ABSTRACT

The travel and tourism industry is an increasingly important part of the employment structures of advanced industrial nations and lesser developed countries. Many of the tourist industry’s key suppliers are headquartered in the developed world (e.g. American Airlines and Holiday Inn), while tourist expenditures tend to be disproportionately significant for third world economies, especially in the Caribbean and South Pacific. The tourist industry has become a highly dynamic spatial network of production and consumption, and as such is implicated in some of the critical theoretical issues of current concern to economic geographers: the globalization of capital and firms (Berry et al. 1993; Dicken 1992); deindustrialization and regional economic restructuring (Goe and Shanahan 1990; Harrison and Bluestone 1988); the increased significance of strategic alliance networks (Debbage 1994); the spatial division of labor (Massey 1984; Walker 1985); urban revitalization (Mullins 1991); the growth of the information technology services-based economy (Hepworth 1989); the evolution of advanced services especially producer services (Beyers 1992; Daniels 1986; Drennan 1992; Greenfield 1966); and the creation of post-modern/post-industrial/post-Fordist landscapes (Harvey 1989a; Urry 1990 and 1995).