ABSTRACT
Almost two decades ago, Ioannides and Debbage (1998) passionately made the argument for bridging the considerable theoretical gap which at the time they perceived to exist between tourism research and one of the geographic discipline’s key branches, namely economic geography. Their edited volume was inspired by their own backgrounds in economic geography, regional development and planning studies but also, to a major extent, by the work in tourism of several influential geographers such as Pearce (1989), Britton (1991), Shaw and Williams (1994) and Smith (1998), to name but a few. Happily, over the years since The Economic Geography of the Tourist Industry (Ioannides and Debbage 1998) made its appearance, a growing number of authors have offered their own valuable contributions relating to the interlinkages of tourism to economic geography (e.g. Milne and Ateljevic 2001; Papatheodorou 2004; Shaw and Williams 2004; d’Hauteserre 2006; Mosedale 2006; Bianchi 2009; Hjalager 2010; Brouder and Eriksson 2013). These insights, in turn, have led Ioannides and Debbage (2014) to reflect that we must no longer talk about a singular economic geography of tourism. Rather, just as we now must perceive the pluralistic nature of research relating to tourism’s overall spatial characteristics (Hall and Page 2009), we must also recognize the existence of the ‘economic geographies of tourism’ (Ioannides and Debbage 2014: 115).
