to the environmental, cultural,
psychological, sociological, and anthropological
approaches. 1 15
 6. Sociological Approach
• Tourism tends to be a social activity.
• It refers to the tourism behavior of individuals and
groups of people and the impact of tourism on
society.
• It examines social classes, habits, and customs of
both hosts and guests.
• The sociology of leisure is a relatively undeveloped
field, but it shows promise of progressing rapidly
and becoming more widely used.
• it states that studies will be conducted more and
more from a social point of view.
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 7. Geographical Approach
 Geography is a wide-ranging discipline, so it is
natural that geographers should be interested in
tourism and its spatial aspects.
 The geographer‘s approach to tourism sheds light
on the location of tourist areas, the movements of
people created by tourism locales, the changes that
tourism brings to the landscape in the form of tourism
facilities, dispersion of tourism development, physical
planning, and economic, social, and cultural problems.
 Geographers have investigated the area more
thoroughly than have scholars in many other
disciplines.
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8. Interdisciplinary Approaches
 Tourism embraces virtually all aspects of our society.
 It calls for :
 anthropological approach
 a psychological approach
 a political science approach
 a legal approach
 The fact simply is that tourism is so vast, so
complex, and so multifaceted that it is
necessary to have a number of approaches to
studying the field, each geared to a somewhat
different task or objective.
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9. The Systems Approach
It refers to study tourism is a systems approach.
A system is a set of interrelated groups coordinated to
form a unified whole and organized to accomplish a set
of goals.
It integrates the other approaches into a comprehensive method
dealing with both micro and macro issues.
It states that how it operates within and relates to other systems,
such as legal, political, economic, and social systems.
There are two approaches in the study of tourism:
A. Tourism as industry, and
B. Tourism as a system.
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 A. Tourism as Industry

 what is the difference between

tourism and other types of industries?

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• It does not have the usual production function, nor
does it have an output which can physically be
measured
• Due to the vague and dispersed nature of the tourism
industry has made it difficult to evaluate its impact
upon the economy relative to other economic sectors.
• It is not always easy to disaggregate tourism‘s
contribution to Environmental problems from the
contributions of other economic sectors.
• A tourism industry does not exist because it does not
produce a distinct product. But, an industry is defined
as a group of firms engaged in the manufacture or
production of a given product or service
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Eg. Certain industries such as transport,
accommodation and entertainment are not
exclusively tourism industries, for they sell these
services to local residents as well.
• It is the consumer who travels to the product‘ and
not vice versa. There fore the natural and cultural
resources of destinations can be treated as a form
of product.
• Similarly with other Industries: Tourism industry
 processes tourists like metal industry processes
metal
 can compiling a standardized package during Mass
tourism through tour operators
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• In summary, the tourism industry‘ cannot be
likened to other industries as it does not
produce a single identifiable product and
neither are many of its services used
exclusively by tourists. Essentially when the
term tourism industry‘ is used, it refers to an
amalgam of different businesses and
organizations, connected by the common
factor of providing services in some capacity
to tourists.
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 B. Tourism as a System

How we can look Tourism as a system?

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• It refers that Tourism incorporating not only
businesses and tourists, but also societies and
environments in the form of a system.
• Every part of tourism is related to every other part,
and that no manager or owner involved in the tourism
system has complete control over his or her own
destiny. For instance the predicted climatic changes
associated with global warming pose a significant
threat to existing patterns of tourism demand.
• The advantage of a systems approach is that it allows
the complexity of the real life situation to be
accounted for in a simple model, demonstrating the
linkages of all the different elements.
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Problems in the Study of Tourism

Why is the study of tourism‘

problematic?

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• First, in many situations, comparability
across space and time is made difficult or
sometimes impossible by variation in official
practice in distinguishing and recording the
levels of tourist activity.
• Second, there are problems inherent in the
definition of tourism as an industry.
• A third practical problem is the lack of a
conceptual grounding for the study of
tourism.
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 Geography and the Study of Tourism

• what can Geographers brings to the study of

tourism?

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• Tourism (with its focus upon travelling and the
transfer of people, goods and services through
time and space) is essentially a geographical
phenomenon, and accordingly there are a number
of ways through which a geographical perspective
can illuminate the subject: through
1. The effect of scale
It refers that the spatial perspective allows us initially
to recognize and make a valuable distinction between
activities at a range of geographical scales global,
international, regional and local and then to relate
how patterns of interaction, motives for travel and its
effects and impacts vary as the scale alters.
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 2. Spatial distributions of tourist phenomena-
This is a traditional area of interest for geographers
and is concerned with several central elements
within tourism as a whole. This includes the spatial
patterning of supply, including the geography of
resorts, of landscapes, places and attractions
deemed of interest to tourists or locations at which
activity may be pursued. Furthermore, geographers
have a role to play in isolating patterns of demand
and associated tourist movements.

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 3. Tourism impacts-
Geographers also have a bona fide interest in the
resulting impacts of tourism since these exhibit
variations across time and space too. Impact studies
have conventionally considered the relatively broad
domains of environmental, economic, social and
cultural impacts, each of which has a geographical
dimension.
Geography has the capacity to provide a synergistic
framework (i.e. a combining approach that
emphasizes that the product is often more than the
sum of individual parts)
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 4. Planning for Tourism-
As it has developed; tourism has inevitably become a
focus of attention in spatial and economic planning.
The capacity for physical development of tourism
infrastructure to exert extensive changes in host areas is
considerable, and in order to minimize detrimental
influences and maximize the beneficial attributes of
tourism, some form of planned development of the
industry is often deemed essential. The historically close
links between geography and planning (with their
shared interests in the organization of people, space and
resources) therefore provide a fourth area in which
geographers may contribute to the understanding of
tourism. 1 32
5. Spatial modeling of tourism development
• evolution and change of patterns of tourism
through time at a range of geographical scales; 
• spatial diffusion of tourism, both within and
between countries;
• development of hierarchies of resorts and tourism
places; 
• effects of distance on patterns of tourist
movements

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