ABSTRACT
The growth of international and domestic tourism has been matched by a corresponding increase in the numbers of those who study tourism and its impacts. Indeed, it may even be said that tourism research is one of the academic growth industries of the late twentieth century (Hall 1995). The literature on tourism has expanded enormously with the result that research has become ‘highly fragmented, with researchers following separate and often divergent paths’ (Mathieson and Wall 1982: 2). Nevertheless, one of the major areas of interest for geographers, as well as other tourism researchers, is the impacts of tourism and recreation.
