ABSTRACT

Tourism destinations have an ever-present imperative to create and sustain competitive advantage, which has led to increasingly large volumes of marketing appeals about a seemingly limitless range of destinations, all contending for the traveler's attention. As lifestyle aspects of leisure travel become increasingly important and travelers continue to search for new experiences, the range of destination marketing opportunities increases. In popular culture, lifestyle has come to mean that which is trendy and generally contributes to an attractive and comfortable existence. With the growth of knowledge of tourism consumer behavior, it is more possible and realistic to conceptualize a lifestyle tourism experience, as our understanding and the tools available to examine the components of that construction are more available, deployable, accurate, and ultimately more useful. Lifestyle tourism is not theorized as a type of special interest/niche tourism, but rather as an umbrella concept that potentially includes a wide range of niches.