ABSTRACT

This chapter presents an introduction to the study of tourism and the concepts with which students need to be acquainted, including the meaning of ‘tourism’ and what is meant by the terms ‘tourist’, ‘traveller’, ‘visitor’ and ‘excursionist’. It reviews some of the leading studies in the growing field of tourism studies to provide an overview of the evolution of tourism as an area of study, and issues related to tourism development in the wider environment of global change are recognized. Tourism is part of a global process of change and development which is no longer confined to the developed countries that traditionally provided the demand for world travel. Tourism is embraced as a subject for serious academic study, but it has not always been this way. The tourism is fraught by a number of problems which any student and researcher needs to be aware of. Some of the principal problems are: recognition, conceptualization, terminology, data sources, reductionism and rigour.