ABSTRACT
I am grateful to Shalini Singh for inviting me to provide a contextual commentary on this interesting volume. I have learned a great deal from the process. As an international historian with a particular interest in domestic tourism and its destinations, mainly in the UK and Spain, but also in countries across Western Europe, together with the US and parts of Latin America, I have found the widespread neglect in tourism studies both of domestic tourism and of informed historical perspectives to be impoverishing and distorting. In the Asian context, especially, the present initiative appears long overdue, although, inevitably in the present state of research, it contributes more to remedying the first problem than the second. A recent overview of tourism development in South-East Asia provides a good illustration of the current status of domestic tourism studies in the region: the author points out, in passing, that domestic tourism is significant in (especially) Indonesia, Thailand, the Philippines and Malaysia, only to move on without apology to focus on the international tourism that dominates the agenda (Wong Poh Poh, 2003; see also Chon, 2000).
