ABSTRACT
This book is about the study of tourism. More precisely, it is about a particular field of academic endeavour, the roots of which can be traced back over decades, if not centuries. (According to Baum (2005), formal training in hospitality in Europe dates back to the nineteenth century.) However, over the last twenty to thirty years, it has emerged as one of the fastest-growing subjects of study within higher education around the world. In the UK, for example, tourism higher education – as a distinct subject in its own right, rather than a component of other programmes of study – began in the early 1970s with the commencement of two ‘named’ tourism Masters’ programmes. The first two undergraduate degree programmes were subsequently introduced in the mid-1980s. Yet, by 1991, tourism provision nationally still amounted to just ten undergraduate and twelve postgraduate programmes. Over the following decade, though, there was exponential growth in the number of institutions offering tourism degree programmes, the overall number of programmes, the number of students enrolled on them and the number of academics both teaching and researching the subject. By 2003, some 50 per cent of all the higher education institutions in the UK offered around 100 undergraduate and 50 postgraduate tourism programmes between them, collectively accounting for an estimated total of around 12,000 student enrolments. In addition, over 150 postgraduate research students were estimated to be undertaking tourism-related doctorates at that time (Airey 2005b: 273). Thus, although these figures are estimates (definitional issues making it difficult to compile wholly accurate data), there can be no doubting the remarkable growth in the study of tourism in the UK since the early 1990s.
