ABSTRACT
In recent years there has been an increasing emphasis on understanding the geographies of tourism (Coles, 2004; Gibson, 2009; Gibson, 2010; Hall & Page, 2009). In addition to serving as one of the traditional parent disciplines for the study of tourism (see Echtner & Jamal, 1997; Leiper, 1981; Leiper, 2000; Tribe, 1997; Tribe, 2000 for a critical discussion of the disciplinarity of tourism studies), geographical perspectives have also bequeathed tourism scholars with a range of theoretical and practice-oriented tools, including the destination area life cycle (Butler, 2006) along with geographic information systems (GIS), which can assist with understanding the spatial factors that correlate with ecotourism’s business performance (Weaver & Lawton, 2007). The sheer diversity of tourism forms that exist throughout the world (heritage tourism, volunteer tourism, death tourism, medical tourism, etc.) means that researchers must increasingly grapple with the spatiality of consumption. As Gibson (2009, p. 522) notes, across each variation in the form of tourism consumption are “variform rationales for travel, internal market structures, divisions of labour and methods of destination construction”. As Agarwal (2005) has observed with respect to resort developments, tourism exists at scales ranging from the local to the global. Each of these scales influences the other, much in line with the ideas of the influential human geographer Doreen Massey around the global nature of place.
